Advice

For financial advisers, balancing the need for personalisation with the imperative for scale has long been a core challenge. However, the use of modular portfolio design through individual sleeves is redefining this balancing act. .

By any measure, Christine Atencia’s career at Nexia Sydney has been one marked by clarity of purpose, quiet resilience, and deep commitment – not only to her clients, but to the legacy of her family’s sacrifices and her belief in the power of financial planning to shape better lives.

As the wealth management landscape evolves, leading financial advisers are no longer just portfolio managers, they are strategic business operators. In this context, investment consultancy Atchison views portfolio construction not as a back-office function, but as a critical growth lever.

Since the banking and financial services royal commission, smaller, independent, specialist wealth platforms have been able to grow their market share at the expense of their much larger ‘legacy’ rivals — and share investors have jumped on for the ride.

The spectacular market gyrations of April, sparked by escalating trade conflicts, geopolitical tensions and the Presidential ‘X’ account, represent the first significant stress-test for a generation of separately managed accounts (SMAs) run by Australian asset consultants.

GFC. COVID-19. 2023… and now 2025?
With recession fears once again dominating headlines and markets rattling investor confidence, financial advisers are being called on to do more than just manage portfolios — they are being asked to provide clarity, calm and connection.

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.