I don’t need to rewrite all the Royal Commission recommendations for you, so I’ll take those as understood. That said there are a few interesting observations this morning: Bank executives with the wrong culture will be trying not to laugh at the recommendations. Some are calling it a waste of time. I think not (see…
Holiday over. This year Emma and I hosted my brother’s family over from the UK, for a month. They say your relations are like fish. Fantastic when they are fresh but give it a week and they stink. Not so this time, we had a ball. But it was a lot of hard work. Sorting…
I manage a $40 million Australian equity fund. It was great in the financial year ended June 30, 2018. The market was up 12 per cent and the fund was up 23 per cent. In the funds management game, that would have put us in the top 25 long-only funds in Australia. We began to…
When my brother and I first got on the property market ladder in the early 1980’s we were relatively early into the debt boom philosophy, early to exploit the new global phenomenon, the ability and willingness to borrow money. It changed everything. Our parents stood aghast as we two fingered their frugal culture and bought…
I have rung a few of my UK contacts overnight and here are some British views on what is going in the UK: Theresa May won out over Jeremy Corben’s no-confidence vote in the UK – it was wholly expected. Brexit is not about politics, it is about the UK extracting themselves from the clutches…
In the last couple of months it has been all about “the market”. We have been more concerned with cash levels than stock selection and as one of my team said yesterday, you know something is wrong when the first word anyone says when they walk into the office is “Bugger” rather than “Let’s have…
As any broker can tell you. Volumes dwindle. Interest in the stock market (any market) gets progressively eroded if it doesn’t trend up. You need an uptrend to retain interest, an uptrend makes the stock market easy/popular/active. The longer the downtrend goes, the more the interest wanes. As the interest wanes the core function of…
Background: In March this year Bill Shorten pledged that should Labor win the upcoming election then from 1st July 2019 they will axe cash refunds for excess imputation credits paid to individuals and in superannuation funds. This would reverse the cash refund of imputation credits introduced by John Howard two decades ago. It would also…
Two of my kids are still at school and approaching that moment of decision, foisted on them by time, possibly unwillingly, when they are being told they have to decide what they are going to do after school, which, dauntingly, implies they have to answer the question, right now, “what am I going to do…
