Anyone watching the Federal Budget would have seen Treasurer Josh Frydenberg deliver a “high-spending, Australia’s bouncing back” budget with some big-ticket items aimed to drive the country out of its pandemic doldrums. To be honest, there weren’t any real surprises in this budget; it appealed to all. But many pundits agree that the budget missed…
Monash Absolute Investment Company (ASX: MA1) has announced that it is undertaking a restructure from shares held in the listed investment company (LIC) into a newly established exchange-traded managed fund (ETMF), to be known as the Monash Absolute Active Trust (ASX: MAAT). Why is Monash doing this? The move from LIC to ETMF will mark…
Wilson Asset Management’s founder Geoff Wilson is gearing-up for a new $225 million listed investment company (LIC) called WAM Strategic Value Limited (ASX: WAR). The listing price will be $1.25 a share. According to the prospectus, plans are to issue between 13.2 million shares and 180 million shares, depending on demand. The first $125 million would…
Martin Currie, the active equity specialist investment manager of Franklin Templeton, says “as the global economy returns to growth, investors looking to catch the growth wave should be looking to emerging markets.” Alastair Reynolds, Portfolio Manager of the Legg Mason Martin Currie Emerging Markets Fund, agrees and says “Take one example. In 2021, the global…
It has been a wacky year so far. Stocks that did well during Covid-19, dubbed the “Covid-winners” such as electronics and homeware retailers Kogan (ASX: KGN) and Afterpay (ASX: APT), have been absolutely smashed, losing 44% and 30% in the last three months respectively. Kogan last week announced a profit warning: because it failed to…
Bitcoin, together with all the major cryptocurrencies, is taking a major beating this morning, after China came out and reiterated that “digital tokens cannot be used as a form of payment,” effectively banning the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is now at its lowest level since early February, and Ethereum has lost more than 7%, with both cryptocurrencies…
Put simply, Esports is computer gaming at its highest level. It’s playing games against other people at a professional level, not gambling. Yes, there is such a thing. And they draw big crowds at huge arenas with contestants winning huge sums of money as prizes. In the same way that football and cricket players are…
It was roughly 10-years ago now, that Nick Griffin, Chief Investment Officer at Munro Partners, marched into our Melbourne office and gave a presentation on how a Bookstore would one day turn into a Superstore. We thought he was crazy. Remember when Amazon sold only books? It’s hard to imagine that it was that same…
It’s mid-May 2021, hopes are swelling that the pandemic may soon be behind us as vaccines are distributed around the globe, and inflation fears are rising as investors look to some form of normality. What investors may find is that it is becoming tougher to generate similar double-digit returns that we saw last year in…
2020 was an interesting year. Horrific bushfires, a pandemic followed by months in lockdown and a recession, just to top it off. But amid all the chaos, the economy staged a remarkable recovery opening up an opportunity for a gig economy to flourish. Coronavirus brought forward digitisation and working autonomously. This meant employers and employees…
