Currency, Crypto and ICO Articles

As the world adjusts to the knock-on effects of Trump’s new tariffs, currency markets are playing an increasingly pivotal role in driving portfolio outcomes. Whilst currency exposure is often an after-thought for Australian investors, it can be a powerful lever for both risk management and performance enhancement. In short, now’s the time to ensure currency is your portfolio’s friend rather than its foe…

Alternative investments have done what alternative music did in the 90s: become so mainstream that their name doesn’t apply any more. They are no longer reserved for institutional investors and the wealthiest of the wealthy. Alternatives have become a staple component of most high net worth individuals’ portfolios, and are increasingly showing up in mass market portfolios. We investigate the sector’s growth drivers for a steer as to what’s coming…

As the US dollar continues its inexorable rise, the Aussie dollar has been left in its wake over the past four months. Whilst that’s bad news if you want to travel to the US, it’s good news for investors who are positioned to benefit…

Have you ever thought you were aware of all the potential market-moving macro developments, only to be surprised by a left-field occurrence which you didn’t realise was a game-changer for the global and Australian markets?

Are you considering diving into tokenised investments, but having reservations about their connection to blockchain—the technology that underpins all cryptocurrencies? Rest assured, you're not the only one. Since scaling meteoric highs in 2021, cryptocurrencies have been weathering a period of price volatility, putting some investors off investing in anything blockchain related.

The Reserve Bank of Australia is running a pilot to explore retail use cases for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) — a digital Aussie dollar or e-dollar, which could be held digitally like cryptocurrencies. This is not the first time CBDC is being tested for real-world use by the RBA. It has carried out two pilots in the last two years to test tokenised CBDC for the wholesale market and cross-border payments.

If we’re going to talk about cryptocurrencies, let’s start with how many of them exist. And that’s not easy to answer. In the often murky world of digital assets, even establishing the number of currencies is problematic. Depending on the source, in June 2022, somewhere between 2,800 and 19,000 had been created.