This is my last edition as Editor as I am leaving Firstlinks to become Commsec’s Equity Market Strategist.
Morningstar’s Director of Personal Finance, Mark LaMonica, will take over the role until a permanent replacement is found.
It’s been a privilege to work at Firstlinks. I came here three-and-a-half years ago to help Graham Hand. He wanted to focus ...
The RBA has increased interest rates to tame inflation and there’s no shortage of knee jerk reactions. About how it hurts homeowners (of course); about what the RBA will do next, even though almost no one forecast the rate rise a mere four months ago; and about how the government is or isn’t to blame, depending on which side of politics you support.
A ...
While the latest Division 296 draft legislation may have dispensed with an unrealised capital gains tax component, it still has the whiff of a wealth tax about it. That’s because the effective tax rate on earnings, including any realised capital gains, is tied to the Total Superannuation Balance (TSB) and not just the earned income itself.
Though ...
Many people are encouraged to think that their super fund is much like a bank, where they deposit money, earn interest and draw the money out when they retire.
That is a mistake because super funds are nothing like banks. A super fund is structured as a trust. A trust is legal entity that means someone holds property or assets (e.g. money, shares or ...
Following two decades of ‘low-inflation’ in the 2000s and 2010s, inflation spiked up suddenly in 2021 after the Covid lockdowns unleashed a fiscal and monetary flood of cheap money. The ‘return’ of inflation in 2021 awakened a sudden resurgence in interest in the implications of inflation for investors.
Over the past couple of years, I have heard and ...
In a recent email to his Wall Street Journal readers, Jason Zweig posed multiple-choice questions. The answers would provide investors with lessons.
The first started with a lead-in, asking readers to remember all those headlines about the US stock market being super concentrated in the ‘Magnificent Seven’, then he posed the question, “The S&P 500 ...
Dependable earnings growth is a core characteristic of the high-quality listed infrastructure companies in which we invest. Throughout past cycles we have seen consistent, solid returns. Given the earnings profile, operating models and potential for inflation protection that underpin these companies’ assets, we expect this to continue. Moreover, we see ...
At GMO, we have always defined a bubble as a two-standard deviation divergence of the price of any asset class above its long-term real price trend. The U.S. stock market has now been in bubble territory for a prolonged period. Sooner or later, the bubble will burst, and the price will return to its historic level.
In our study of over 300 two-sigma ...
Technology was supposed to bring costs down but it doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of it.
I just found out about another price rise for Kayo’s streaming services with its premium plan increasing from $40 to $45 a month.
It’s not the only one though. Last August, Netflix hiked prices for all its plans, with the basic ad-free plan increasing ...
It’s been a crazy start to the year. We’ve had the US break international law by seizing the Venezuelan leader, Nicolas Maduro. We’ve had Trump threaten the takeover of Greenland. We’ve had the US Justice Department open a criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell over the Fed’s building renovation project. We’ve had ...
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's Davos speech dramatically amplifies the political risk embedded in Australian housing policy and accelerates the timeline for when those chickens come home to roost.
His central thesis, that we are witnessing "a rupture, not a transition" in the global order, means the comfortable policy assumptions that have ...
Like the track Upside Down by Diana Ross in the final series of Stranger Things, the ASX has become an upside-down world in which riskier dividend yields sit below risk-free government bond yields. Now is as important a time as ever for investors to think carefully about what bond-like stocks to hold in their portfolios.
Introduction
The Australian ...
This is my last edition as Editor as I am leaving Firstlinks to become Commsec’s Equity Market Strategist.
Morningstar’s Director of Personal Finance, Mark LaMonica, will take over the role until a permanent replacement is found.
It’s been a privilege to work at Firstlinks. I came here three-and-a-half years ago to help Graham Hand. He wanted to focus ...
The RBA has increased interest rates to tame inflation and there’s no shortage of knee jerk reactions. About how it hurts homeowners (of course); about what the RBA will do next, even though almost no one forecast the rate rise a mere four months ago; and about how the government is or isn’t to blame, depending on which side of politics you support.
A ...
While the latest Division 296 draft legislation may have dispensed with an unrealised capital gains tax component, it still has the whiff of a wealth tax about it. That’s because the effective tax rate on earnings, including any realised capital gains, is tied to the Total Superannuation Balance (TSB) and not just the earned income itself.
Though ...
Many people are encouraged to think that their super fund is much like a bank, where they deposit money, earn interest and draw the money out when they retire.
That is a mistake because super funds are nothing like banks. A super fund is structured as a trust. A trust is legal entity that means someone holds property or assets (e.g. money, shares or ...
Following two decades of ‘low-inflation’ in the 2000s and 2010s, inflation spiked up suddenly in 2021 after the Covid lockdowns unleashed a fiscal and monetary flood of cheap money. The ‘return’ of inflation in 2021 awakened a sudden resurgence in interest in the implications of inflation for investors.
Over the past couple of years, I have heard and ...
In a recent email to his Wall Street Journal readers, Jason Zweig posed multiple-choice questions. The answers would provide investors with lessons.
The first started with a lead-in, asking readers to remember all those headlines about the US stock market being super concentrated in the ‘Magnificent Seven’, then he posed the question, “The S&P 500 ...
Dependable earnings growth is a core characteristic of the high-quality listed infrastructure companies in which we invest. Throughout past cycles we have seen consistent, solid returns. Given the earnings profile, operating models and potential for inflation protection that underpin these companies’ assets, we expect this to continue. Moreover, we see ...
At GMO, we have always defined a bubble as a two-standard deviation divergence of the price of any asset class above its long-term real price trend. The U.S. stock market has now been in bubble territory for a prolonged period. Sooner or later, the bubble will burst, and the price will return to its historic level.
In our study of over 300 two-sigma ...
Technology was supposed to bring costs down but it doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of it.
I just found out about another price rise for Kayo’s streaming services with its premium plan increasing from $40 to $45 a month.
It’s not the only one though. Last August, Netflix hiked prices for all its plans, with the basic ad-free plan increasing ...
It’s been a crazy start to the year. We’ve had the US break international law by seizing the Venezuelan leader, Nicolas Maduro. We’ve had Trump threaten the takeover of Greenland. We’ve had the US Justice Department open a criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell over the Fed’s building renovation project. We’ve had ...
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's Davos speech dramatically amplifies the political risk embedded in Australian housing policy and accelerates the timeline for when those chickens come home to roost.
His central thesis, that we are witnessing "a rupture, not a transition" in the global order, means the comfortable policy assumptions that have ...
Like the track Upside Down by Diana Ross in the final series of Stranger Things, the ASX has become an upside-down world in which riskier dividend yields sit below risk-free government bond yields. Now is as important a time as ever for investors to think carefully about what bond-like stocks to hold in their portfolios.
Introduction
The Australian ...
