ASX Education: Why you don’t matter

Westpac had its results on Monday. Whenever a big company has results every significant fund manager will come into work the next day to find ten pieces of research (fifty in the USA), one from each of the big brokers, sitting on their desk selling ten different opinions about the result. Fund managers are like…

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ASX Education: Your Best Investment Ever

I have an article in The Age Money section. It's one to send to your kids. Click below and read it online (it helps it go viral), or you can read it below. Or just copy and paste the image and the link and send it to the kids by email. https://www.theage.com.au/money/investing/the-best-investment-in-the-whole-world-20180605-p4zjkr.html I have been…

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ASX Education: Exchange Traded Funds

Australian investors who want a diversified portfolio in a particular asset class without having to manage it themselves are able to Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) on the ASX. ETFs are exchange traded on the ASX. That means you can buy and sell them on the ASX just like shares. They trade and settle in exactly…

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The importance of knowing the unknown

ASX Education: Knowing the unknown

In order to make any money in the stock market you need to focus on the unknown and stop wasting your time on the known. Every year the top and bottom performing stocks are not the stocks the market predicts most accurately, those stocks will hardly move, the big money is always in the stocks…

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Active or Passive investing

ASX Education: Active v Passive

Much has been written recently about the relative merits of taking an active approach or just letting your funds track an index. The growth of passive funds has been extraordinary. The head of Vanguard in Australia was in the news last week as the FUM have grown to $5.4 trillion. $2.9 trillion is tracking indices…

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Full service broker

ASX Education: Full Service Brokers

When I started broking in 1982 there were no personal computers let alone email or online broking. Everyone used full service broking because they had to. Now you don’t have to but the industry still exists and if you talk to most people about full service brokers they will immediately launch into the terrible experiences…

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The importance of having a strong Self managed super fund (SMSF)

ASX Education: Do I need an SMSF?

Thanks to compulsory superannuation most people are invested in managed funds. You didn’t really make a choice to invest in managed funds but courtesy of the cozy relationship between employers and fund managers almost all of you tick that little box that says “put my super in your default fund” when you are employed. The…

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Your guide to surviving the results season

Marcus Today: Your Results Season Guide

NINE SECTORS THAT SHOULD HAVE GOOD RESULTS NEXT MONTH (AND FIVE THAT SHOULDN’T) We had a question on the Marcus Today stock discussion group on Facebook asking whether there was anything on the horizon that could upset the recent recovery in Orora (ORA). The most likely thing to upset any stock at the moment is…

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risk_reward

Risk and Reward

There is a natural assumption in almost every aspect of life that, from playing a cricket shot to investing in the stockmarket, there is a trade off between risk and reward. But when it comes to investing, one of the most common mistakes is to look at returns, at forecasts, at earnings growth and dividends,…

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