Analysis & Opinion

Where the wealthy stash their cash

Think mega wealthy, seriously cashed up, an embarrassment of riches and the elite and exclusive world of private banking, add to that investment strategies for tens, hundreds, thousands of millions of dollars. Are you visualising brilliantly conceived systems of complex, sophisticated asset allocation schemes? From the outside looking in there is a distinct notion of…

PEG ratio gaining in popularity against the P/E, but beware of its flaws

A common method used to establish the best value for money when comparing shares in different companies is to look at their respective price earnings ratios. This ratio is defined as the current market value of a share in cents divided by its earnings per share for a year in cents. Other things being equal,…

Two market crashes later – Robert Kreft, a story of a full-time trader

It took the loss of a massive $300,000 during the bear market of 2001 to cause Robert Kreft to come to his senses. Declaring that from experience he has learned that human nature will usually overlook the risks in favour of the rewards, he confesses that greed drove his second foray into trading in 1999….

Hedging your losses, and making profits, using CFDs

Not everyone lost money in the past couple of weeks of market gyrations. Plenty made tidy profits short-selling CFDs on stocks or indices they guessed would be sold down as the market over-reacted to the bad news on sub-prime mortgages. Others used CFDs to protect the value of their existing share or CFD holdings. Harley…

Overseas shares not so taxing

It’s all very well to talk about buying overseas shares, but what about the tax issues? As one of our readers pointed out, two issues that may impact negatively on Australians investing in foreign shares are our dividend imputation system, and the foreign with-holding taxes on dividends and capital gains. Let’s deal with the second…

Trading CFDs full-time

Full-time traders used to be slick young traders on too much coffee who traded big sums for the big banks. Today, full-time traders come from all walks of life such as Newcastle-based mother of two, Justine Pollard, who trades Contracts for Difference (CFDs) from home. CFDs are criticised by many commentators as being too risky…

Overseas shares not so taxing

It’s all very well to talk about buying overseas shares, but what about the tax issues? As one of our readers pointed out, two issues that may impact negatively on Australians investing in foreign shares are our dividend imputation system, and the foreign with-holding taxes on dividends and capital gains. Let’s deal with the second…

Check out the investment portfolios of the nation’s heavyweight finance experts

Are stocks going cheap? And what about the property market – should we be selling out before it’s too late, or buying on the dip? Everyone has an opinion on current market conditions, making it difficult to discern what’s fact and what’s fiction. So let’s get to the heart of the matter: where are Australia’s…

Stockmarket courses can be pricey, but do they offer the secret to investing success?

How do you become a great trader or investor? Must you shell out thousands on a course, or can you learn the art by going it alone? Talk to anyone in the investing world, and they’ll surely give you a different answer. While some investors praise the merits of attending a structured course, others recommend…

Use these 5 ratios to unearth superior stocks

We all want to find the next Rio Tinto, but long before it’s trading at $100 a share, or Google when it was a tiny IT company with only a vision. But how do we know that a company will be a superior player over the long haul? What key ratios unlock the secret to…