Analysis

A dedicated allocation to ASX listed REITs is largely an Australian idiosyncrasy as a legacy from the high weight and structural elements of the property trust sector in its heyday. The 2009 financial crisis should have put paid to the role REITs had in portfolios given their distribution cuts and capital raisings at the time….

At Rask Australia, we believe an investment strategy and process should change when the facts change, as John Maynard Keynes famously said.

Of the many opportunities that were thrown up by the Covid-19 Crash, one of those that is still open – although weakening by the day – is that in the eight credit listed investment trusts (LITs). Most of this group were trading at small premiums to net asset value (NAV) prior to the crash, such…

SMSF auditors have been put on notice after the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) found several tax practitioners falsifying self-managed superannuation fund annual returns. Seventy-four tax practitioners have been identified after lodging 2017 and 2018 SMSF annual returns with an incorrect or fraudulently recorded SMSF Auditor Number (SAN). The review comes after the Australian Taxation Office…

The scale of the human, social and economic costs wrought by COVID-19 has prompted some politicians to compare it with war. Although this might create some good political spin, which is always attractive to politicians, it is not correct. The differences between COVID-19 and actual war are many and varied. In truth, the only thing…

Martin Currie, the Australian and global active equity specialist, has called on other asset managers to create coalitions in order to drive change in the way firms and their clients invest. “Group efforts multiply the value of ESG investing”, Martin Currie, says, having been a leader in that space for many years. In its recently…

State Street has seen a spike in interest, by fund managers and pensions funds in the region, in outsourcing their trading activities in recent months. The uplift appears to have been prompted by COVID-19 and the aim to reduce risk. Michele Hardeman, State Street’s Hong Kong-based head of global markets for Asia Pacific, has written…

How does ETF investing go seriously wrong? If you don’t pay attention to ETF buy-sell spreads, the advantage of low MERs can evaporate.

In a letter sent to employees late in April, Aon chief, Gregory Case, says 70 per cent of the firm’s staff around the world will take a reduction of approximately 20 per cent of salary, which will be implemented in accordance with local practices. But proposed merger partner, Willis Towers Watson, is not following suit….

Historically, it’s been assumed that the economic multiplier of a fiscal stimulus is about 0.5, but recent work indicates it can be much higher than this in depressed times, such as the current conditions, according to a research note by Amundi Asset Management. In its latest research note in its ‘Thematic Views’ series, Amundi, the…

If clients are seeking advice on where opportunities are in the Australia share market, they should not overlook a group of Australian technology stocks that withstood the pandemic and have strong growth prospects. Macquarie Securities analysts reveal that some technology stocks have continued to grow throughout the COVID-19 crisis as the disruption has accelerated the…

Like most assets, bitcoin cruised into the new year in 2020, racking up a 44% rise until mid-February. Then, like the stock market, BTC took fright at the extent of the global disaster that Covid-19 rapidly proved to become. But while the S&P 500 index plunged by 33.7% before a floor was (at least temporarily)…