Blog

Personality goes a long way…to becoming a better investor Oct 09, 2019

When it comes to investing the dominant line of thought is that most people are cool, rational investors, and markets move accordingly.

In the real world, we all have our own underlying motivations and fears, and we tend to make irrational decisions that reflect our own personalities, emotions,...

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8 timeless investment principles you can use in any asset class Oct 08, 2019

Fads will always come and go in investing as market cycles unfold in ever-changing ways.

Sometimes buy-and-hold investing will be very popular, for example; in other decades it will drift back out of favour as secular bear markets take hold, and as investors lose faith in markets delivering...

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This is how to optimise the use of your borrowing capacity Oct 05, 2019

The amount of mortgage debt that you can carry these days is likely to be constrained to an approximate ratio of your total income.

Given that this is now the case, it’s more important than ever to optimise the use of your borrowing capacity rather than wasting any of it with dud assets.

...

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This is where the BIG infrastructure spend will go Oct 05, 2019

Australia’s population is forecast to growth to around 41.5 million by 2061.

If the present rate of growth is sustained, then we’ll get there sooner still.

The share of Aussies living in the capital cities is projected to rise relentlessly until that time, up from about half to nearly...

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This is why you should raise your financial thermostat Oct 04, 2019

There’s a very simple reason that raising your ‘financial thermostat’ is important.

And that’s because, if you don’t, any financial successes or windfalls that come your way will most likely be squandered.

It sounds harsh; but it’s true.

I’m pretty sure...

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This is how to beat the inner impostor Oct 03, 2019

The impostor phenomenon or impostor syndrome is a persistent internalised fear of being ‘found out’ or one’s life achievements being exposed as a fraud.

The condition was first recognised in the 1970s, and encapsulated how common it can be for those exhibiting the syndrome to...

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This is how to jump off the hedonic treadmill Oct 02, 2019

The concept of the hedonic treadmill refers to the tendency of people to revert back to a relatively stable level of happiness over time.

And that’s in spite of the good and bad fortunes we will inevitably experience along the way.

You might think of it more as a thermostat than a...

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This is why you should think beyond borders Oct 01, 2019

In years gone by many of us invested predominantly in our own back yard (almost literally so in some cases!).

It made sense at the time.

But today it has become considerably easier to access international markets, so it doesn’t necessarily make sense to have the same home bias that once...

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