For the fourth consecutive year, alternative products were the most popular type of managed investment product registered in the past financial year, according to APIR, accounting for over half of new registrations.

APIR identifies, codes and manages reference data for unlisted financial products. In its 30 years of operation, it has identified almost 33,000 individual financial products.  Overall, registrations of managed investment products for the financial year ending 30 June 2025 were up 18.8 per cent on the five-year rolling average, at 719.

According to APIR chief executive, Chris Donohoe, products identifying as alternatives accounted for 51.60 per cent of the new registrations. The alternatives category covers a broad range of asset types and registrations predominately comprised of mortgage, single asset property and private equity funds.

“Additionally, equity funds accounted for 25.03 per cent of new registrations, which is in line with the previous two years, while fixed income came in at 13.91 per cent. Cash/cash equivalent made up 9.46 per cent of new registrations, having almost doubled over the last four years.  

“The majority of new registrations – 82.61 per cent – stated the investment objective as income and growth or income only, which is marginally down on last year, and growth only funds made up 17.39 percent.  This ties in with a fall in the number of funds distributing monthly or quarterly which fell from 65.14 per cent in FY24 to 56.33 per cent in FY25.”

Mr Donohoe also said that after a couple of years where there has been a domestic focus for new managed investment products, the trend has returned to more normal levels.

“In FY23 (61.80 per cent) and FY24 (57.84 per cent) there was a material increase in the number of registrations which had a domestic geographical focus. However, this normalised in FY25 with 50.35 per cent of new products classified as having a domestic geographical focus while 39.08 per cent had a global (including Australia) focus and 10.57 per cent had an international (excluding Australia) focus.

“In recent years there has been a strong increase in registrations in wholesale products and this continued in FY25, with 54.94 per cent of products identified as wholesale products.  For the first time, this was ahead of retail funds (42.42 per cent) and only 2.64 per cent of new registrations for institutional funds,” Mr Donohoe said.