Super Fund Rankings: Balanced Category (41–60%)

Quartiles divide a range of data points into four roughly equal groups which can then be ranked according to their performance.

For example there may be 40 investment options that are all categorised as Balanced. The performance of these investment options is then analysed over various periods from 3 months to 15 years.

For each time period the 40 investment options are then divided into four groups of 10. The 10 investment options that have the highest performance are ranked in Quartile 1. The 10 investment options that have the next highest performance are ranked in Quartile 2. The following 10 are ranked in Quartile 3 and the bottom 10 are in Quartile 4.

You can then easily scan the tables to identify that the 1s are the best performers for a particular time period, and the 4s are the worst performers.

The first table below gives the median performance of investment options in the top and bottom quartiles, along with the median investment option’s performance. The median investment option is the one that appears halfway down the rankings. The second table shows the quartile ranking for each investment option.