Jonathan Baird, Investment Specialist, Western Asset Compared to global peers, Australians tend to have a very low allocation to fixed income (bonds) in their investment portfolios, preferring to allocate to cash and term deposits. Yet bonds can be a reliable and stable income investment, providing a relatively high level of capital stability alongside meaningful diversification

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Forget about fake news – have you heard the good news?  In 1990, 35% of the world’s people lived in absolute poverty.  By 2015, just 9.6% did.  By 2015, more than 1.25 billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty, which is roughly 138,000 people per day. The Brookings Institute calculates that half of the

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Financial research suggests that so-called “quality” companies, i.e. those with high return on equity (or “ROE”), tend to be able to produce market-beating shareholder returns.  But as this note demonstrates, it’s not enough to simply rank companies based on their current ROE – rather consideration must also be given to the likely sustainability of their

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The Importance of a Globally Diversified Portfolio The U.S. midterms are once again upon us and, as has often been the case in both Australia and abroad during 2018, it is a time of great political instability and uncertainty. The last several months have already seen markets driven in both directions by trade and tax

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Many investors are aware of the benefits of international diversification.  Unfortunately, adding global equity exposure to your portfolio also usually involve an income sacrifice, as dividend yields internationally generally tend to be lower than in Australia.  As this note will demonstrate, however, it’s now possible to have your income and international diversification too, thanks to

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In light of fairly significant sharemarket falls in recent weeks we’ve heard plenty of our clients query where the opportunities for portfolio construction may lie in asset classes other than equities or otherwise discuss potentially overlooked equity exposures. It seems that a number of our clients are adjusting their portfolios to more of a ‘risk-off’

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The recent pull back in global equity markets has tended to fall most heavily on growth orientated stocks, which have also run the hardest in recent years.  Given the maturing global equity bull market, this suggests it might be opportune to consider a tilt towards more value orientated stocks, as is possible through fundamentally-weighted indexing

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Chatting to advisers and investors every day, a common question I get asked is “where is the money going in ETF-land?” or “what type of ETF exposure is receiving the most amount of flows?”. I thought I would answer that question with a short post on the topic. And the answer – a lot of

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Ask almost anyone young or old in the western world if they are familiar with Amazon, Google, or Facebook and you would most likely get a resounding “yes!”  However, if I were to ask those same people if they were familiar with Tencent, the answer would probably be “Ten who?” So, who exactly is Tencent

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Australian investors have likely recently felt the effects of market volatility, which has put downward pressure on many large cap Australian companies that offer relatively high yields. For investors with a concentrated single stock portfolio, this recent performance trend highlights the danger of relying on a small number of high yield stocks for retirement portfolios.

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