It’s that time of year. When everyone starts talking about what will happen next year. Banks. Brokers. Economists. Lunatic gold newsletter salesmen on Youtube. They’ve all got an opinion. The media goes on holidays while those left manning the fort get extra lazy. We’re all subjected to unfiltered astrology calls on financial markets. It’s termed businessman’s pornography with good reason. The turn of this year into next is more heightened than most. It’s also a new decade. If you think forecasting a year ahead is an unreliable and impossible task, imagine extending such brazenness out to ten years. Then imagine…

Competitiveness can be good. It can drive us further. Lead us to do better things. Challenge ourselves in ways we didn’t think of. You don’t even need to compete with others. Compete against yourself. Health. Fitness. Creative. Skills. Projects. Financial. Anything. New goals. Comparison isn’t as helpful. Looking around us and beside us to see what others are doing or what others are buying. Lining it up against what we’re not doing or what we’re not buying isn’t good. Letting the actions of others determine our feelings isn’t sensible. Especially when it involves money. The New York Times recently ran a…

Alpha. In an investment sense it means how much better your returns were against a specific benchmark. If you were holding an ASX small cap fund and it returned 12% while the ASX small cap index returned 10%, your alpha is 2%. This can also work in reverse. Your fund returns 8% while the index returned 10%, well you’ve got negative alpha of 2%. The financial industry has long been attempting to get to the bottom of what alpha is within financial advice. Someone pays a financial adviser X amount, does that person derive more in value from that advice…