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3 July 2025
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With an election due by 17 May, we are effectively in campaign mode with the Government announcing numerous spending promises since January and the Coalition often matching them. Here's what the election means for investors.
The return of Donald Trump to the US presidency brings the prospect of more US tax cuts and deregulation, but also more tariff hikes, trade wars and policy uncertainty. Here's what it means for markets going forward.
Absent much higher interest rates and or unemployment, a house price crash in Australia looks unlikely. However, a failure to boost affordability risks a further slide in home ownership and rising inequality.
The nine lessons include there is always a cycle, the crowd gets it wrong at extremes, what you pay for an investment matters a lot, markets don’t learn, and you need to know yourself to be a good investor.
Despite being richer, surveyed measures of happiness have been flat to falling in Australia. Some suggest we should focus less on GDP and more on broader measures of wellbeing, though there are pros and cons to that approach.
News nowadays seems to have become even more negative with constant stories of disasters, conflict, wrongdoing, grievance and loss. These risks can’t be ignored yet the history of investing suggests that pessimism doesn’t pay.
With Div. 296 looming, is there a smarter way to tax superannuation? This proposes a fairer, income-linked alternative that respects compounding, ensures predictability, and avoids taxing unrealised capital gains.
An ANU study has found that families with at least one super balance over $3 million have average wealth exceeding $19 million - suggesting most are well placed to absorb taxes on unrealised capital gains.
SMSFs have managed to match, or even outperform, larger super funds despite adopting more conservative investment strategies. This looks at how they've done it - and the potential policy implications.
Stockland’s development chief discusses supply constraints, government initiatives and the impact of Japanese-owned homebuilders on the industry. He also talks of green shoots in a troubled property market.
As the US debt ceiling looms, the usual warnings about a potential crash in bond and equity markets have started to appear. Investors can take confidence from history but should keep an eye on two main indicators.
US mega-cap tech stocks have dominated recent returns - but is familiarity distorting judgement? Like the Monty Hall problem, investing success often comes from switching when it feels hardest to do so.
How does a strategy built around systematically buying-and-holding a basket of the market's biggest losers perform? It turns out pretty well, so why don't more investors do it?