Famed American investor Warren Buffett is known to carefully assess his major stock purchases from a very long-run valuation perspective.  In this light, his recently revealed favourite stock is instructive for what it says about the US tech sector, and the NASDAQ-100 in particular. Buffett – An Apple in his eye In a regulatory filing

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Human capital in asset allocation Most readers and investment professionals will accept that “time in the market” beats “timing the market” as the key to wealth generation over the long run. Despite this, we tend not to think too much about the accumulation process, often making investments on the assumption of a static lump sum

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NEW YEAR, NEW RECORD! In what is typically a very quiet month for Australian markets, the ETF industry still managed to eke out a new record in terms of assets under management in the first month of 2018. Total industry FuM at the month end was $36.6B, a growth rate of 1.6% or monthly growth of

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The drop back in US equity prices over the past two weeks has had reverberations around the world.   At this early stage, it still seems likely this period will prove only a “correction” in the ongoing global equity bull market.  In this post I analyse historical market corrections with the data suggesting that the worst

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The volatility and declining performance of the markets over the last few weeks have certainly put some investors on edge and have been a timely reminder that, just as markets were kind to investors last year, and by and large trended up, markets can indeed go down. Given the recent volatility, depending on how your

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Stocks: off to a strong start Global equities posted further gains in January, with the MSCI All-Country Index returning 4.1% in local currency terms. By contrast, Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 Index delivered a negative 0.4% return, and continued the general trend of underperformance that has been evident over the past year.  The trend for global equities

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After close to a decade of underperformance there are strong indications that 2018 could finally be the turnaround year for the world’s major energy companies. In this post, I provide some reasons why this could be: The synchronised global growth currently being seen across developed and emerging markets should provide support for oil demand. Meanwhile,

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One word: BIG! We’ll begin our posts in 2018 with a look at the year 2017 in ETF-land. And what a year it was! The Global ETF industry recorded significant growth in 2017, receiving its highest ever level of net inflows (US$633B) – a growth rate of 18% year on year. In total the global

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One of the surprise global market developments over the past year has undoubtedly been weakness in the $US. Why? This note suggests that, rather than simply blaming a dovish Fed or an erratic US President, the main driver of $US weakness has been the broadening (or “synchronisation”) of global growth over the past year, which

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With the end of the year drawing near, we thought it was an opportune time to discuss the year to come for the ETF industry. In this post, we outline our top 3 predictions for the ETF industry in 2018. In our view, a growing audience of younger investors, an increasing array of fixed income options, and

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