The Rules of Investing

In tennis, just as in investing, it's the points that you win that matter. After all, Roger Federer played 1,526 singles matches throughout his career, and while he only won 54% of the individual points within those matches, he walked away with the win 80% of the time. Ausbil Investment Management's fresh-faced co-head of emerging companies, and portfolio manager for its small and micro-cap strate...

There's no supply in residential housing nor the majority of segments of the commercial real estate market. Sky-high construction costs are now too prohibitive. Bandaid solutions, like rent control, only backfire. And inconsistent state, federal and local policies are not helping either. That's according to this week's guest on The Rules of Investing, Andrew Parsons, a founder and the chief invest...

Investors are too focused on interest rates and are subsequently underweight risk assets. That’s the, albeit US-centric, view from Global X ETFs’ Head of Investment Strategy, Scott Helfstein. He elaborates by saying that the US economy is looking a lot more like mid-cycle expansion than late cycle and that “you don’t want to be sitting on the sidelines”. A fan of thematic investing, Helfstein goes...

Fully franked dividends are a prized asset of the Australian market. While the lack of growth is often lamented, plenty of self-funded retirees are content to dine on the distributions of Australia's big miners and banks.  And who can blame them - high commodity prices, particularly in iron ore and lithium, resulted in record dividends from the top end of town. However, after peaking in 2021 and 2...

This time last year, PIMCO Portfolio Manager Adam Bowe told Livewire that there was a 50/50 chance that Australia would slip into recession. March GDP figures show that the economy grew at just 0.1 per cent, the slowest rate since December 2020. Today, Bowe says interest rates are sufficiently restrictive, and the chance of recession remains a ‘line ball’.  In this episode of The Rules of Investin...

While "survival of the fittest" certainly applies to the Earth's abundance of flora and fauna, it may be time for investors to take a page out of Darwin's book.   That's according to FNArena's Rudi Filapek-Vandyck, who believes the market has irreversibly changed since 2014 - as has the way investors should value stocks.   In this episode, Rudi outlines why he believes technological innovation wil...

There seems to be no stopping Australia's ultra-wealthy, with the number of billionaires down under growing by 14.4% over the past 12 months, to a record 159 people. For some context, in 2020, this number was 117, according to The Australian.  While it's wonderful to daydream about what you would buy or do with a few billion dollars, the true secret success of the ultra-wealthy is their ability to...

In investing, just as in love, trust is everything - and without it, you really don't have anything at all.  It's for this reason that the Wilson Asset Management global equities team meets with more than 700 management teams across the world each year - including in the US, Japan, and Europe. In addition, they also meet with competitors and suppliers, as well as talk to current and past employees...

Time flies when you’re having fun! While the last five years have had plenty of ups and downs, they haven’t dented the enthusiasm and passion of small-cap fund manager Chris Stott from 1851 Capital. Stott launched 1851 Capital in 2020, just before COVID-19 hit, wreaking havoc on the market and his portfolio. Since then, Stott has comfortably beaten his small-cap benchmark, growing the fund’s initi...

The past six months have been golden for investors, with everything from equities to gold and even Bitcoin enjoying stellar runs. And if risk assets are not your bag, then there have been juicy yields on offer across a range of cash and fixed-income asset classes.  Animal spirits woke from their slumber in late October 2023 when the Fed effectively claimed victory in the fight against inflation. M...

Quality growth stocks, those with fortress balance sheets, impressive moats, structural tailwinds and top-notch management teams, have had a stellar run recently. Take Goodman Group ( ASX: GMG ) for example, which has risen 66% over the past year. Or Megaport ( ASX: MP1 ), up over 252% in 12 months alone.  If you're like this anonymous writer, you've probably started to ponder whether it's time to...

If there is any one investment product that has experienced a true boom over the last 10 years, it is exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and exchange-traded products (ETPs) more broadly.  The number of listed products has increased by 17.5 times in Australia during the last decade alone. More than 300 products are now listed across the ASX and CBOE exchanges and two million Australians have at least one...

