In Practice

In Monty Python’s famous Dead Parrot sketch, John Cleese tries to return a clearly dead parrot to the pet shop, but the shopkeeper insists it’s “just resting.” In this guest article, Adelaide adviser Richie Parsons tells why he is haunted by this sketch.

As a Curtin University commerce student in the early 2000s doing a financial planning major, Bree Stevens was delighted to be offered a part-time job with Perth advice firm Blueprint Wealth. She figured she could work a day a week, pick up some industry experience and get a feel for whether real-world financial planning matched the way she was starting to think about the profession from her coursework.

The advice community is being well-serviced by platforms, according to the research house Investment Trends’ 2024 Platform Competitive Analysis & Benchmarking Report.

There’s nothing like a market correction to trigger a crisis in confidence for investors and advisers alike. Having been rewarded for taking on more risk and allowing ever-greater levels of concentration to creep into portfolios, a widespread, Trump-driven sell-off is beginning to bring diversification back into focus again.

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.