SMSF or Self Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs): setting up and running them

Investment in telco companies: broadband and mobile data growth plus low valuations and low expectations?

mike — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:36:15 +0000

Telcos: the dotcom crash all over again? One of the market themes that is starting to looking interesting is telcos. You know, those boring mature industries, whose fixed phone line legacy business is gradually being whittled away by the internet? The ones who are dying a slow death whilst being whipped by regulators at the same time? Doesn’t really sound attractive? Well [...]

K Rudd magic & why the mining super-profits tax is a superannuation tax

mike — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 06:39:10 +0000

My utmost admiration for the government on the Miner’s Super-tax. There’s a true symmetry to this which just has to be mentioned. It’s called a Super tax because it’s a tax on ‘Super-profits’ in the mining sector. But of course the beauty of it is that it is really also a tax on the superannuation (’super’) savings of most Australians (the [...]

The volatile world of the video games investor

mike — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 04:25:33 +0000

Video games: still a long term growth story For a few years now the video/computer games sector has looked attractive as an investor. As most people would now be aware video games have passed movies in terms of gross revenue and there are a bunch of factors which make them extremely interesting as a long term growth story. For example: increased availability [...]

Commercial property trust / REIT investment using an Exchange Traded Fund (ASX:SLF)

mike — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 06:34:15 +0000

In the never-ending quest for the unpopular asset class that you might be able to pick up on the cheap it is difficult to go past commercial real estate at the moment. But there are a few problems: commercial real estate can be very illiquid with the gearing in this sector, falling property values, and historically low interest rates that may [...]

Dollar cost averaging in volatile equity markets

mike — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:47:11 +0000

Does dollar cost averaging really work better in a volatile equity market? Say that your equity market outlook assumes that one of two scenarios is true. Either: You expect equity markets to be volatile over the next 10 years or, You are convinced that neither you nor anyone else knows what equity markets are going to do over the [...]

Cheapest online supermarket shopping: Coles Online or Woolworths Homeshop?

mike — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 10:46:05 +0000

Why Woolworths and Coles pricing matters Supermarket expenses account for about 16% of our annual household expenditure for our family of 4 (2 adults, 2 children excluding mortgage costs). In cash terms, roughly $25,000 per year, and the second highest category of expenditure in the household after childcare. The Australian competition regulator, the ACCC, in an enquiry [...]

Public beliefs about long term investment returns from different asset classes

mike — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:03:45 +0000

Staggering (to me anyway) study out from Gallup a couple of weeks ago about the public’s beliefs about which asset classes offer the best long term investing returns. When asked “which of the following do you think is the best long term investment?” 34% of the 1000-odd telephone interviews picked savings accounts with 33% picking real estate. [...]

Superannuation & government deficits: political risk is back

mike — Mon, 18 May 2009 03:13:40 +0000

Watching the Obama government fiddle around with the various creditors in Chrysler (and in other government bailouts where political calculations are coming into play in Australia and the UK) it’s pretty obvious that there is ‘political risk’ coming back into investment in a big way. It is something that Bill Gross at Pimco was also keen [...]

How to create a bear market rumour: US bank ’stress test’ results

mike — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 04:29:11 +0000

In the old (pre-internet) days to create a market rumour you actually had to go to the trouble of making a phone call to a broadsheet journalist. As a university prank we rang a major newspaper’s Property columnist, told him we were from the (fictitious) “Real Estate Institute” and did he know if there was any [...]

Emerging markets: shorting China

mike — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 01:17:00 +0000

It will not have escaped people’s notice that shorting some indices last year would have been very lucrative. What about in 2009? As a company we do some business with Hong Kong and Chinese clients. Recently we’ve been receiving letters in response to our invoices which read along the lines of: “whether there is a possibility of a [...]