Is the sky falling

Stock Market News: The Sky is Falling

Here is a video you should all watch, it is on a website called LiveWire and you’ll find it in their top trending articles, for a reason. It is a video from a chap called Donald Amstad from Aberdeen Standard Investments. You have probably never heard of Aberdeen Standard Investments, but they are a large…

Read more

Why The Big Funds Underperform

The press are carrying articles today talking about the performance of the biggest Super Funds. Here are the biggest 20 funds by size showing the size, number of Members, average balance and growth in member numbers or otherwise. I know there is this generally accepted view that fund managers always underperform and if you look…

Read more

Listed Investment Companies

Listed Investment Companies, known as LICs, are effectively a managed fund with the main difference being that they are traded on the ASX like a share instead of being unlisted and traded through the fund manager’s administration system. So for one trade, on the ASX, through an LIC, you can buy a portfolio of shares…

Read more

ASX Education: What Is The Average Return?

Marcus has updated this article for 2020 with the new average return numbers. You can find the updated article HERE We had a question on the Marcus Today Stock Discussion Group on Facebook asking: “Silly question but Marcus mentioned the average market return is about 9%, I assume that is capital growth and dividends included?”…

Read more

ASX Education: Capital and Income

In response to a question in the Marcus Today Stock Discussion Group we worked out that over the last forty years the average total compound return from the All Ordinaries index per annum including dividends reinvested but not including franking over the last: 40 years was 11.18%. 30 years was 9.48%. 20 years was 8.66%.…

Read more

Fear And Greed

The S&P 500 has recently ticked a couple of sell signals on RSI and MACD (highlighted below). Despite that, fear or volatility is benign – here is the VIX (volatility) index that is used as a barometer of fear and greed – it is not predictive but does highlight when the market is “comfortable” (now)…

Read more
London Stock Brokers in the 1980s

ASX Education: London Barrowboys at work

Having spent sixteen years in the UK and four years in Australia sitting on the institutional desks of some major brokers, particularly in the UK, one thing becomes apparent, that share prices don’t go up and down because of the fundamental reasons that commentators and the media obsess over in hindsight, they go up and…

Read more