Dan Farmer

Dan Farmer is the Chief Investment Officer of MLC Asset Management, the investment arm of Insignia Financial (the group formerly known as IOOF). He was appointed group CIO in July 2022 in a move that unified the legacy IOOF and MLC investment teams under his leadership, following the departure of previous CIO Dan Armitage. Farmer has more than 30 years of industry experience and had been with IOOF since 2010, first as manager of the Australian Equities portfolio (2010–2017), where he built out the firm's boutique-manager program and its defensive equities portfolio, then leading the broader investment team (2017–2022) before taking the top job.

Before IOOF, Farmer spent his early career at Telstra Super, where he rose to Senior Executive Investments and managed the fund's ~$3 billion Australian equity portfolio, having started out running internally managed Australian share portfolios and derivatives almost straight out of university. Under his leadership the Insignia multi-asset team grew from just four people in 2010 to roughly 47 professionals by 2022, managing over $100 billion.

Farmer holds a Bachelor of Economics (Honours) from La Trobe University in Melbourne and a Master of Commerce (Honours) from the University of Melbourne. He is a regular commentator on Australian institutional investing, appearing in Investment Magazine, Money Management, Livewire and the Investment Innovation Institute's podcast.

• Runs diversified multi-asset portfolios for superannuation and wealth clients, blending listed markets with a growing allocation (roughly 25–30%) to unlisted real assets and private markets.
• Believes retail/super funds can now compete with industry funds on unlisted assets: the old view that "retail funds are reluctant to invest in unlisted real assets was probably true five or ten years ago" but no longer holds.
• On infrastructure, avoids "trophy assets" like airports and toll roads in favour of mid-market plays such as telco towers and fibre networks; maintains pricing discipline — "If we're uncomfortable with the price, we won't participate in the co-investment."
• Keen on esoteric / specialty private credit — legal finance, accounts-receivable financing, and natural-catastrophe reinsurance — targeting "low to mid double-digit returns" with risks largely uncorrelated to other assets, citing 15+ years of in-house expertise and a "window with less competition [that] is open for quite a while."
• Ties portfolio construction to simplification and scale: "Part of my challenge is demonstrating to the investment team that simplification does have a strong link to alpha generation."
• Positioned "mildly defensive," consolidating three legacy strategic-asset-allocation frameworks (MLC, IOOF, ANZ Smart Choice) into a single unified model.