Italy – Germany 10 Year Bond Spread Source: Bloomberg The above chart shows the spread between Italian 10 year bonds and German 10 year bonds. I found it via Paul Krugman’s blog. As Krugman suggests it looks like things are starting to look pretty grim again in Euro land as the spreads are heading towards …
Category Archive: Investment Strategy
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Jul 16
Australian Government Bond Yield…the outlook’s not so good any more
What a difference three months can make. The Australian Government Bond Yield has gone from a positive outlook, to negative, and Bill Evans of Westpac has just made the call that the next interest rate move from the Reserve Bank should be down. For those of us who read this blog, you may recall that …
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Jun 24
Australian Government Bond Yields…pretty much flat
Well, flat, it pretty much is. What a difference a couple of months can make…from a nice gentle normal looking yield curve to very very flat out to five years to maturity. Pretty obvious stuff here…housing has slowed, inflation isn’t a perceived threat, the Euro crisis has global recession potential written on it, and the …
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Jun 12
Managing Inflation Risk…advisers have it wrong
Source: van Eyk Research The above poll was taken by van Eyk Research on their subscription website. In terms of the sample, it is large (848 responses) so may be statistically representative of van Eyk subscribers whom I can only assume is financial advisers, researchers, and maybe fund managers. As shown almost 1 in 2 …
May 29
Volatility…it might be the best value around?
Source: Bloomberg The above chart shows the last 12 months of VIX index. For those who don’t know, the VIX, effectively, is a mathematical representation of expected future volatility of the S&P500 (its a little more than that but lets keep it simple). For me, the VIX is the one “trade” that has consistently shown …
May 25
Australian Government Bond Yield Curve…flattening
Not surprisingly the Australian Government Bond yield curve has flattened signficantly over the last month. The longer part of the curve is lower than it has been for much of this year which is typically an indication of less confidence in the economic outlook in our country. On the other hand, the shorter term yields …
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 …
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 …
Apr 30
To Hedge or not to hedge?…MSCI provides an answer
Interesting paper by MSCI Research came out eaarlier in the week about hedging…click here. Its US centric with some interesting analysis and but the basic conclusion should apply to any country. i.e. basically over the long run currencies revert to the mean resulting in no real difference, but over the shorter term currency effects can …
Apr 14
A lack of Global Small Cap investing???
International equity small-cap stocks widely outperformed large-cap stocks over the year to September 2010, returning 24.4 per cent and 12.7 per cent, respectively in US dollar terms. I took the above from today’s InvestorDaily email and whilst the fact that global small cap outperformed large cap is not surprising, as it is bound to happen …