Lighthouse Funds is an investment company that offers a single fund and KiwiSaver services, focusing on delivering strong investment returns through responsible investing.

Lighthouse Funds

At Lighthouse Funds we help you achieve your financial goals faster.

We are an active manager of investment funds, specialising in global equities. We are specialists in that one field, with deep skills built up over more than 25 years of investing.

We use proprietary quantitative algorithms to select the stocks our funds invest in. But we also maintain human oversight of all investment decisions.

We have strict commitments to responsible investing.

We’re based in New Zealand, and provide fund offerings for New Zealand residents. But in today’s world the Internet means location isn’t all that critical. Our operations would be no different if they were in Sydney, London or New York.

Our investment objective is to maintain 5-year average returns of at least 15% pa (*). In practice our actual long-run average returns have been more than 20% pa.

As far as we know we have the highest long-run average returns of all the equity funds available in New Zealand - certainly we top the league tables compiled by both MJW and Aon. 


(* All percentages are in New Zealand dollars, net of costs and fees, but before investor tax)

Bikaji Foods

UNIBIC

V2 Retail

Arkis BioSciences

Nykaa

Shaily Engineering Plastics Lt

March brings the end of the typical New Zealand financial year, including for our Lighthouse Global Equity Fund.

For the 12 months to 31 March 2024 the Fund was up 67.6% (in New Zealand dollars, net of costs and fees, but before investor tax).

That’s heartening after a couple of tough years, and means that two of the last four financial years have had returns of over 60% pa (FY2021 had net returns of 64.8%).  

More importantly, our 5-year average return is currently 22.9% pa, which is comfortably above our objective of 15% pa. If you’d invested $10,000 with us five years ago it would have been worth $27,990 now.

The annual returns for our current investment strategy have been:

We were disappointed with the Fund’s losses in FY2022 and FY2023. We’re realistic that there will be periods where investments lose value, and we intentionally optimise for 5-year, rather than 1-year, returns. But a loss is still a loss and it motivated us to make some improvements.

Fortunately, we'd already been working on improvements to our quant algorithms. Ironically, we'd been waiting to see how these improvements performed in a bear market before introducing them.

The good news is that these improvements, that we refer to as “Generation 3”, performed very well through the market downturn in 2022 - as you can see from the chart here. Given this higher and more consistent performance it was a simple decision to introduce this Generation 3 approach for FY2024.

Note that this chart shows simulated returns, from our testing tools. You'll see the simulation predicts a 66.0% net return for FY2024, but the actual net return was 67.7%. Our consistent experience is that our simulated returns are about 1-2% pa lower than the actual real-life returns, and this is another example of that. That’s not surprising – the simulation uses conservative assumptions for trading spreads and costs.

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NZ:LIGHTHOUSEFUNDS

Lighthouse Funds