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 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...
There is a comforting illusion that takes hold whenever a great company finally comes to market and the orders come flooding in. When a business is wanted badly enough, we quietly assume the money to buy it will always be there. Demand feels infinite. Capital starts...
There is a familiar rhythm to how markets misread central banks. The headline says "rates unchanged". The cameras pack up. The next news cycle moves on. Three days later, the underlying repricing finally shows up in portfolios, and by then most retail investors are...
There is a particular kind of word that arrives in financial media slowly, then all at once. For most of the last twenty years, "stagflation" was the kind of term reserved for economic historians, the occasional fund manager letter, and Howard Marks footnotes. This...
There is a particular rhythm to how markets treat states, cities and asset classes that have fallen out of favour. First there is the reasonable concern. Then the reasonable concern hardens into consensus. Then the consensus hardens into a kind of received wisdom that...
A year end conversation with Ron Shamgar and Robert Swift, moderated by Darren Katz As 2025 draws to a close, I decided to approach our final newsletter with a different idea. Instead of another macro roundup or performance commentary, I invited our two investment...
