Investment Articles & Insights

When you are investing for income, you are looking for capital preservation, a level of growth and consistent income. But what if the fund you pick fails to deliver? Worse still, what if your money is lost?

We all know the long list of benefits of investing in ETFs, but the passive fund boom has reached the stage where narratives can sometimes reign supreme. The risk is that the recent wave of ETF launches, particularly in thematic, single-stock, options-enhanced, and actively managed strategies, is partially shaped by investor demand for exposure to recent winners rather than enduring sources of return.

There’s a persistent misconception among investors that portfolio construction is a set-and-forget exercise. But much like physical health, financial fitness depends on consistent, disciplined work. This is because portfolios drift, risks evolve, and market conditions change.

You’ve decided to join more than 1.2 million Australians in managing your own self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF), but where do you start to build your portfolio? Just as with any investment portfolio, you can make it as simple or as complicated as you like, but it needs to align with your investment strategy.

In recent years, shorting has migrated from the realms of professional hedge fund management into reach of individual investors en masse. That’s not necessarily a good thing.

You may think of momentum as a basic strategy that involves buying whatever has gone up most recently. That would be unfair, though.

April confirmed what markets had begun to suspect: the global macro backdrop has changed. Higher geopolitical risk is now structurally entrenched. Markets have quickly adjusted to this unfortunate new reality across all asset classes. Geopolitical risk has reasserted itself as a primary driver of energy prices, inflation expectations, and capital flows. Investors still anchored to the old world of low inflation, cheap money, and frictionless globalisation risk being structurally mispositioned.

By now, most of us have realised that the US-Israel-Iran war will have longer-term consequences beyond recent volatility. It’s accelerating a structural shift in global markets defined by tighter energy supply, more persistent inflation, and the fragmentation of trade and capital flows.