Television presenter Andrew Denton once asked Australian icon Margaret Fulton during an interview for Enough Rope whether she advocated people bringing a personal touch to recipes when cooking a meal.
With an expression of incredulity she firmly answered: "No."
Recipes should be followed to the letter, Fulton argued, because when people started tinkering with a recipe they ended up with the same old stew they always cooked.
In other words, when people get creative the outcome is often unpalatable.
The same can be said for investing. Investment decisions should be the result of painstaking research and should, therefore, be boring to the majority of people.
The moment investing gets exciting, you are probably speculating.
Unsurprisingly, the introduction of a daily share trading facility in a number of industry super funds, including AustralianSuper, legalsuper and Care Super, has been welcomed with some trepidation.
With the increasing financial and social pressures from an ageing population in Australia, the idea that financially illiterate super members could speculate with their superannuation savings is terrifying.
After all, statistics on professional managers outperforming the markets over the long term are not always rosy. We can only imagine what the track record of amateurs is.
Perhaps the concerns about the daily share trading facility are somewhat overstated.
Retail super funds have been incorporating such features for a while and there has been no indication yet that this has led to an evaporation of super savings.
According to ASFA chief executive Pauline Vamos, the facility also had enough controls around it to discourage reckless investment behaviour, while experience showed the share trading facilities were more often used to transfer existing share holding parcels into a super fund than to actively buy and sell shares.
"What the industry funds are doing is saying: 'where you do have a small share portfolio, we will put it on our platform and you can still use it'. The super system should be for everyone and many people do have a small share portfolio," Vamos said.
Part of the reason to introduce the daily share trading feature was to compete with the rising popularity of self-managed super funds (SMSF), the funds said. However, it remained to be seen whether this facility really countered the appeal of SMSFs.
The majority of SMSF trustees do not delve into their CommSec account every night to finetune their holdings, but use it as a tax-effective vehicle that allows them to reduce their tax rate on investments they have built up outside super, including investment properties and art work.
The introduction of the daily share trading facility is, therefore, more likely a response to retail super funds as the ban on commissions will heat up competition between the two camps.
Most super fund executives are not particularly concerned about the consequences of facilitating trading for members.
The daily share trading option was just another phase in the ongoing development of super funds, they said.
"When I got my first car, a car radio was optional. Now it is standard," one industry fund chief executive commented.
Ultimately, the decisive factor in the sense or nonsense of the trading facility is how members make use of it.
