In Practice

An imminent big-milestone birthday has the Brilliant Investment Group (BIG) executive chair thinking about what he’d like to see this year.

What do you do when you finish high school? “Go with your strengths,” Peta Nunn’s school careers counsellor told her. So, she found herself in a maths degree at university. But something didn’t feel right.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” While not known for his financial advice, Mike Tyson’s famous quote likely resonates with those planning for and entering retirement.

Investing is often seen through the lens of numbers, charts, and performance metrics. But at its core, investing is about people. It’s about the relationships we build, the trust we foster, and the communities we create.

There are plenty of people in the investment industry who say they have been influenced by legendary investor Warren Buffett, but for Gold Coaster Hugh Robertson, the obsession with the “Oracle of Omaha” started when he didn’t really know anything about him. It was the start of a journey that led to his advice firm, Centaur Financial Services.

Melbourne-based Link Wealth Group has acquired its fourth advice practice, buying a majority stake in Hobart-based full-service financial advisory firm, Sky Advisers.

While firms are focusing on improving their operational capability and leveraging good technology to make their practice more efficient, this ambition needs to be tempered by an awareness that those same opportunities create openings for different risk sets.

By dint of the fact that they have longer life-spans, women are set to receive the vast majority of spousal inheritances in the next quarter century or so. For advisers, that shift has important implications.

The US and Australian advice systems may not be completely analogous, but ETF usage is surging across both markets and the need for more resources is becoming stark according to researchers.

The first thing advisers need to remember, Cerulli notes, is that almost half the intergenerational transfer won’t event be intergenerational, it will be horizontal or intra-generational because it will be passed on to spouses.

AFCA stands by the use of its “But for” methodology to calculate compensation payments, despite the FAAA’s protestations. Clients will get paid what they lost, plus what they would have earned if the advice wasn’t inadequate. Just don’t call it payment for theoretical loss, or opportunity cost.

While advisers and their licensees place most of their compliance eggs in the SOA basket, the real focus should remain on more robust client discovery and documentation processes according to Assured Support’s Ben Moffatt.