Financial Planning, Investment & Insurance Solutions

  • 2021 Q3 September Quarter Review

    2021 Q3 September Quarter Review

    Economic Overview Labour and supply shortages, shipping bottlenecks, COVID delta variant, inflation, vaccine hesitancy. There were plenty of worries in Q3, but markets remained mostly positive across the quarter as economies continued to open and society resumed some normality. This led to an increase in demand in many areas and a struggle to supply that demand. Something governments, businesses and central banks will be dealing with in the year ahead. In the US, the Fed Reserve stated tapering of quantitative easing will be announced at the November meeting and will finish by mid-2022. Interest rate expectations also moved higher. The…

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  • YourSuper Comparison, Super Bad

    YourSuper Comparison, Super Bad

    Australia’s worst superfunds have finally been placed in the village stocks for all to see. The YourSuper comparison tool was released earlier this year, it offered investors the ability to sort through various super fund options who have a MySuper default option and compare fees and returns over a 7 year period. While the tool has been available for use for a few months, it was only last week that funds were categorised on their investment performance. Either “Performing” or “Underperforming”. This kicked off a flurry of excitement in the media about who the worst were and how the members of those…

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  • Working Class Returns

    Working Class Returns

    Seven News recently featured a story on rocker Jimmy Barnes. Jimmy was selling up his family home in Sydney to move to his new base in the Southern Highlands of NSW. What was the price to take over the working-class man’s converted Botany warehouse? Jimmy was hoping to get $4 million, after paying $1.61 million 17 years ago and spending another $1.6 million on renovations. The Seven reporter described it as a “clever investment”. If Jimmy and his family hit the $4 million sale mark (being Sydney, they’ll likely blow past it) we still wouldn’t describe it as a “clever investment”. Putting…

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  • Client Alpha

    Client Alpha

    The concept of adviser alpha has been floating around for several years now. We talk about it on a regular basis without explicitly naming it, but we specifically discussed it back in 2019. From an adviser context ‘alpha’ is essentially an excess return above what an investor may have achieved otherwise without an using an adviser. That’s the value the investor receives from an advice relationship. Various sections of the industry define adviser alpha (or adviser value) various ways, but from a high level these are the key areas: Goals: has someone identified their goals and do they know the asset…

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  • 2021 June Quarter Review

    2021 June Quarter Review

    Economic Overview Attention turned to vaccinations and reopening economies in the second quarter of 2021, by the end of the quarter over 3 billion vaccine doses had been administered globally. There are now strong indicators of a robust and lengthy economic expansion ahead. Around the world there are now businesses desperate to hire new employees, millions of consumers with money burning holes in their pockets, and ongoing fiscal and monetary support from governments and central banks. In the US, the positive news around COVID was vaccinations. While President Biden had set a goal of 70% of all adults vaccinated by…

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