Outside equity, fixed income and well-known alternatives there is another world of investment options that rarely find their way into portfolios. Examples include agricultural land and businesses, energy and carbon trading, water rights, fishing licences or music royalties. It is unsurprising that few consider these options, as they are far from simple to judge and…

One of the most important roles of a financial adviser is to assist investors in navigating their own ‘behavioural biases.’ The world of behavioural finance was little known until a few years ago, before being made famous by The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis’ biography of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two of the founding fathers…

Just what is China doing by limiting all kinds of activity and corporations? Many see this an authoritarian regime imposing restraint on its citizens. Yet this is not exactly unusual. Every domain imposes rules. Our local media content, our banks have been given the book on what they can and can’t do, our energy market…

Comment by Jamie Nemtsas I have been an adviser for 25 years and, apart from a quick dalliance with AMP as a graduate, I have worked at or owned a self-licensed wealth management practice for all that time. Those practices, independent from institutional owners, have always built portfolios from the ground up.  Asset allocation, tactical…

One of the boxes ticked when selecting a fund manager is whether the investment team has its own money in the strategy, or even better, has ownership in the organisation. The logic is self-evident: ‘skin in the game’ should matter. Yet there are, inevitably, drawbacks. The fund’s risk /return appetite may be unduly influenced by…

Advisers all have financial benefit from promoting investments through an advice fee, or percentage of FUM. This is not a value judgement, simply a statement of how this industry and many others work. No one has come up with an alternative model that can balance all the conflicting requirements. Yet, as we know, there will…

An illustration of why an active long-short approach to the global listed infrastructure (GLI) sector makes sense. ESG funds have gained in popularity in 2020, sometimes with a material impact on underlying holdings. This has impacted GLI stocks recently, with the iShares Clean Energy ETF buying 1%–6% of companies’ floats in a matter of weeks, leading to…

The persistent era of disruptive services has its counterpart in companies considered ripe for extinction. History, however, suggests one should not be quite so fast in judging. The advent of affordable motor vehicles (and of course, other factors such as urbanisation) resulted in the waning of mail-order catalogues and the rise in the department stores,…

The attack on short sold stocks in the past week has caused a frenzy of comments on the participation of so-called retail investors. Where this will end up is anyone’s guess, but what is increasingly clear is that equity markets are no longer at the behest of traditional investors. Nasdaq has weighed into the argument…

How do you know you need advice? Seeking advice can be a challenging endeavour for most people. It is not so much that advice is hard to find, but more so that the abundance of information out there offers so much but under it may lie hidden intentions but more on this later. Here are…

Financial advice industry bodies including the SMSF Association (SMSFA), Association of Financial Advisers (AFA), and Financial Planning Association (FPA) have jumped on ASIC’s Affordable Advice review to call for an industry reset. This week the SMSF Association released their submission, with key concerns relating to compliance, both in terms of costs and burdens being applied,…

This week we caught up with Michael Rees-Evans of Libertas Wealth Consulting. Michael has an impressive career spanning big business and boutique, spending time with Price Waterhouse and Accenture as a management consultant before embarking on a career in financial advice in 2002 with Hillross. Today he leads Libertas Wealth Consulting in Lane Cove. We…