Most people judge their financial progress in the currency they are paid in. A salary goes up, a portfolio statement shows a larger number, the house is valued higher than last year, and it feels like progress. Economists have a name for this habit. They call it money...
There is a familiar ritual whenever a well known stock falls 30%. Someone at a barbecue declares it "on sale". Someone else warns about catching a falling knife. Both are usually answering the wrong question. A lower share price tells you the market is paying less for...
Every power station has two numbers. The first is its nameplate capacity, the output it could deliver under perfect conditions. The second is what it can actually be relied upon to deliver at 6pm on a cold, still winter evening when everyone gets home and turns the...
Whenever the Reserve Bank lifts rates, the market tends to react to consumer stocks in a fairly predictable way. Commentary turns to "the consumer", the retail names fall together, and a sector made up of dozens of very different businesses is repriced as though they...
There is a habit investors pick up after a long run of easy money, and it makes rising interest rates far more unsettling than they need to be. They start to think of interest rates as a setting rather than a price. Something a central bank chooses, the way you might...
Markets are surprisingly good at handling one worry at a time. Give investors a single villain, an oil spike, a hawkish central banker or a wobble in technology stocks, and they will argue about it, price it and move on. What markets handle far less gracefully is a...
Most Australians could not find Kharg Island on a map. It is a strip of rock in the Persian Gulf, roughly 32 kilometres off the Iranian coast, and it handles close to 90 per cent of Iran's crude oil exports. Almost nobody paying down a mortgage in Penrith or managing...
There is a particular species of investor who is convinced that the hard part is seeing the future. Get the thesis right, the reasoning goes, and the returns arrive as a matter of arithmetic. It is a flattering idea, because it locates the difficulty in the one place...
There is a comfortable assumption in Australian property investing that goes something like this. Put a full line supermarket at the front of a centre, sign a long lease, and the income takes care of itself. Groceries are non discretionary, people shop weekly, and the...
There is a particular kind of market reflex that returns every time a barrel of oil moves. A headline crosses, prices spike, energy stocks jump, miners wobble, and the commentary immediately splits into two camps: those declaring the start of a new inflation era, and...
The Asset That Doesn't Need a Rate Cut There is a particular trap in property investing, and it catches thoughtful people as often as careless ones. A well-produced research report lands on the desk, the charts are clean, the conclusion is confident, and the reader...
One of the most expensive words in small cap investing is cheap. It sounds like a reason to buy. It feels like a reason to buy. A stock trades at a five year low, the price to earnings multiple looks absurd next to its history, the dividend yield jumps off the screen,...
