Date registered: January 28, 2012
Nov 08
Nobel laureate economist Robert Merton says David Murray’s Financial System Inquiry must fundamentally shift how Australia thinks about superannuation. He says the desire to maximise lump-sum balances at retirement is excessively risky; the focus should be on ensuring retirement income is enough to meet a desired standing of living. Source: AFR – 6 Nov 2014 …
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, …
Oct 07
My favourite simple performance report on active management came out today on the Australian market…it can be downloaded by clicking here. Unfortunately active management for the broad asset classes once again came up looking poor with an overwhelming proportion failing to outperform broad indices for Australian Shares, International Shares, Australian REITs, and Australian Bonds. An enormous …
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 22
At the Portfolio Construction Conference 2014 I had the good fortune of being on stage to discuss Ryan Taliaferro’s presentation on the Low Beta Anomaly. Now I know I’ve opened up with a lot of jargon, so in plain english…the low beta anomaly more or less says, shares that exhibit low levels of price volatility, on …
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 …
Aug 01
I’ve just returned from a manager research trip in the UK where we visited a variety of strategies from a variety of managers and fortunately for me, with some of the leading thinkers and researchers in the advice industry (hat tip D&G … and I don’t mean Dolce and Gabbana). Several of the managers we …
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 …
May 09
It appears that the financial planning industry is a big believer in rebalancing but a little unsure as to how often. Some accept the automatic quarterly option, some rebalance at the client review, some annual, or even at 13 months to potentially reduce capital gains tax by taking advantage of the 50% CGT discount. Because the …