Last night UBS lost $2billion due to another “rogue” doing unauthorised trades and as reported last night by Zero Hedge, Goldman Sachs are shutting down their famed (or perhaps infamous), Global Alpha hedge fund. The obvious question posed by Zero Hedge is whose next? and I wonder which Australian fund(s), if any, will be hit. …
Category Archive: General Investment
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Sep 10
A few thoughts on investment strategy for today
With the US heading towards recession and the Euro Sovereign Crisis getting ugly again where to invest one’s funds has never been tougher. Australian bonds yields are around 4%, meaning they are on PE ratio of 25 which compared to local and global shares, which are currently on forward PEs of around 10, are very …
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Aug 22
Asset Weighted Returns…an ignored concept
Around a year ago I was involved in a project looking at life cycle investing and I flippantly said that we should differentiate in the market place by offering the younger investors, say 25 years of age, 150% geared investment that reduces down to 30-40% risky assets at age 65. Older investors could lend to the …
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Aug 19
Another dodgy market update
Obviously a pretty difficult investment environment at the moment. Markets tanking again overnight and following on in Australia this morning. Watching Billabong drop around 25% this morning demonstrates the benefits of diversification…I’d hate to be an adviser with an overweight Billabong position in my client’s portfolio. Anyway I digress. Volatility in the sharemarkets will continue for many …
May 12
Perpetual Portfolio Manager’s Interesting View
I just had a meeting with Charlie Lanchester, who manages half of Perpetual’s massive Industrial Share Fund, and his views on the Australian economy were far more dire than many commentators are saying. Like many, he believes that commodity prices are very high and showing signs of faultering (doesn’t mean they going to crash just …
May 06
The extreme but possible storm ahead
Attended a Researcher’s conference yesterday which had an interesting line-up of speakers that covered China, the global economy, Small cap stocks, and . The first guy was very impressive, an investment Strategist, he did a “Me-style” global economic presentation (perhaps that’s why I liked him) where the key points were… Commodity Prices in a bubble Australian …
Apr 14
A lack of Global Small Cap investing???
International equity small-cap stocks widely outperformed large-cap stocks over the year to September 2010, returning 24.4 per cent and 12.7 per cent, respectively in US dollar terms. I took the above from today’s InvestorDaily email and whilst the fact that global small cap outperformed large cap is not surprising, as it is bound to happen …
Mar 18
Commodity Prices Boom/Bust History
Source: www.macrobusiness.com.au Found the above chart on the brilliant Australian blog, www.macrobusiness.com.au, and its quite a frightening picture indeed. As the headline says, “at no time in the last 200 yeasr have commodity prices risen as fast and as high as in the last decade without a sharp decline”. When you throw in the fact …
Mar 16
SPIVA Report – Active Managers Bad Year
My favourite investmnent returns report was released yesterday by Standard and Poors, their SPIVA Report. Its my favourite because unlike other investment return analysis/reports, this report takes into consideration investment fund survivorship. As many of us know, when an investment fund continues to underperform it typically closes never to be seen again and the reports …
Jan 28
Top read on Asset Class Bubbles
A couple of days ago Jeremy Grantham (the G in GMO) published his latest quarterly newsletter (click here) in which there’s an excellent article on Asset Class Bubbles. I won’t bore you with my own re-interpretation of the newsletter but I just wanted to point out my appreciation for Grantham’s first chart explaining “the way the …