Traditional passive index investing, whereby a fund tracks the performance of a market capitalisation based index, has been and remains an excellent way to invest, and exchange traded funds or ETFs have been an efficient and practical way for investors to access such an investment strategy. Indeed, in its annual research, which tracks the performance

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While the majority of Australian investors’ portfolios tend to be very equity-heavy, in the current economic environment there may be a case for diversifying across asset classes and increasing commodities exposure. This article looks at four of the key factors supporting a bullish view on commodities in the near-term. 1. Reflation and Releveraging Economic reflation

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In this contributed post, Chris Joye, Portfolio Manager at Coolabah Capital and the investment manager of our HBRD fund, analyses the current risk and return trade-offs of ASX shares vs. major bank hybrids. The post illustrates that in current market conditions, hybrid investors are able to obtain attractive income returns coupled with significantly less historical

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The Australian sharemarket has struggled in recent times to replicate the performance of many global peers.  One of the major drags over the past year has been the financial sector, reflecting a slowing in credit growth and new regulatory concerns stemming from the banking royal commission.  Outside of Australia’s “mega-cap” stocks, however, sharemarket performance has

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I got up early last Saturday morning and started my usual weekend routine.  Made myself a cup of coffee, a piece of toast and logged on to the AFR. Reading through the headlines, I came across many investment themes and ideas and couldn’t help thinking to myself “There’s an ETF for that!” Now this wasn’t

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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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Investing success is often not just about picking the right asset class or securities – but also avoiding the poor investments.  In the current global economic environment, out of the world’s major asset classes, it’s hard to go past global bonds as having potentially the lowest likely return over the next year or so. Let

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Should you hold individual bonds and “do it yourself” or a diversified bond fund/ETF? One commonly held belief in investing is that holding individual bonds entails less risk than bond funds, due to the return of principal at maturity. Is this correct? If so, does it matter? Ultimately, it depends on the role bonds play

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Modern portfolio theory suggests there are two kinds of risks in stock returns: Systematic or market risk, which investors attempt to ‘diversify’ away by adding a variety of assets to their portfolios; and Unsystematic or stock specific risk, which represents a stocks return that is not correlated with general market movements In recent times, global

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