A festival about investing? Yes, really

It’s not every day you see a mechanical bull share the bill with a CEO, but this was no ordinary finance festival.

On Saturday 24 October, around 2,000 Australians headed to Carriageworks in Sydney for FinFest 2026, and it was a long way from your typical investing conference.

Between the bar and the mechanical bull, the talks on stage tackled questions many Australians grapple with. What can you control when markets are hard to predict? How do you tell a lasting trend from a passing fad? And what does it take to build wealth over time?

Betashares founder and CEO Alex Vynokur spoke about compounding and the habits that help investors stay on track. Chief Economist David Bassanese shared his outlook for markets, and investment strategists Tom Wickenden and Hugh Lam tested which megatrends could shape the next decade. Here are the ideas that stood out.

“Building wealth is a compounding game,” Alex told Equity Mates hosts Bryce Leske and Alec Renehan. Diversification, patience and keeping costs low are “probably the most important things” for building wealth, he said.

Diversification can help investors avoid major losses that take years to recover from, while patience gives “the magic of compounding” time to work. Alex cautioned against concentrating investments in a single asset or trying to predict market highs and lows. “Time in the market absolutely beats timing the market,” he said.

He also highlighted the long-term impact of fees, drawing on Warren Buffett’s point that investors can’t control market performance but can control what they pay. Alex encouraged Australians to pay closer attention to their super, saying it is “our money” and deserves the same consideration as a bank account.

Alex also shared his ideas for improving wealth-building opportunities for Australians. Betashares is advocating for a tax-free threshold to help young Australians build their first investment portfolio. “We are really strongly advocating to give every Australian a start in life,” he said of the idea.

Alex described emotion as investors’ biggest enemy and said diversified, cost-effective and automated investing can help keep it in check. He added that AI may help with the emotional side of investing because it has “no emotion whatsoever.”

Betashares Chief Economist David Bassanese opened the event with a market update, saying global growth was holding up despite geopolitical tensions and rising interest rates.

“There’s a lot of things to worry about in the global economy, but the markets have kept going up,” David said.

He said global growth was tracking at just over 3% this year, around its usual pace. Markets fell when the Iran war began and oil prices surged, but later rallied on strong earnings from large US technology companies.

David also described AI as a long-term positive, saying productivity gains could support growth and ease inflation. He expects inflation to decline gradually without pushing the economy into recession, allowing company earnings to continue growing.

Australian shares may lag global markets while technology stocks lead, he said, but should still “grind higher.”

Investment strategists Tom Wickenden and Hugh Lam joined Equity Mates host Alec Renehan to discuss which investment themes could last through the next decade.

“I look for the unnatural market forces,” Tom said, pointing to governments’ strategic spending as one way to identify long-term trends. Governments buying for security or energy supply, he said, “often don’t care about price” because “they’ve got another agenda.”

Tom cited defence spending, which is on track to reach its highest level since 2009, and plans by around 30 countries to triple nuclear capacity by 2050.

He said investors should consider whether demand for a theme is likely to persist over the next five to ten years and which companies will capture the profits. Only then should they assess whether the price makes it a good time to invest.

The discussion also covered humanoid robots. Hugh said he was optimistic about the theme but warned that falling prices could squeeze manufacturers’ margins. Tom raised the risk of a race to the bottom.

In a quick-fire round on megatrends and fads, Tom said he believed quantum computing would become a megatrend, while acknowledging that he did not yet understand it well enough to invest. “If I don’t understand it, I can’t invest in it,” he said.