Warryn Robertson, portfolio manager and analyst at Lazard Asset management, understands the nuances of infrastructure assets like few others in the market. His approach is to find monopoly assets with inflation protected revenues, high margins and reasonable leverage then buy them at attractive prices.  Of the 400 listed infrastructure stocks globally only 160 have passed the four filters and typi...

"Living Legend", "One of a kind", and "Diamond in the Rough are not terms usually bandied about when describing economists! But these are just a few of the hundreds of messages of support and appreciation that flooded a recent social media post recognising the 40-year tenure Dr Shane Oliver to AMP. Shane has dedicated his years to educating Australians on all matters of the economy. His style tend...

If you’re looking for the future blue chips of the ASX then Washington H Soul Pattinson might be worth a closer look. The company has been around for more than a century, has never missed a dividend payment but, for the most part, has flown under investor radars. That is starting to change following the tie up with Milton Corporation in 2021, which has helped to propel Soul Patts’s market cap over...

The structural forces that saw growth investing rise to the top after the GFC remain. Covid created a blip, but the world is returning to slow growth, low inflation and lower interest rates. That's the perspective of Jason Orthman, the Deputy Chief Investment Officer of Brisbane-based Hyperion Asset Management.  Orthman says that neither you, me, nor our grandchildren are likely to experience an e...

Each year, Barron's releases a list of Australia's Top 100 Financial Advisers. Pitcher Partners' Charlie Viola and Lipman and Burgon Partners' Paul Burgon have featured high on this list over the years, and both ranked in the top 10 in 2023. As part of Livewire's Outlook Series for 2024, Livewire's James Marlay hosted an in-depth panel discussion exploring how these two investing gurus are allocat...

Two years ago, on a trip to Perth, Yarra Capita’s  Dion Hershan  was pitched the case for lithium stocks by his Uber driver. Hershan says it was a cliche moment and a classic example of a ‘ringing the bell’ sign. On the flip side, there are moments when deciding to invest causes your stomach to churn and your hands to quiver. “Some of the best ideas I’ve had in my career were when my stomach churn...

The penny has dropped and thanks to a three-letter word from the Federal Reserve's recent interest rate decision ("any"), small caps both in the US and in Australia have started to rocket out of a long slumber. For most of the last 18 months, small cap performance at an index level has been smashed thanks to the soaring cost of capital. But now that markets have called central banks' bluff, we're...

Culture is not something that immediately springs to mind when assessing a company and its prospects for the future. More often than not, we investors are scouring profit and loss statements, comparing financial ratios and (if we have the time and skill) constructing valuation models. However, good culture is critical in a business; it takes a long time to build and is hard to maintain. And yet, i...

From geopolitics to fiscal policy, commodities to equities, this week's featured guest on The Rules of Investing has some high-conviction views on a whole range of subjects.  For more than 40 years, Donald Amstad traded his way through the highs and lows of financial markets. After completing his undergraduate studies at Oxford University, Amstad began his career at Japanese trading house Nomura....

Despite all of his success, Morry Waked has remained relatively under the radar. He’s not one to boast of his achievements, and he’s very rarely fronted the media. At Livewire, we dedicate ourselves to finding the best fund managers in Australia - and in a testament to how underground Morry is, he hadn’t even popped up on our radar. Last week, however, Morry found himself thrust into the spotlight...

The times when a company is dominating headlines (for all the wrong reasons) are the best time to buy.  Take Medibank Private ( ASX: MPL ), for example, which you may remember, was embroiled in a data breach in October 2022.  On the news, the stock's share price plummeted more than 20%. And while it still hasn't retraced its steps to its prior glory, astute investors who picked up the private heal...

Matthew Kidman is a well-known entity to readers of Livewire, as host of Success and More Interesting Stuff, Buy Hold Sell, and most recently, Livewire Live. Finally, we got him in the hot seat to run us through his own journey into funds management, his approach to investing, and the way he’s thinking about markets today. From hard truths on a squash court to starting his own shop, Centennial Ass...

Short sellers have had a tough time of it over the past decade. The era of free money lifted all boats, including companies that would perhaps otherwise be candidates for short selling.  Today's market is radically different. Central banks have lifted rates in a desperate attempt to control inflation. Global equity markets have performed well, but much of that performance can be attributed to the...