Now is the time to myth-bust investment truisms
For pretty much all of my working life, we have been able to hold onto a handful of truisms about investment. Expressions like ‘time in the market not timing the market’ become investment adages because their truth endures through the ups and downs of the cycle. But sometimes, as Jim Callaghan noted about politics in…
False Gold-Stock Panic
The left-for-dead gold miners’ stocks are literally trading at stock-panic levels today! But they’ve been slammed to extreme lows in recent months on a false premise. Traders assume gold’s parallel plunge must be fundamentally-righteous. But that was driven by enormous gold-futures selling on anomalous market events. As these unsustainable extremes inevitably reverse hard, the battered…
Lessons Learned from Lithium
“Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” It seems in the blink of an eye newcomers to share market investing will come across this omni-present cautionary adage on the perils of investing in equities. The puzzling contradiction in this advice is readily evident in what these newcomers find dominating the data presented on financial…
The impacts of deforestation on investors
Just as humans have towns and cities, the living world has forests. They are nature’s melting pot – home to countless forms of animal and plant life. What’s more, they play a critical role in stabilising our climate. Trees, plants, and bushes absorb carbon dioxide, sunlight and water, then convert the water into oxygen and…
52 Week Highs in the Eye of the Storm
The Australian Stock Exchange has managed to escape a plunge into official Bear Market Territory but there are some market experts of the opinion it is only a matter of time before we follow the lead of US markets into the abyss. All major US exchanges are in Bear Market territory and still falling. In…
Defence Stocks with Double Tailwinds
The US Federal Reserve continues to hike interest rates, dancing around the delicate line between curbing demand enough to tame inflation while steering clear of curbing demand too much, plunging the US and with it much of the developed world into a recession. As expected, the US Fed hiked interest rates another 0.75%, with an…
The energy crisis is likely to last years
An overreliance on vanishing Russian fossil fuels will torment Europe. Europe is restarting mothballed coal-based power plants because the benchmark electricity price has exceeded 1,000% above its average of the past decade (where prices are set by the marginal cost of the last unit – essentially, the most expensive unit – of energy purchased to…
Will Rising Interest Rates Help or Hurt the Big Four Banks
For many economic forecasters, market experts, and professional and retail investors, the wait is over. The “other shoe” has dropped. Markets came down with a severe case of the jitters when it became obvious rising inflation around the world would not ease without central bank intervention with rising interest rates. The interest rates in question…
Gold languishing but its upside remains
Gold continues to languish near major lows after a rough summer, deeply out of favor with traders. Oddly this leading alternative investment seems oblivious to the first inflation super-spike since the 1970s. That should be driving big gold demand, fueling a major upleg. But that classic inflationary response has been temporarily delayed by heavy-to-extreme gold-futures…
The importance of portfolio diversity
One thing we can usually rely on as investors is that things don’t all go wrong at the same time. If there are losers, there are generally some offsetting winners. We illustrate this with something we call a smarties table. It’s a grid in which each column represents a year within which each row shows…
