If you’ve ever treated yourself to small luxuries when feeling the financial pinch, you might just be part of ‘the lipstick effect’ – and it can apply to both men and women.
Over the past decade, investors have increasingly turned to the Australian private credit market. Between 2015 and 2025, Australia’s private credit market increased at a CAGR of 21% to reach $234.5 billion, of which ASIC estimates that approximately half is real estate-focused.
Private credit, or non-bank lending, is a broad and often misunderstood category. As media scrutiny and regulatory attention continue to increase, it is becoming increasingly important to distinguish between the various segments of the market. The risk and return characteristics can differ significantly across lending strategies, making broad characterisations potentially misleading.
If you took a closer look at your portfolio today, there’s a fair chance you have a high concentration globally in tech stocks – specifically the Magnificent Seven – and domestically in banks and miners.
Australian investors have spent three years facing an expensive global equity market, and a local one too concentrated in banks and miners to share fully in the technology boom.
For the everyday investor, the mechanics of buying or selling units in an ETF are pretty simple. Click to buy, click to sell. It happens almost instantly.
US Treasuries are dominating the headlines for all the wrong reasons. After the US Treasury announced that it will more than double the size of its long-bond buybacks, yields rose rather than fell. In other words, the world’s largest borrower told the market what it wanted, and the market said no.
Here’s an investment truth that not everyone is focused on: when most Australian investors think they are diversifying globally, they are really just buying more US exposure.
If you’ve heard the phrases ‘best of both worlds’, ‘smart indexing’ or ‘intelligent exposure’ in relation to an ETF, it’s highly likely that the ETF uses a smart beta approach to investing.