Keeping You Up To Date

Sticking to investment principles The reporting on COVID-19 has caused panic and fear across global markets and economies. The topic is now a permanent fixture across all aspects of media. From a financial perspective, there are two possible paths: 1. A recession across multiple countries driven by a partial shutdown of industry and the workforce; or 2. An economic recovery driven by a two-pronged fiscal and monetary stimulus from governments, coupled with a realisation that the vir...

Now is not the time to try and time the markets     After showing great resilience, and perhaps a degree of complacency, equity markets have fallen sharply in recent days. A relatively sudden surge of confirmation of corona virus outbreaks outside of China has been the main trigger for the correction. However, Apple's removal of previous earnings guidance and a deterioration in some leading economic indicators (such as the preliminary reading of the U.S. Purchasing Mana...

The Hunt for Dividend Income in 2020 With interest rates at historic lows and likely to stay that way for some time, retirees and other investors who depend on income from their investments are on the lookout for a decent yield. Income from all the usual sources, such as term deposits and other fixed interest investments, have slowed to trickle. Which is why many investors are turning to Australian shares for their reliable dividend income and relatively high dividend yields. The aver...

Australians delight in their nation punching above its weight. But there's little to celebrate in being the world's silver medallists;  we're a nose behind the Swiss when it comes to household debt. i With the present-buying, holiday-taking season nigh, millions of Australians could soon find themselves sinking even deeper in the red. Older readers may remember a time when credit was hard to come by and people were cautious about going into debt. But those days are long g...

Like it or not, we live in interesting times. More than a decade after the Global Financial Crisis, the global economy is facing fresh headwinds creating uncertainty for policy makers and investors alike. This time around it's not a debt crisis, although debt levels are extremely high, but geopolitical instability. The ongoing US-China trade war and Brexit confusion in Europe have increased market uncertainty and volatility and put a spoke in the wheel of global growth. The Internatio...