Industry Super Fund, AustralianSuper is very noisy in the press regularly bagging SMSFs, talking up their returns and results, and highlighting the amount of funds they have under management. Their Balanced Fund, which has more than $65 billion under management, returned 10.86% for the 2014-15 financial year after fees and taxes. The average annual return for…

Despite Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) being labelled as one of the greatest innovations in global markets, their use and growth in the Australian market has been much slower than in other countries. Only now is this, in my opinion, game-changing instrument beginning to come to the attention of Australian investors. As at December 2014, there…

Back on 12th March, I looked at introducing timing techniques to actively manage a portfolio of ETF’s rather than simply using a buy and hold approach. The 5 ETF’s included in the basket were the Mexican Bolsa, German DAX, NASDAQ 100, S&P600 Small Cap Index and NASDAQ Biotechnology Sector (ETF codes are EWW, EWG, QQQ,…

According to data published by the Australian Superannuation regulator APRA, ‘most’ Australian superfunds showed some fairly healthy returns for the March quarter of this year. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) began publishing quarterly performance data last year on the more than 1000 MySuper products available to Australian workers. According to APRA, the best performing…

Gary Stone was recently interviewed by Better System Trader on why it is important to time the market – not for the best days but to ensure you are out for the worst days. You can listen to the podcast which includes: The importance of preparation before investing or trading in the share market. The…

Over the last few months you may have read my blogs on ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds). In my view, ETFs have and will continue to revolutionise how everyday investors invest as more and more become aware of the huge advantages of index investing via ETFs. I’m not alone in this view. The Oracle of Omaha,…

This was the front page of the AFR WEEKEND last weekend on 2nd May. Whilst this attention grabbing headline is a very important question, I think that a far more important question that needs to be asked by the vast majority of Australian investors is “How can I maximise my chances of reaching the “new…

On Thursday 23 April, Gary Stone appeared on Peter Switzer’s TV Show on the Sky Business Channel 602. A 10 minute recording can be watched of this show where Gary and Peter discuss: The bullish local market attempt to breach 6000 for a fourth time. The attractiveness of the oversold Brazilian market and the opportunity…

In last week’s post I looked at how the declining value of the Euro currency had negatively impacted on the value of the EWG ETF despite the fact that the underlying DAX Index had risen significantly since the middle of October last year. This week, we will look at the inverse situation, where a declining…