The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies has an in-depth piece out on the cost of LNG plants, looking in detail at the drop in LNG construction costs and how maintainable the falls are in construction costs: As you can see, the Australian plants dominate the top of the cost table, with many of the more recent plants
After a strong August performance, September saw a pull-back in most of our portfolios amid concerns surrounding trade tensions, China’s economic growth and the outlook for interest rates, as the US Federal Reserve hiked US interest rates by 25 basis points. All of those factors extended into October (and then some), with stock markets down close
Better work from Chris Joye this week on bonds as he abandons the worst of his arguments about the benefits of floating rates. However, his main purpose seems to be to distract from his prior poor arguments and so he builds an irrelevant straw man and then demolishes said straw man. In his original piece,
This week’s webinar at 12:30 pm AEST, Thursday 18 Oct is a focus on the drivers of the recent volatility in stock markets around the world: – How to hedge against volatility – What does it mean for your portfolio – Investment opportunities Add to your Calendar. Click here to watch Join us on our live
Join Damien Klassen, David Llewellyn Smith and Tim Fuller as we discuss the new cold war between the US and China and how it affects the world of investment. Listen in to a replay of our webinar Find out below: Take us on your daily commute ! Podcasts now available on iTunes and all major Android
Trying to work out how much value an investment adviser adds to the investment process is difficult, but Vanguard has had a go at quantifying it anyway. Vanguard’s conclusion is that there are seven key areas adding to around 3% per annum (intermittently rather than every year) that could be added by an adviser (see here for
Quantitative and statistical models are extremely useful in investing. But they are guides, not gospel. Forgetting there are real consumers behind the sales numbers and real companies beneath the profit numbers is the first step to an investment model that is going to fail when you need it most. There is a reason you never
The Wall Street Journal suggests that they may have: I’m not seeing it yet in my data: I use Factset rather than the Bloomberg data used by the Wall Street Journal, and so maybe there is a timing issue. But Thomson Reuters data concur with Factset: Also, it is worth noting the fall in earnings in the
International stock markets ripped higher in August and both the Australian dollar and bond yields fell, completing a trifecta of investment themes that we have been positioned for. With this backdrop all of our portfolios performed strongly: Given our portfolio tilt toward Quality stocks, our portfolios once again performed strongly over the month of August. Our
This post is dedicated to all of the Nervous Investors out there: you know who you are. You want to start investing, or invest more, but are frozen by a myriad of concerns: are you buying at the wrong time? you wanted to buy last year but didn’t get around to it, and now you
Investment markets are late in the economic cycle, the issue being that you never know when the end will come. However, there are some signs that it is not here yet for US equities at least – and there is the potential that US equities will hold the rest of the world out of the abyss
In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy there is a galactic president: The President is very much a figurehead… the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not
July marked our first full year of live investment for the MB Fund. We started the year with a view that with Australia at the tail end of historic mining and housing booms, and the US in the middle of a tax-cut driven boom was that the best strategy was to invest heavily in offshore
With the royal commission showing that bank staff are busy working out how to keep billing dead customers, or busy coming up with reasons to explain why they have charged fees for services not provided, its no wonder that there isn’t enough time to train staff in Australia properly: No. 1 by a country mile!
News broke yesterday morning that ASIC Chairman James Shipton has greenlit the prospect of tactical taskforces to be embedded in our banks (for up to 8 weeks at a time) in an attempt to address the surging and endemic misconduct present in our banking system. Treasurer and chief Royal Commission resister, Scott Morrison, has backed
There was more from the Royal Commission grilling of National Australia Bank yesterday. “Hopelessly Conflicted” is one term that I’m hoping will catch on: The process that saw NAB’s superannuation trustee NULIS advised by the bank’s wealth management arm was hopelessly conflicted, the Hayne royal commission has heard. Counsel assisting Michael Hodge QC put to
Here is an interesting table from Technology Foresight showing the most disruptive technologies and a timeline for when they are expected. I have shown the most imminent ones below, click the image below for the full table as a pdf: I’m interested in your thoughts (preferably with supporting research or at least some sort of reason to
Fairfax has been running a series of articles (see here and here) on the collapse of Great Southern and the hardships it has caused, a timely reminder of the perils of mixing debt, investment and tax breaks. Almost every case consists of investors borrowing to invest on the advice of a “trusted professional”, large amounts
From the AFR: The owners of Australia’s $117 billion listed real estate sector are expecting the market to ‘correct’ and have kept their gearing to historically low ranges in anticipation of this according to feedback received by S&P Global Ratings. At event in Sydney on Tuesday where the impact of tighter credit on property prices was discussed,
A frequent focus point for the media is whether a company “beat” its earnings forecasts or not. But the definition of a beat or miss is poorly constructed, and often misleading. For me, changes in forward estimates are a more reliable indicator of whether a reporting season is progressing well or not. On that basis,
Front page of the AFR today: Sorry – no R&D grants because we need the money so that we can give tax cuts to companies so that they can spend more on R&D (disclaimer: more R&D will only occur if there is enough cash is left after paying higher dividends, performing more buybacks and awarding managers bigger
Correlation doesn’t equal causation. But sometimes it does. I would like to know whether the board of Macquarie are Freakonomics listeners or just unwitting participants in a glass cliff experiment – Australian edition. The ABC sets the scene (emphasis mine): Shemara Wikramanayake is set to become the first female chief executive of Macquarie Group, taking over from Nicholas Moore,
Vested interests are everywhere, chipping away at the moral fibre of politicians, tilting taxes in their favour and diverting resources. In a more diversified economy, the vested interests compete with each other for government favours – a waste of money I’m sure, but there is some benefit in that no one type of vested interest
Jeremy Grantham’s GMO offered a recent presentation talking about climate change and investing at the LSE: http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/the-mythical-peril-of-divesting-from-fossil-fuels/ The main chart that caught my eye was a one on the long-term effect of excluding an entire sector from the index : Basically, my interpretation is that if you decided to exclude an entire sector from your investment
Good breakdown by Credit Suisse (via the Wall Street Journal) on where the US earnings growth is coming from: Oil is good for a small set of companies, bad for the rest. But unless the oil price falls the earnings growth will be repeated in 3Q and 4Q. Taxes are one-off but set to continue
The shoe is on the other foot for a change with a Chinese company (recently listed Contemporary Amperex Technology – the world’s largest EV battery manufacturer) announcing a new factory in Germany yesterday. From Bloomberg: CATL and the state of Thueringia in central Germany Monday announced a plan to build a 16-gigawatt lithium-ion plant close to
June continued to see positive returns across our portfolios, our Australian fund was up 2.3%, International up 1.3% and the tactical funds up between 0.3% and 0.9%. These returns were supported by a fall in the Australian dollar, which added significantly to performance in June. June was a strange month from a performance perspective. World
May continued to see positive returns across our portfolios, our Australian fund was up 2% and the rest were up around 1% over the month. These returns came as protectionist trade rows flared and markets belatedly realised that European growth is slowing more sharply than expected – themes that we were relatively well positioned for.
April saw markets bounce back from a poor March, and our portfolios had healthy gains with our international portfolio up 2.6% and both our Tactical Growth and Tactical Foundation funds rising 1.6%. International shares were aided again by a falling Australian dollar – over the last 3 months the weakness in the Australian dollar has
Financial planning has long had two major problems, and the intersection of the two problems is where the action is. The Royal Commission into banks is merely uncovering what most people in the industry have known for a long time. Problem 1: Do Financial Planners provide advice or sell product? If I go to a
