Shares for Beginners

"There's a time and a place for being aggressively contrarian and aggressively foraging through the tip. Then there are other times when most of the stuff in the tip is just rubbish." Steve Johnson is the Chief Investment Officer of Forager Funds Management. In this Quick Tip he’s talking about narrowing your investment universe, the difference between open and closed ended funds, and not being co...

How can listening to music make you a better investor? What if there’s something more to life than investing, stocks and money? In this episode I’m joined by Vitaliy Katsenelson to talk investing, Stoic philosophy and the importance of story-telling. Vitaliy Katsenelson was born in Murmansk, USSR, and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1991. After joining Denver-based value investme...

My guest today believes that the tools and levers to enable personal finance have never been better, simpler, cheaper or more accessible, particularly here in Australia. DAVID SCOLLON has spent twenty-five years in the financial industry, and recognises the complexities and challenges people face with personal finances. In Mission: Possible, he demystifies the topic to help people manage their mon...

Tony Kynaston is arguably one of Australia’s best private investors. Tony is a former senior executive of companies like Coles and Shell. He started investing in the stock market 30 years ago and developed a checklist methodology to become a professional investor. It’s called Quality at Value. In this Quick Tip Tony talks about joining the Australian Shareholders’ Association and the serious misco...

I've been thinking a lot lately about how little I know about the metrics that investors use to value companies. We had a look at the P/E Ratio a few weeks ago. This week Craig Mercer joined me again to discuss Return on Equity or ROE . But like all the best metrics, they become more complicated the more you dig into them. The warning for beginners is to not take a metric on face value. Craig Merc...

Behavioural Finance is the application of psychology to financial decision making. By allowing psychological biases and emotions to affect investment decisions, investors can do serious harm to their wealth. Zaffar Subedar has over 15 years of experience in the financial services industry and academia. In this Quick Tip he talks about how to avoid self-sabotaging behaviour, the guru syndrome and t...

There's an old cliché about the "starving" artist that may have a basis in reality, but isn’t set in stone! My guest David Maurice Sharp joined me to discuss the tricky financial waters that come with following the artistic path. He's a financial educator that provides valuable advice for performing artists like actors, dancers, lighting gurus, costumers or stagehands on investing, saving and buil...

Shares in a company are like slices of pizza. But how can you find out the correct number of slices? In this Quick Tip Claude Walker from A Rich Life talks about how investors who succeed learn from their mistakes, build up their knowledge base, so they can invest with an advantage over others who don’t put in the same amount of work. Claude is the founder of  A Rich Life  and writes the...

We live in a world with an abundance of valuable information at our fingertips. But the downside is exhaustion from dizzying information overload and a 24-hour news cycle that makes it overwhelming to sift through and process. In fact, in early 2020, 66% of Americans reported being “worn out” by the amount of news. In Thriving on Overload: The Five Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Info...

Mike Tyson says that every boxer has a plan until they get punched in the face. And everyone is a long-term investor until they get punched in the face. Enrique Abeyta is the editor of Empire Elite Trader, a weekly investment newsletter. In this Quick Tip he talks about sticking to a plan, how we wouldn’t learn to become a dentist to work on our family and friends, and how it’s your money man, tak...

Fiona Balzer is the Policy and Advocacy Manager at the Australian Shareholders’ Association and each year she organises volunteers to monitor the performance of most of Australia’s top 200 companies - protecting the rights of retail shareholders. We spoke about the seasons of the ASX – confession season, reporting season and annual general meeting season, the importance of the AGM, and how can lis...

I interviewed Rudi Filapek-Vandyck this week and he kindly responded to my arm-twisting to give us a few more moments to discuss the violent up and down movements this week on world markets. Apparently, it’s a lot to do with low volume and short covering. This interview was recorded on October 5th and I’m releasing this over the weekend of October 8-9 after the US S&P500 dropped on Friday...

One of the most used investment tools available is the Price-Earnings (PE) ratio . It causes so much confusion among investors who like to treat it as a one size fits all instrument to find "value" in the share market. According to Rudi Filapek-Vandyck , there is no such thing as a simple universal measure to decide which stocks represent attractive "value" and which ones are "overvalued". More in...

