Opinion

The last thing an adviser wants is for their client to be sitting in front of another adviser in 12 months, explaining how their last adviser didn’t understand them. But what are advisers doing to prevent it?

The Treasurer’s plan to limit concessional tax treatment within super at $3M comes without a lot of the details required for effective retirement planning. Making bold changes now could be costly, says Wattle Partners principal Drew Meredith.

Negative-yielding debt topped US$18 trillion at its height in late 2020, representing a quarter of global bonds outstanding at the time. With the stock of negative-yielding bonds now yielding in the positive, owners of the debt face ugly marked-to-market losses – but counter-intuitively, there were investors willing to buy them.

“I don’t think anyone told me that things are going well,” said Michelle Levy of the advice review consultation process. Despite being given disparate views on how to fix things, the lawyer believes compromise was never an option.

Australians’ penchant for property investment comes with the caveat that patience is a necessary virtue. This applies doubly so for fretful LRBA holders, writes Nicholas Way.

Ever since the GFC interest rates around the world have been on a trajectory to zero, which acted as a proxy tax on investing for retirement for millions. But the current economic is a whole new ball game, writes Drew Meredith.

Litigation involving estate planning and superannuation is ramping up, with major impacts on self-managed super funds, and in particular trustee obligations. Cooper Grace Ward partner Hayley Mitchell discusses key recent case law and what it means for estate planning and SMSF management.

Australia may have fared better than its international peers, but markets still took a pummelling in 2022 with traditional safe havens and equities alike bearing the brunt in a wildly dislocated market.

Pandemics, invasions and the return of inflation. If the last few years have shown investors anything, it’s that outrageous predictions can often be anything but.

Household wealth in September recorded its third largest quarterly decline since the Australian Bureau of Statistics began keeping records in 1989. And wealth is likely to keep falling in the coming quarters, as the lagged effects of interest rate hikes flow through.

Being independent used to be enough to attract new clients, says Wattle Partners’ Drew Meredith. Today, they are increasingly demanding alignment with their own values.

While ESG arose in the space of listed equities, private debt managers can be more effective than equity funds or other fixed income investors in getting companies to meet their ESG goals.