Last Friday I attended a day long program with around 80 researchers, financial advisers, and other financial professionals as part of a 5 day portfolio construction program run by Graham Rich over a 12 month period. Friday’s program was divided into three parts… Investment Fables Asset Allocation using Scenario Modelling Greece Each part went for …
Category Archive: Investment Strategy
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Nov 03
Australian Government Bond Yields…more rate cuts to come?
Source: RBA In just 3 business days the yield curve has dropped down to where it was at the end of September where markets had experienced eight weeks of gloom and doom. Mind you, a lot happened in the three days to the end of yesterday…including the Greek’s putting significant doubt in the Euro rescue …
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Oct 29
Australian Equities Fund Manager Style over time
A couple of weeks ago I did a post showing Fama French 3 Factor analysis on some of the leading Australian Equities fund managers. The analysis covered returns from June 2003 to September 2011 so it obviously covered a mixture of markets…bull bear and sideways. I just completed the same analysis but this time I …
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Oct 14
Australian Equity Manager’s Investment Style…maybe not all true to label
Its been a little while since I wrote anything on managed fnds. Yesterday I attended a series of presentations at Griffith University whereby undergrad students presented results of their previous few months working in financial services. Some of the results were very interesting including how many global fund managers demonstrated a different investment style than …
Oct 10
Asset Allocation that considers Asset Weighted Returns
My earlier posts on asset-weighted returns got me thinking about how to apply this thinking throughout the working life of a superannuation member so I did this little exercise. I know this has probably been done to death by the lifecycle investment gurus out there but I thought I’d see for myself what I would …
Sep 25
Reducing Equity Risk with Bonds
Earlier in the week I was at a meeting whereby one of the attendees suggested that in a balanced portfolio (~70% equities) the equities proportion adds around 90% of the risk, and then in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review I see a headline quote from Stephen Nash (FIIG Securities) that said, “If investors replaced half their …
Sep 12
More on Asset weighted vs Time Weighted Returns
I just did some simple analysis of balanced fund returns and on a time weighted basis (excluding tax), balanced funds returned on average a compound monthly return of 0.38% in the ten years to the end of August 2011. This is equivalent of a compound annual growth rate of approximately 4.7%. I then assumed the …
Sep 10
A few thoughts on investment strategy for today
With the US heading towards recession and the Euro Sovereign Crisis getting ugly again where to invest one’s funds has never been tougher. Australian bonds yields are around 4%, meaning they are on PE ratio of 25 which compared to local and global shares, which are currently on forward PEs of around 10, are very …
Aug 22
Asset Weighted Returns…an ignored concept
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 …
Aug 19
Another dodgy market update
Obviously a pretty difficult investment environment at the moment. Markets tanking again overnight and following on in Australia this morning. Watching Billabong drop around 25% this morning demonstrates the benefits of diversification…I’d hate to be an adviser with an overweight Billabong position in my client’s portfolio. Anyway I digress. Volatility in the sharemarkets will continue for many …