Reading time: 5 minutes FIXATED ON FIXED INCOME AS INDUSTRY APPROACHES $50B MILESTONE The Australian ETF industry started the second quarter of 2019 where the previous quarter finished, with strong monthly growth which led the industry to once again hit a fresh record high, just shy of the milestone $50B mark. The industry ended April

Read more

Reading time: 4 minutes Following a “V-shaped” recovery from the sharp market sell-off late last year, US equities now face a reality check as we head into the Q1 earnings reporting season. Although early earnings results have broadly met expectations, there seems more downside than upside risk to the earnings outlook as this year progresses.

Read more

Quick read: 3 minutes JD.com aka Jingdong could be the biggest company you’ve never heard of. The company started as a small bricks and mortar store in Bejing in 1998 and moved online in 2004. It now provides over 314 million active customers in China with direct access to an unrivalled range of authentic high-quality

Read more

Reading time: 5 minutes With global growth slowing there is understandable concern that the decade long global bull market could be finally coming to an end.  This note suggests, however, that bear markets still remain a relatively rare occurrence, and even rarer in the absence of a US recession.   Equity markets are inherently volatile

Read more

Reading time: 6 minutes The dust continues to settle following the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. As a new dawn breaks across the financial services industry I was keen to share a few of my insights into how investors, their advisers, and funds management businesses like BetaShares are

Read more

This article was last updated in May 2019 Quick read: 2 min This is the first in a new series of posts we are commencing in 2019, which we are calling “Behind the Ticker” (ticker being the name that some people use for stock code). In this ongoing series, we will delve deeper into the

Read more

While my “on hold” call for the RBA turned out correct last year, I now expect the RBA to cut the cash rate this year, and twice by early-2020.  This reflects a weakening in a range of economic indicators and the Reserve Bank’s own acknowledgement of more downside risks. Economic Storm Clouds Let’s start with

Read more

As a high growth sector with strong exposure to Asian markets, it’s no surprise that global robotics companies suffered a setback with the downturn in global equity markets in 2018.  That said, given the strong longer-term outlook for robotics remains generally undiminished, the recent pull back in prices has improved valuations and may provide investors

Read more

The current equity market slump, including ‘Shocktober”, has once again shown the value that bonds can play in investors’ portfolios in terms of offering some downside protection. While this may be obvious to some, what is perhaps less obvious is that compared to the traditional benchmark bond indices which are generally heavily weighted to low-yielding

Read more

This week we sent out to the media our annual ETF predictions for the year ahead after another fascinating year in the industry. At a high level, Australia’s ETF industry is predicted to continue its rapid growth trajectory in 2019, driven by investor demand, product innovation and the evolving requirements of advice models used by

Read more