Please read this, comment and propagate through your networks. Where does Duty of Care End
It’s Logical to Think of Negative Interest Rates as a Storage Cost for Money
This piece is not original or revolutionary. It is a distillation of various discussions and illustrative of a current somewhat unique situation. Post commencement of writing this article, the author has read an excellent piece by David Merkel in the Aleph Blog, http://alephblog.com/2015/04/21/on-negative-interest-rates/. This explains negative interest rates perhaps more eloquently than the current. In […]
Submission to the Australian Financial System Inquiry 2014
See the submission by clicking here. The website for the FSI is here. The main points covered: Governance around the SMSF sector is loose. There is considerable focus around the ease of setting up and managing an SMSF. This puts systemic risk into the sector, which many Trustees and Stakeholders do not fully understand. Despite […]
Retirement Planning 101, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the SMSF
Tongue in cheek, this post illustrates how the accessibility and ease of setting up an SMSF has the unintended consequence of increasing systemic risk. We also explore how this might be mitigated. Read on…… Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to setup and run a Self Managed Super Fund or SMSF. Sick of those fund managers […]
Our Big Kitchen
This post is not about Portable Beta, or finance; however a charity with a unique and effective way of engaging the community is worth writing about. http://obk.org.au/ Our Big Kitchen (OBK) is, to quote from their website:
Property Rentals and Securities Lending. A Non Literal Discussion.
Property Rentals and Securities Lending. A Non Literal Discussion. I was in a seminar recently, where the merits of securities lending were being debated. Some quite divergent views were on the table. The following analogy occurred to me: In the current environment, there is wide focus on financial products being transparent, having risks and fees […]
Is it ok to not lend your stock?
Common wisdom and common practice is divided. Before I present my views, I ask another question: Is it ok to not receive interest on your cash… Clearly, the answer to the latter is a resounding NO. So, if we ask: How do you earn interest on your cash? The answer; by lending it to a […]
Interesting Charts
I came across this article courtesy of Marc Faber at Calibrated Confidence. All the charts therein are interesting and worth a look. What caught my eye was this one – Median Household Net Worth by Age Group (1989-2010): The chart very visually illustrates the decline in median household net worth in the USA over approximately the last […]
What’s in a Headline:
Sometimes I wonder just what goes in to creating a headline. Analyse exactly what the words of a headline say, and you may be left incredulous. Are they an accurate reflection of what is going on. Are they an accurate reflection of the article that follows, or are they just devices to attempt to capture […]
A Couple of Counterintuitive Observations
Recently, I have noted several instances where conventional wisdom is challenged. It is worth repeating these. The reader is welcomed to add further examples, comments or criticisms. Inverse Glide Paths Common wisdom for retirement planning dictates that the asset mix in a retirement portfolio varies such that the riskiness (or volatility, or potential capital loss […]