Central banks can’t buy gold fast enough, while gold miners are recovering after a dramatic selloff and Bitcoin, the asset previously regarded as digital gold, is having a miserable year.
Central banks can’t buy gold fast enough, while gold miners are recovering after a dramatic selloff and Bitcoin, the asset previously regarded as digital gold, is having a miserable year.
When Beijing throttled exports of rare-earth magnets in April 2025, carmakers from Detroit to Wolfsburg panicked. Production lines halted. Procurement experts scrambled for stock. What looked like a trade tiff was, in fact, the visible edge of a very deliberate strategy, one that has been unfolding quietly for nearly a decade.
If you’ve noticed a change in the way markets have been functioning in recent years, you’re not wrong. The exponential growth of U.S. money supply, fuelled by decades of deregulation, cheap debt, and increasingly aggressive central bank stimulus has arguably changed the very nature of investing.
Non-bank lending has increasingly become an integral part of Australia’s financial system, serving a much-needed segment of the market. For investors, non-bank lending provides access to loans secured against assets which may generate income – for example, in the case of the asset being property, from the borrower’s mortgage repayments.
Retirement can be a surprisingly rewarding chapter, financially speaking. But only if you have a solid plan in place that covers not only your day-to-day expenses but also safeguards your wealth when the markets get volatile.
Most investors think about demographics as a slow-moving structural force which is useful information, but doesn’t affect short term investment performance. However, over the next decade and beyond, demographics are likely to become a more prominent investment theme.
You may have heard that ASIC is in the final stages of potentially allowing a competing stock exchange into the Australian market, long monopolised by the ASX. The potential new entrant is Cboe Australia, the Australian arm of Cboe Global Markets, a Chicago-based financial trading group. If they do enter the market, it spells change and opportunity for investors…
Ready to be shocked? The bottom half of American households, some 65 million families, now own just 2.5% of total U.S. wealth. And at the other end of the spectrum, the top 1% controls wealth that outstrips the bottom 50% by more than $US40 trillion.
If you follow the news, the world is probably feeling mighty unsafe right now, with geopolitical risks dominating the headlines. Of course, the media thrives on amplifying fear, so for investors the real question isn’t whether the news headlines are dramatic. That’s always the case. It’s whether the real geopolitical risks are material, and how they might affect investors’ portfolios looking forward.
The Australian private credit market has grown rapidly in recent years. Once considered a niche investment strategy, it has become mainstream, attracting capital from a range of sources seeking yield in a low-rate world.
When we picture retirement, most of us already have a rough idea of what’s in our toolkit. How much super do I have? What’s my home or investment property worth? What’s the value of my shares and savings? Will I qualify for the Age Pension? And so on.
A unique characteristic of high-quality, defensive listed infrastructure companies is their sustained investment profile through the economic cycle. With this in mind, we look to secular trends for opportunities to enhance real growth. One such trend is investment in renewable energy, which is sustaining robust growth despite political headwinds and appears positioned for strong ongoing gains.