Reading time: 3 minutes
Healthcare stocks understandably have received a lot of attention over the past 18 months.
The arrival of COVID-19 vaccines promised a return to a (more) normal life, and as the vaccine rollout began, companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca dominated headlines – not just for their success in producing a vaccine,

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The hunt for yield in the investment world is intense, with dividend yields on global stock markets falling materially since early last year, and bond yields close to record lows.
The dividend yields on the Australian and U.S. markets have fallen drastically since the start of last year,

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Ethical investing is no longer a niche area. In the last few years, there has been a significant increase in interest in the space as investors look to drive change with their investment dollars. Total assets under management in sustainable investment funds have doubled over the past four years to around USD 3.6tn¹.

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While both exchange traded funds (ETFs) and listed investment companies (LICs) are exchange traded products, there are some important differences. These differences can be a source of frustration for investors who can confuse the two, and the expected performance profiles of each.
Let’s take a closer look.

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With interest rates expected to stay low over the next few years and bonds delivering negative returns after inflation, traditional asset allocation for retirees may no longer work as well as it has in the past.
While the traditional 70/30 asset allocation split has served retirees,

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The first six months of 2021 has seen a maturing of the equity market recovery since the ‘COVID crash’ early last year and an associated rotation in popular investment themes. This note considers some potentially interesting investment themes for the remainder of the year.

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Over the past decade, a seismic shift has occurred across the global investment landscape – the shift of assets from active investment managers towards passive, or index, strategies. This shift has been of such magnitude that in the U.S. market the total assets invested in passive strategies eclipsed the total invested with active managers in April 2019¹.

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Reading time: 5 minutes
Along with rising commodity prices over recent months, the recent much higher than expected lift in United States consumer prices has heightened global market concern over a potential breakout in inflation. For those investors concerned about such a risk, this note considers some potential ways they can add an ‘inflation hedge’

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In the realm of investing, a ‘factor’ can be described as any characteristic that helps explain the long-term risk and return performance of an asset.
Factor investing is an investment approach that involves targeting specific drivers of return across asset classes. There are two main types of factors that have driven asset class returns: macroeconomic factors and style factors.

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Hybrid securities have tended to offer attractive franked income returns for usually only moderate levels of capital volatility. As such, and especially in these times of very low cash and fixed-income returns, they offer a potentially useful additional source of income and diversification in many investor portfolios.

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