Date registered: January 28, 2012
Mar 20
Well…not normal yet. The shorter part of the curve suggests the market is expecting another two 25bps cuts by the RBA but with the Euro sovereign crisis well and truly looking much better its highly unlikely there’ll be any cuts soon. Whilst there’s plenty of evidence that shows the Euro sovereign crisis has improved, nothing …
Mar 15
Yesterday, the New York Times published details of a resignation letter of a very senior Goldman Sachs employee who totally ripped into the culture and product flogging mentality of Goldman Sachs. For anyone interested in the letter, whcih is quite an entertaining read for those of us in the industry, here it is… Goldman Sachs Letter. …
Mar 13
I was quite excited to see the launch of the new Russell Select Australian Corporate Bond fund over the past few days. I thought the ability to have a diversified Australian bond fund that has the ability to provide a bit of credit risk for a more diversified portfolio would be great. Unfortunately when I …
Mar 10
The SPIVA report was released a few days ago and as I’ve mentioend before it is my favourite assessment of the success of fund managers because it takes into consideration survivorship bias…in other words, if you want to know who are the best fund managers over the last year, then you start with all fund …
Mar 06
Source: RBA I know the above chart is a couple of days old but there’s not much change since last Thursday. At its simplest what it shows is that the bond market is still expecting the Reserve Bank to decrease interest rates some time during the year…with 1 year bond yields at less than 4%, …
Mar 04
Many financial planners recommend their clients follow a particular Strategic Asset Allocation that may be based on the output of the combination of a risk profile as well as matching the client’s needs. For example, a popular strategic asset allocation for a “balanced” portfolio may be along the lines of… Australian Shares 35% Global Shares …
Mar 01
This link from The Economist was passed onto me today and is a hilariously written letter from a fictitional hedge fund manager to its investors. I have reproduced the full letter below (I hope The Economist doesn’t mind) … Dear investor, In line with the rest of our industry we are making some changes to …
Feb 26
Jeremy Grantham’s latest quarterly newsletter is on the GMO website and as usual it is an educational, pragmatic and brilliant read. There is so much to take away from this one. There are three parts to his ‘longest quarterly letter ever’… 1. Investment advice from your Uncle Polonius …which contains 10 absolute must read points. …
Feb 24
Unfortunately whilst the yield on Greek 1 year bonds is high at 730% (yes there’s no decimal point), it can hardly be described as good. When you have a 730% interest rate on your 1 year loan, its pretty safe to say that your chances of paying it back are zero. I understand why Greece …
Feb 20
A look at the average returns of bonds over the last 30 years does not suggest that equity returns have really been worth the risk. Table 1 shows the returns on Australian Bonds (Aust Comm Bank All Series/All Maturities) versus the accumulated return of the Australian sharemarket (S&P/ASX 200 TR) and whilst equities have the better performance …