My favourite investmnent returns report was released yesterday by Standard and Poors, their SPIVA Report. Its my favourite because unlike other investment return analysis/reports, this report takes into consideration investment fund survivorship. As many of us know, when an investment fund continues to underperform it typically closes never to be seen again and the reports …
Category Archive: Investment Strategy
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Mar 03
Australian Government Bond Yields – Pretty Quiet…and other thoughts
I haven’t posted too often this year and the above chart pretty much shows why. This year, there hasn’t been too much change a not a great deal of interesting things to write about. Despite natural disasters, minority government, middle east issues, record food prices and climbing oil prices, our bond yields have been relatively …
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Feb 23
VIX up 26% this morning
With all of the risks that exist in the global economy and political scene I’ve been amazed at how low equity market volatility has gotten in recent months. I also have to admit that my thoughts about current equity markets is that they are more momentum driven than any great fundamental reason so the only …
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Nov 17
Australian Government Bond Yield Curve – Nov 2010
Not surprisingly since August 31 interest rates have increased across the board on the back of stronger local economic data (good unemployment, strong China etc) and now the yield curve has rates above those back at the end of May 2010. It will be interesting to see what happend to interest rates over the coming days/weeks given …
Oct 26
Reducing the Risks of Portfolio Failure in Retirement
I have a draft article with some interesting analysis showing the probabilities of running out of funds across numerous drawdown scenarios…click Reducing the Risks of Portfolio Failure in Retirement – Oct 2010. If we’re forecasting growth returns to be around 10% then even with a conservative expectation of the volatility of annual returns and the …
Oct 25
Favour Global Equities??? Yes and No
Got a few quotes in the Investor Daily today…click here …the article suggests I favour global equities which I do but I don’t. I’m certainly skeptical of the global equity upside potential but the main basis to my thoughts are that global equity markets have far greater diversification than the Australian market which is really …
Oct 01
AUD and Parity with USD – only the bulls can maintain it
All this talk about Australian Dollar and US Dollar parity got me thinking about the behaviour of the Aussie relative to other assets, namely the sharemarket. The above chart shows that, with the exception of the first half of 2008 when the the sharemarket was a little more forward thinking than the RBA, there has …
Aug 30
Simple Economic Update
The month of July saw the return of strong sharemarkets both in Australia and overseas with the first positive monthly performance for four months. This return of confidence was largely due to investors reacting positively to the European Banking stress tests where 92% of European banks tested passed. Alongside of the good sharemarket performance was …
Aug 27
Jonathan Pain slams fund manager benchmarking
Apparently Mr Pain is of the belief that equity managers should have benchmarks that are more aligned with their client’s needs and therefore, as far as I can tell, have more of a cash plus or absolute return benchmark. Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted the report but anyway… …whilst on face value this sounds quite reasonable as …
Aug 25
Fear Creeping Up and may be appearing in Oz
Source: Bloomberg After another down day in US Equities markets we can see the VIX is starting to creep up…it increased overnight by a little more than 7% and currently stands at 27.5. If the VIX is one thing it is certainly volatile. Whilst the chart shows that over the last 12 months the VIX …