Obi Wan Kenobi wasn’t talking about the yield curve when he uttered these words, but his sense of foreboding has parallels with some of the commentary over the weekend in respect of the dreaded yield curve inversion. Without doubt, you will read and hear about this inversion over the coming days and it will be […]
READ MOREWinter is coming! – 2018 report card and 2019 outlook
Now that the kids are back at school, the roads and trains are full and Australia has kicked back into full capacity, it’s time to peer into our crystal ball again. Unlike President Trump, I am happy to admit I’m borrowing a famous quote from the hugely popular series ‘Game of Thrones’. But what is […]
READ MOREProperty Market – going, going, gone?
On 16 September 2018, 60 Minutes Australia aired a story warning of the impending crash in housing prices. In the story, Martin North, a data scientist, warned that we could soon see the same impact as the Ireland property bubble here in Australia and that property prices could fall as much as 40%, putting greater […]
READ MORE“No nation was ever ruined by trade”
Benjamin Franklin – 1774. Last financial year was a tale of two halves, the first half ending 31 December 2017 was one of a positive note as equity markets continued to trend higher based on a story of synchronised global growth, benign inflation and corporate tax cuts in the US. Unfortunately, the second half to […]
READ MOREItaly leans to the right
During quieter news periods, market volatility can increase as company information is replaced with speculation on trade wars, tax policies that may or may not pass and who will win the next election. Often these matters are not trivial and can impact upon companies. The problem is that we are usually dealing in speculation and […]
READ MORELook past the headlines
Whoa! slow down! Let’s get some perspective. The snippets above are just some of the thousands of ‘click-bait’ headlines from the online news sites in the last 48 hours. If they’re to be believed then we’re all doomed. Headlines Of the headlines above, my favourite one was ‘The Dow Jones falls the largest amount in […]
READ MORE2017 report card and 2018 outlook
“May you live in interesting times”. We do, and what a year it’s been. We witnessed the (“best ever attended”) inauguration of Donald ‘Tweet’ Trump, and then some 420 protest marches in the US and in a further 168 countries decrying his election. The United Kingdom formally triggered Brexit. We’ve witnessed escalating political tensions around […]
READ MORECan someone please tell me who Jay Powell is?
Jerome “Jay” Powell is a name that we are all going to hear a lot more of over at least the next four years. This morning, US President Donald Trump nominated Jay Powell as the next chair of the US Federal Reserve. As the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Mr Powell will wield incredible […]
READ MORECrisis Management
Crisis management can be defined as the process by which an organisation deals with a disruptive and unexpected event that threatens to harm the organisation, its stakeholders, or the general public. I recently had the opportunity to meet and listen to Dr Ben Bernanke, who served two terms as Chairman of the US Federal Reserve […]
READ MOREExchange Traded Funds (ETF)
If I cast my mind back to my university days (approximately 25 years ago) I recall undertaking a finance subject in which we compared returns from active fund managers to respective index returns that those same managers were being paid to beat. The outcome of the study over varying time periods was dismal if you […]
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