Many of you reading this will have either personally experienced it, or have a friend or family member that has experienced it. The direct and indirect impacts of cybercrime are surging at exponential rates, and it’s most likely this trend will continue over the short term before it gets any better. Hacking has evolved from

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The case for passive investing is often couched in terms of the inability of active managers to “beat the market”, with the market in turn usually defined as a capitalisation weighted equity index such as the S&P/ASX 200. Yet as this note will demonstrate, using an alternative approach to passive indexing can potentially be used

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Once upon a time, not too long ago, you would have to wait 5 minutes to connect to your dial-up internet – once a family member had finally gotten off the phone! You would have to wait several days for your photos to be developed, taken by your Kodak disposable camera, only to find your

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Amid the geopolitical concerns simmering across the globe, the upcoming United States earnings reporting season has received less than usual attention. That’s a shame because early indications suggest corporate earnings are travelling reasonably well.  In fact, despite high valuations, US stocks could keep rising if earnings continue to grow – as seen, for example, between

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Records broken again as industry continues to expand The Australian ETF industry had a very strong month of growth, with new assets taking the industry to a fresh record high. Total industry FuM at the end of March was $27.4B, a growth of 4.8% or $1.2B. The majority of the growth (60%) came from new

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Media commentary has been dominated in recent weeks by talk of Australia’s growing “housing bubble.” This note attempts to provide a factual perspective. It suggests that while Sydney house prices are now starting to reach past peaks in terms of mortgage (un)affordability, they are still a little below their average long-run premium to national house

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Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are well known for their low cost and diversification benefits, however, their level of liquidity and ability to closely track the price of the underlying securities they hold are advantageous for investors but tend to be less well known and sometimes misunderstood. To understand how ETFs maintain this ability, it is

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Global stocks rose further in March, though more modestly than in February. While an earlier than expected Fed rate hike and Trump’s failure to pass healthcare reforms dented investor confidence, sentiment was supported by continued solid global economic reports and failure of the far-right parties to gain power in the Dutch national election. The outlook for

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When it comes to the Australian sharemarket, there are a couple of mantles Australians can claim over our international counterparts. Firstly, Australians have some of the highest levels of share ownership in the world, with 33% of us owning shares directly*.  Secondly, by global standards,  the concentration of this ownership in large-cap shares is relatively

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Last year in my article Currency hedging – 3 things to consider I introduced the concept that exposure to foreign currencies can potentially be an added source of unnecessary risk to your global equities investment when looking at certain currency pairs. Today I’m going to highlight a few specific international regions and global sectors where

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