There’s a 54% chance that any given day on the ASX will be an up day. It might not feel like it at the moment but that statistic holds true over a longer period of time. This interview was recorded last November and there have been 2 changes. We were still in a bull or up market, and Anthony Doyle was working as a Fundie at Fidelity. He’s now with Firetrail. In this Quick Tip Anthony talks about t...

It's 30 plus degrees underground, a hundred percent humidity, the air is saturated, and you breathe out, like steam in the morning. The underground is soaking hot, because the air can't take any more moisture. "Australia’s mining industry is a pillar of the Australian economy, with the country being one of the world’s largest exporters of coal, iron ore, bauxite, alumina, and many other resources....

Graham Hand is the managing editor of Firstlinks Australia, one of my favourite investing newsletters. In this Quick Tip I invited Graham to respond to a listener question about Stocks, ETF’s, bonds, cash, property and how they should be balanced when constructing a portfolio. The interview was a couple of years ago so the part about bonds is a little out of date, but the rest contains good, sensi...

What’s going on in markets at the moment? Does anyone have any idea? Are you looking at coal or lithium as the energy of the past, present and/or future? I was joined by Brendan Doggett to talk about the data from Sharesies and what it's revealing about investing behaviour. Brendan Doggett is the Country Manager of Sharesies AU. As the first Country Manager appointed to Sharesies AU, his role is t...

Investing and love, can they live together? How can couples have conversations about money and investing? Betsy Westcott is a financial wellness coach, and she’s passionate about women, shoes and finance. In this Quick Tip she explains how important it is for women to understand and control their money especially when moving into a relationship. https://www.sharesforbeginners.com/blog/betsy Instag...

Today we have a break from normal programming. You may or may not know that I am the co-host of the ETFs for Beginners Podcast. We had Dave Gow from Strong Money Australia on the show and I found his money chat to be truly inspiring. I hope you enjoy listening to Dave and ETFs for Beginners with the wonderful Ana Kresina. Strong Money Australia focuses on helping people reach Financial Independenc...

Peter Bakker is an algorithmic trading fanatic, a seasoned entrepreneur and marketing executive. Peter has been trading using algorithmic methods for 12 years, with Zipline, Keras and other AI platforms. He has exited successfully from Track4 and other smaller ventures. As CMO, Peter led B2C marketing for Aussie Farmers. He also has an INSEAD MBA. Unhedged is a simple app that allows anyone to inv...

Scott Phillips is the Chief Investment Officer from The Motley Fool. In this Quick Tip we define what a a commodity is, if lithium is a commodity and will it end up being a great investment – we also touch on whether it’s possible to never lose money in the sharemarket. As Scott says, be diversified, be long term, focus on businesses and their fundamentals. You can find the full episode at: https:...

If you don't know who the sucker is at the poker table it's you. I was joined in this conversation by Wall Street Journal reporter Spencer Jakab . His latest book is “The Revolution That Wasn’t: GameStop, Reddit and the Fleecing of Small Investors.” The frenzy in meme stocks in 2021 was perceived as a Robin Hood style raid on Wall Street. Reddit forums filled with young men holding "diamond hands"...

Jordan Eliseo is the Manager - Listed Products and Investment Research at The Perth Mint. In this Quick Tip we talk about inflation and Black Swan events. Keep in mind that this was recorded about a year ago. Since then inflation has surged as we all know. Still interesting to hear Jordan’s view on what it means for the share market going forward, and especially about Nicholas Taleb’s book Th...

We started with the best of intentions to talk about corporate actions but took a couple of turns along the way. Prashant Mohan is the Chief Marketing Officer at portfolio tracker Sharesight . We talked about his investing history, what he's learnt working at a Fintech Startup, why he started investing with an LIC rather than an ETF , and finally getting around to corporate actions - what they are...

Ethan Widell is an Investment Analyst at IronHold Capital . In this quick tip Ethan talks about his passion for reading financial reports. It's important for beginners to understand the level of research required to make informed decisions when investing in companies. Otherwise you may consider index ETFs for the long term. Ethan suggests learning about compounding rather than get rich quick appro...