Around a year ago I was involved in a project looking at life cycle investing and I flippantly said that we should differentiate in the market place by offering the younger investors, say 25 years of age, 150% geared investment that reduces down to 30-40% risky assets at age 65. Older investors could lend to the …
Category Archive: Financial Planning
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May 12
The best return available for retirees
Believe it or not it comes from Lifetime Annuities…the obvious catch is that you need to survive beyond your life expectancy. In Australia, this product type has been totally out of favour since the government reduced social security benefits associated with them a few years back but perhaps this is an overreaction and their true value has …
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May 12
Perpetual Portfolio Manager’s Interesting View
I just had a meeting with Charlie Lanchester, who manages half of Perpetual’s massive Industrial Share Fund, and his views on the Australian economy were far more dire than many commentators are saying. Like many, he believes that commodity prices are very high and showing signs of faultering (doesn’t mean they going to crash just …
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Mar 18
Commodity Prices Boom/Bust History
Source: www.macrobusiness.com.au Found the above chart on the brilliant Australian blog, www.macrobusiness.com.au, and its quite a frightening picture indeed. As the headline says, “at no time in the last 200 yeasr have commodity prices risen as fast and as high as in the last decade without a sharp decline”. When you throw in the fact …
Dec 16
Fee for service responsible for increased passive investment???
A change in adviser remuneration structure is causing a structural shift in asset allocation away from active products towards more passive products such as exchange traded funds (ETFs) and passive funds, according to Fidelity Investment Managers. The above paragraph, taken from Money Management’s daily, isn’t quite true. Whilst I believe adviser remuneration restructure has some impact on …
Oct 26
Reducing the Risks of Portfolio Failure in Retirement
I have a draft article with some interesting analysis showing the probabilities of running out of funds across numerous drawdown scenarios…click Reducing the Risks of Portfolio Failure in Retirement – Oct 2010. If we’re forecasting growth returns to be around 10% then even with a conservative expectation of the volatility of annual returns and the …
Aug 30
Simple Economic Update
The month of July saw the return of strong sharemarkets both in Australia and overseas with the first positive monthly performance for four months. This return of confidence was largely due to investors reacting positively to the European Banking stress tests where 92% of European banks tested passed. Alongside of the good sharemarket performance was …
Aug 27
Jonathan Pain slams fund manager benchmarking
Apparently Mr Pain is of the belief that equity managers should have benchmarks that are more aligned with their client’s needs and therefore, as far as I can tell, have more of a cash plus or absolute return benchmark. Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted the report but anyway… …whilst on face value this sounds quite reasonable as …
Aug 05
Advice about Advisers from the Reformed Broker
I love following other’s blogs and the Reformed Broker is one of them. At the time of writing his latest post provides some “free advice to the Hollywood set when working with an adviser” and I lay these points out for you below (I hope he doesn’t mind but please check out his blog…its excellent …
Jul 20
Latest Article for Publication – Guaranteeing Investment Success
I have just submitted an article, on behalf of my employer, to the Australian version of the Journal of Financial Advice. Its a fairly simple message….advisers could better look after their client’s financial needs and goals by increasing their focus on their client’s cash flow needs as opposed to the focus on investment strategy. I know …