In December last year, I wrote an article entitled “Nothing Terribly Wrong” talking about the market fears being overdone. At the time the ASX 200 was down 12% from the top. In hindsight, a marvellous thing, I wrote it ten days before the market bottomed. The markets have bounced. Let us revisit last year’s fears…
The obvious post-Hayne Royal Commission comment is that Bank executives with the wrong culture will be trying not to laugh at the recommendations. The AFR cartoon on the announcement of the recommendations: Some are calling it a waste of time. I think not. In hindsight the Hayne Royal commission was never going to have the…
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…
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…
