10 Aussie stocks with the highest debt
What a difference a year makes when it comes to attitudes towards corporate gearing. Companies once lauded for having ‘ballsy borrowings’ are now as popular as Scrooge himself on Christmas morning. The global credit squeeze brought to front and centre the stress debt can place a company under. And the 180-degree about-face on what now…
CFD fever hits Singapore
Peter Oxlade, senior vice president and head of CFDs & Securities for Man Financial, is under no illusions: establishing a viable presence in Singapore’s fledgling CFD market – and the wider Asian region – will be no walk in park. But he’s convinced, after slightly less than a year in Singapore, it’s a walk a…
Inflation
Inflation is the true enemy of building wealth and investors should put measures in place to protect against inflation’s corrosive downside. “Inflation” can be defined as “the state of affairs when the value of money falls and the prices of goods and services increase, other things being equal”. Interest rates move up and down from…
Net Tangible Assets (NTA)
The “net tangible asset backing per ordinary share” figure, often abbreviated “NTA”, is one possible measure of the worth of a share, although its usefulness is subject to some reservations. It can be compared to the market value of the share. In an ongoing company the various measures related to income tend to be more…
SPI
The Share Price Index Futures (SPI), which tracks the S&P/ASX 200 Index, is the most popular futures contract. To buy the SPI, a trader would outlay a deposit per SPI contract, which is a small percentage of the value of the contract. The value of the SPI 200 futures contract is $25 times the level…
Dividend Reinvestment
Many companies offer their shareholders an alternative to receiving dividends in cash, allowing the shareholders at their option to enrol in a dividend reinvestment plan (DRP) and to take up newly created shares instead (or to take a mixture of cash and shares). When these plans first became popular such shares were generally offered at…
Platform (master trust and wrap account)
If you see a financial adviser these days they will more or less demand that you invest via a master trust or wrap account, otherwise known as an administrative platform. Your adviser might even offer you a choice of platforms, with a different selection of managed funds or shares on each. Platforms can be confusing…
Dividend imputation
Before 1 July 1987 corporate profits were subject to two lots of tax. Firstly, companies paid company tax on their earnings. Only the “after tax” earnings were then available for dividend declarations. Secondly, individual shareholders paid personal income tax on any dividends received by them, despite the fact that the companies paying them had already…
Efficient Market Hypothesis
For some share enthusiasts, the EMH is not a nice thought. The theory argues that careful share selection based on myriad factors, including analysing company financials, reading news and analyst opinions or charting historical share prices is pointless. The concept of analysing whether a company is under-or over-valued relative to its current market price is…
The Scoreboard – Winning and Losing Stocks for 2008
The biggest dog in 2008 went to none other than beleaguered investment bank Babcock & Brown – its shares tanking by 99.4% to the year ending 17 December 2008. Anyone with $10,000 parked with the investment house in December last year, has less than the cost of a tank of petrol to show for it…
