The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released the average weekly ordinary time earnings (AWOTE) and consumer price index (CPI) figures which are used to determine key superannuation rates and thresholds that will apply from 1 July 2026. This article outlines the rates and thresholds that are changing and those that aren’t. It also explains key ...

In 1971, an uncle of Don Brash, the governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand from 1988 to 2002, invested the proceeds from selling his fruit farm in 18-year government bonds yielding 5.4%. At that time, the uncle’s NZ$30,000 could buy 11 four-cylinder cars. But when the bonds matured in 1989 the NZ$30,000 could buy only one of those cars. Inflation, ...

Audio: Listen to this article Recently, Firstlinks published an article comparing the performance of LICs and ETFs. It concluded that LICs have generally underperformed their ETF peers over a range of timeframes. That may be true in some cases. But before we draw that conclusion, there is a more fundamental question that needs to be addressed: Are we ...

For decades, investors and academics have been locked in a hunt for alpha—the holy grail of risk-adjusted returns that can’t be explained by known market factors. The quest has grown so frenzied it spawned what John Cochrane famously called the factor zoo: a sprawling menagerie of hundreds of documented anomalies, each claiming to produce excess ...

Diversification is one of investing’s oldest principles—and, arguably, one of its most misunderstood. Most client portfolios today appear well diversified. They span regions, sectors, and often include multiple managers and strategies. On the surface, they look balanced. But appearances can be misleading. Look beneath the labels, and many portfolios ...

When we think about the current volatility, we are reminded of a prescient quote from Russian revolutionary and president Vladmir Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.” Time will tell whether the Iran war is indeed one of these periods where decades happened. As for markets domestically, higher oil ...

At any given point in time, there is one major investment risk that becomes the focus of everyone’s attention. Sometimes this will be a new and significant event (such as the war in Iran); other times it will be a risk that has lain dormant but suddenly becomes the thing to care about (like the recent AI/software company flare-up). The problem is not ...

Ben Graham was born in England and moved with his family to the US when he was 1 year old. His father took the family to New York to set up a new branch of a successful family business. This was far from the prototypical immigrant experience. His family was wealthy and moved to 5th Avenue in a house staffed by domestic servants. This lifestyle would ...

The Strait of Hormuz has been described as the world’s most critical energy artery, but in February 2026, that artery was effectively severed. As conflict between the US and Iran escalated, the closure of this passage didn’t simply spike the price of oil — it broke the global supply chain for refined products in ways that have no modern parallel, not ...

Mined gold production reached a record high in 2025, based on our 2025 Gold Demand Trends report(Chart 1). Global miners produced 3,672 tonnes of gold, a modest year-on-year increase of 1% and the highest in our data series – albeit this may be subject to revisions when more data becomes available.[1] And we expect mined gold production to further ...

Geopolitical events like the current Middle East conflict and supply chain disruptions can create short term market volatility, but they rarely change the long-term fundamentals for investors as the Vanguard Index Chart demonstrates. Vanguard has seen more than $1.5 billion of net inflows into its ETFs in the first half of March, already outpacing ...