A Morningstar survey for the three months ended September shows the value of savings has increased by around $7 billion. Photo: 123RF
The value of KiwiSaver funds increased across the board in the third quarter.
Morningstar's survey for the three months ended September shows the value of savings increased by around $7 billion in the quarter to $117.6 billion.
That is up on an $8 billion increase in the first half of 2024.
Average quarterly returns for most funds, balanced, aggressive and conservative alike, were around 4 percent.
But Morningstar data director Greg Bunkall said over the year it is clear some have had better returns than others.
"Over the year the balanced category punched out around 16 percent but the conservative was around 11. So if we expand the performance period a bit longer you can see the impact of being invested in more growth orientated asset classes.
"If we look at the balanced categories over the short term, sort of one year, you can see BNZ had a strong year, Pathfinders had a strong year but if we go out over longer period, sort of 10 years, Milford still has a pretty strong performance."
According to the data for the quarter ANZ led the market share with more than $21.8 billion in savings value.
ASB was in second, Fisher funds third, Westpac fourth and Milford rounded out the top five.
Bunkall said account holders can't learn anything from short term returns and instead need to think about their long term savings goal.
"If you've got 10, 15, 20, 30 years to retirement you've really got to look at your risk profile and make sure that you're in the right fund to make sure that you're making the most of that time in the market for compounding returns, and making sure those longer term returns are available to you by investing in those more aggressive asset classes."