Strategy

While lacking the sex appeal of direct equities and the familiarity of property, annuities can play an integral role in solving the funding issues faced by many retirees today.

While growth assets like shares go through bouts of short-term underperformance versus bonds & cash, they provide superior long-term returns. It makes sense that superannuation has a high exposure to them.

When deciding to skew your return focus in favour of growth or income, it is critical to look at your tax environment.

How can the loss of productivity from an ageing population be reversed? Japan is setting the blueprint for other nations with its ambitious technology policies, providing a case study for The Future of Work.

The world of investing can be confusing and scary at times. But fortunately, the basics of investing are timeless and some investors (often the best) have a knack of encapsulating these in a sentence or two that is insightful and easy to understand. In recent years I’ve written several insights highlighting investment quotes I find particularly useful. Here are some more.

These five great charts help illuminate key aspects of investing for income (or cash flow): there are alternatives to bank deposits for income; the gap between yields on different assets provides a guide to relative value; shares can provide stronger growth in income with less volatility than bank deposits; a high and sustainable income yield from an investment provides security; and yield is a guide to future returns.

Portfolio construction is a dynamic concept that should vary from person to person to match their investment preferences and goals. For the average Australian, most of their investment wealth will be held within superannuation that more often than not will be split primarily between stocks and bonds.

As a trader one of the worst things one can do when in the midst of difficult dry spell is to be distracted by what others are making.

As one of the top three retirement killers, it consistently surprises me how widely misunderstood and underestimated the impact of volatility is.

First and foremost, without financial security, decisions are made by others. Your lifestyle in retirement may be decided by the age pension. Your ability to assist others could be a direct concession on your own quality of life.

There are many financial ratios that, when combined, can display the real financial circumstances of a company. Like tools in the garden shed, each has their specific use.

If professional fund managers like Mirrabooka has seen their option-income almost halve, is it worthwhile creating income via an options strategy? Importantly how do you judge what is a sufficient yield to justify the strategy?

I have been a self-managed retail investor for over 30 years so I am a little embarrassed to say that I have finally worked out a way to document every transaction in a capital account in a similar way that my bank statement tells me every transaction in my savings account.

My nine most important lessons from investing over the past 35 years are that: there is always a cycle; the crowd gets it wrong at extremes; what you pay for an investment matters a lot; getting markets right is not as easy as you think; investment markets don’t learn; compound interest applied to investments is like magic; it pays to be optimistic; keep it simple; and you need to know yourself to succeed at investing.

The proportion of big global investors preparing for equity falls is the highest in the survey’s history while allocation to safe-haven cash has risen seven percentage points to a net 33% overweight.

After taking a back seat over the last six months as negotiations appeared to make progress the US/China trade war is back on with the President Trump – “tariff man” – ramping up tariffs on Chinese imports again and threatening more and China moving to retaliate. This note takes a simple Q & A approach to the key issues.