Apr 27
Background After capital market forecasts and assessing investor objectives, the current method for portfolio construction starts with the asset allocation decision followed by investment selection. In the Australian financial planning industry, it widely accepted that the asset allocation decision is responsible for most of the portfolio performance variability, and it is, rightly or wrongly, regarded …
Jun 20
The above chart shows the yields for Australian Government Bonds, both nominal bonds and indexed bonds, as at the end of last week (although you can adjust the pricing date to any trading day of 2016). A simple way to determine the market’s inflation expectations over different timeframes is to simply subtract the difference. If …
Feb 21
Following are my recent thoughts around markets with many charts to support these views. These views are far from complete but do represent a reasonable summary at this point in time. Income Assets Source: RBA, Delta Research & Advisory The above left chart suggests the market believes the cash rate is heading towards 1.5% …
Oct 11
Source: Morningstar Direct, Delta Research & Advisory Over the last 5 years their performance has been pretty much the same…with the obvious exception that equities has bee a much much wilder ride. The reality of bonds in this global economy is that the outlook is still not that great from the major players (US, Japan, …
Sep 27
Irrespective of the quality of the rest of the firm, and there is a lot of quality, with the departure of Mohammed El Erian at the start of the year and now Bill Gross, it doesn’t take much to guess there may be a little destabilisation at the PIMCO offices for a while. Whilst Bill …
Aug 07
Source: RBA I know this probably an overly simplistic way of looking at investment grade credit markets…but…the above chart is currently showing that US investment Grade credit spreads have declined to be in the ballpark of pre-GFC levels. Personally, the US economy is still relatively weak, albeit getting stronger, but I no longer believe this …
Jun 14
The common criticism of market-cap weighted bond indices is that they are inefficient because they are obviously weighted towards those with the most debt. Thus indicating that the index potentially carries more risk than necessary, or than we may want in a portfolio, because those with the most debt carry greater default risk than those with very …
May 16
Source: RBA, Delta Research & Advisory At the e shorter end of the yield curve there hasn’t been a great deal of change. This is completely expected whilst the RBA has signaled its intention to maintain its cash rate at 2.5% for some time and, whilst not easy to tell, this yield curve suggests it …
Mar 25
Over the last 12 months I’ve increasingly had inquiries about investing in mortgage funds. During the GFC, pretty much all liquid mortgage funds froze their investor’s funds so access was only available in periodic dribs and drabs and for many this process is still playing out. However, there are some new funds which have raised …
Jan 13
Source: RBA & Delta Research & Advisory Its definitely been a long time since I posted anything and hopefully this post will at least be a little interesting…I haven’t read a great deal of anything financial over the past few weeks so I apologise if this is old news….but I digress!! Now, the above chart …