Following the day-to-day news on Iran is frustrating. There appears to be scant progress on the vaguely defined war aims or a pathway to lasting peace. According to the Wall Street Journal this frustration is ironically shared by President Trump who seems unable to accept that he can't just bend the Iranians to his will. What is becoming clearer is the ...

Australia has a well-regarded superannuation system. What we do not have is a retirement income system. These are not the same thing — and the gap between them is costing Australians billions of dollars a year. In a new paper, we propose a change to how superannuation works as members approach the drawdown phase. The result would be higher balances for ...

Alphabet's Google changed the game of advertising as Google's seamless integration of ads into its search engine revolutionized relevance and efficiency in online advertising. Google, with its Page Rank innovation and capital-light model, became a dominant force in its industry. Alphabet now faces a shift from nimbleness toward an infrastructure-heavy ...

This is one of the most common investor questions I receive from advisers, and it is one of the easiest to answer. It’s fairly simple. Australians suffer the highest cash rates amongst their rich country peers (chart A) because Australia has: The highest inflation rate (chart B), The highest medium-long-term inflation expectations ie highest treasury ...

I want to be upfront about something. I am not going to offer a formula for calculating the return on AI investment, because no reliable, universal one exists. What I can offer is a different way of framing the question, because I think most organisations are currently answering it with the wrong data, against the wrong benchmarks, over the wrong ...

Volatility is the new world order it seems. Whether it’s a pandemic or warfare, with associated supply shocks, we should now almost always expect rolling uncertainty. The ongoing war in Iran has exposed Australia’s dependency on importing hydrocarbons, which has opened up vigorous debate as to how we deal with this. There are those who say we need to ...

Before the conflict’s commencement, the financial market’s main worry was the rise of AI tools and the potential implications for software companies, with substantial declines in their equity valuations being a painful experience for many investors. In being large lenders to the software space, US private credit funds have also been caught up in the ...

In this era of heightened geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty, portfolio construction increasingly favours assets capable of delivering durable income, capital preservation, and differentiated return drivers. Unlisted Australian commercial property continues to demonstrate qualities that may support these characteristics. The immediate backdrop ...