Reading time: 4 minutes Gold has woken from its slumber to be up more than 18% since the start of the year (see chart below). Whilst this has been driven by growth concerns and falling real rates, we believe there is still a strong case for including it as part of a broader asset allocation.

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Reading time: 4 minutes “What are other advisers doing with client portfolios?” This is one of the questions I get asked the most by financial advisers. I appreciate that many advisers are so busy with the day-to-day running of their practices, they may not get as much time to speak to their peers and share

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Reading time: 4 minutes Due to its relatively strong economy, India’s share market has not only been one of the best performing among emerging markets in recent years, but also the world. As this note will demonstrate,  India continues to offer both an alluring growth opportunity and useful source of added diversification for Australian investment

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Reading time: 4 minutes MULTIPLE RECORDS TUMBLE AS THE SECOND HALF OF THE YEAR STARTS WITH A BANG! The Australian ETF industry experienced rapid, and record-breaking growth this month, benefiting from both high net flows and positive market movements. July 2019 was truly a month where records tumbled, with all-time records broken for: total funds

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Reading time: 5 minutes Key Market Trends – bonds still driving equities There were more modest moves in global financial markets over July, with earlier aggressive expectations of US Federal Reserve interest rate cuts tempered somewhat by signalling from the Fed. US-China trade tensions also continued to linger while markets braced for the Q2 US

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Reading time: 5 minutes According to a Bloomberg report from June 2019, more than 20% (or US$11 trillion worth) of the investment-grade bonds on issue worldwide were trading at negative yields. In other words, investors buying these bonds know that if they hold them to maturity, they will receive cashflows over the life of the

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Reading time: 3 minutes Market cap-weighted share indices can tend to overweight overvalued stocks and underweight undervalued stocks. Investing based on quality, on the other hand, does not consider a stock’s market capitalisation – rather it applies certain quality factors. This approach aims to produce superior performance to market cap-weighted indices, and arguably best demonstrates

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Reading time: 5 minutes The election of Boris Johnson as the U.K.’s new Prime Minister has heightened Brexit concerns.  As this note will demonstrate, however, these concerns have already been at least partly priced into the U.K.’s FTSE-100 Index – and perhaps unduly so given the global orientation of its most highly-weighted companies.  Exposure to

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Reading time: 3 min As 2019 reaches its half-way point, we have seen a continued and marked preference by investors for passive strategies at the expense of actively managed strategies, along with an overall preference for investing via the ETF structure. Overall U.S. ETFs received ~US$56B of net inflows versus outflows in traditional managed funds

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Reading time: 5 minutes There are at least three reasons why it may make sense to have some exposure to government bonds in your portfolio. And in this regard, relatively long “duration” government bonds – such as through the newly launched BetaShares Australian Government Bond ETF (ASX Code: AGVT) – potentially offer the most advantageous

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