Morningstar Australasia has launched new research that provides an insight into the performance of superannuation funds and institutional investment strategies.

The Morningstar Australian Institutional Sector and the Australian Superannuation Surveys show returns, peer rankings, sizes, asset allocations and proprietary ratios over multiple time periods, accompanied by informative commentaries.

The Superannuation Survey includes both for-profit and industry superannuation options.

"The new surveys will provide superannuation fund trustees, asset consultants and institutional investors with timely and meaningful assessments of investment performance, helping them to make better-informed decisions, which will ultimately benefit Australian investors," Morningstar Australasia chief executive Anthony Serhan said.

The surveys build on the existing database of the former Intech business, which was acquired by Morningstar in 2009.

But the new surveys include additional measures to make comparisons between funds easier.

"The incorporation of our batting average ratio provides a simple measure that shows how consistently an investment manager has performed against a benchmark, not just how the manager has performed from one single point in time to another," Serhan said.

The batting average is calculated by dividing the number of months the manager beat the sector index by the total number of months in the period.

The higher the batting average, the more often a manager has outperformed the benchmark.

"It is a way to focus on the longer term," Serhan said.

"There are many ways to measure how a manager has done; you can express it in volatility or tracking error, but this is a simpler, more intuitive way."

The superannuation surveys would also include the MySuper options when those options were launched, he said.