Balanced investors

Investors in these funds have a lower proportion of their money in shares, but individual investments in Kiwi companies can still be large.

Westpac’s KiwiSaver balanced fund, for example, had $1.69 in Fisher & Paykel Healthcare for every $100 invested.

Other large holdings were: Auckland International Airport

($1.34), Auckland-focused commercial property investor Kiwi Property Group ($1.23), Spark

($1.05), Contact Energy ($1.03) and Fletcher Building ($1.03).

Default investors

KiwiSavers who cannot decide where to put their money are bumped into a default fund.

These are conservative funds with a lot of money in cash and bonds. They are safe, but unlikely to produce high returns over an investing lifetime.

Their largest holdings are bonds and cash deposits.

Just 7.02 per cent of AMP’s default money was in Australasian shares, including New Zealand shares.

Bond and deposit investors care less about share prices than their money being secure, and their interest getting paid on time.

For every $100 invested at the end of September, 16.28 per cent was deposited with Westpac, its largest position.

Investors pay KiwiSaver managers to look after their money.

That saves them having to worry about it themselves, other than making the three key decisions every KiwiSaver must make: How much they need to be saving from their salary, what kind of fund they should be saving into (conservative, balanced, growth, etc), and which KiwiSaver provider they choose to be with.

This is sometimes dubbed ‘‘secondhand capitalism’’, where investors’ money ends up being sunk into companies individual KiwiSavers don’t approve of.

Individual investors also have no voice.

Their fund manager is the one to decide how it will vote the shares their KiwiSaver funds hold, if they vote them at all.

Spark directors, for example, got their 8.7 per cent pay rise thanks to support from ‘‘institutional’’ shareholders, including KiwiSaver managers.