Tag Archives: investments

Rebalancing and Self-Control

December 13, 2019

Balance, and finding balance. It evokes pictures of rocks stacked upon each other at the beach. It’s something of an ongoing search for time crunched people. How they can bring balance to various aspects of their lives? There are endless self-help books and articles to read about it, but plenty are still aggrieved about their […]

Defining Adviser Alpha

October 31, 2019

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 […]

Reaching For Yield Over Advice

February 22, 2019

There are some angry retirees around Australia right now. Labor’s plan to rescind franking credits from those who haven’t paid tax has seen impassioned speeches at public hearings, angry letters to newspapers, and media profiles where the aggrieved quote how much they’ll lose from the changes. It all must be very confronting if you’re suddenly […]

2018 Year in Review

January 17, 2019

Economic Overview Global equities posted sharp declines in the December quarter, delivering their worst yearly performance in seven years largely on the back of the final three months. The major concerns were global trade, slowing economic growth and the US Federal Reserve’s plans for further interest rate rises. Government bond yields generally fell (prices rose), […]

Every year we’ll be confronted with a multitude of disasters. Sombre yes, but a fact regardless. Maybe they won’t affect us personally, but they’ll appear before us on the news and they should be pause for reflection. Most show how relatively helpless we are as human beings. Earthquake, tsunami, volcano erupting, hurricane. Natural disasters aren’t […]