Opinion

You will have heard of the term “Blockchain” being mentioned almost always when speaking about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. The funny thing is; when you ask people “What is a blockchain? Besides being the underlying technology of Bitcoin,” they have no idea what a blockchain is. So, what is Blockchain? Before delving too deep into the…

Magellan’s Chris Wheldon, portfolio manager for the Magellan High-Conviction Strategy, discussed some of the current portfolio holdings, recent portfolio changes and their outlook going forward in a recent update to clients. The strategy, which is all about backing just a few high-quality names, has outperformed its objective return of 10 per cent a year, but…

While there has been much talk about renewed inflation and its harm to portfolios, thanks largely to the US economic recovery, the consensus is this will be transitory. That may be wrong. PIMCO, the world’s largest fixed income manager, believes that there is more risk in the current inflation bogey than the market is anticipating….

Canadian real-assets and infrastructure giant Brookfield Asset Management has launched an indicative, non-binding and conditional proposal to take over Australian energy infrastructure business AusNet Services (ASX:AST). Brookfield’s infrastructure affiliate is looking to acquire the company by way of scheme of arrangement, acquiring all of the issued shares in AusNet at an indicative price of $2.50…

When the going gets tough. COVID-19 has presented sudden and unexpected challenges for most asset classes. Risk assets took an alarming hit but rebounded strongly, while defensive assets were mixed, with bonds performing weakly and cash not worth mentioning. Wherever investors were invested at the time of the shock, they no doubt paid much closer…

Reporting season is over. Impressive earnings and historic earnings beats are just some of the ways to describe it. The rise in earnings was led by the big iron ore producers and the Banks. BHP, RIO and Fortescue Metals (ASX:FMG) all riding on the back of the iron ore boom generating strong free cashflow that…

ANZ has bowed out of the share trading game after offloading some 500k clients to CMC Markets (LON:CMCX), that will migrate over to the CMC Markets platform, with total assets in excess of A$45 billion. The transaction boosts CMC Markets firmly into second place in Australia, just behind Commsec as the largest online broker by…

The Iress Ltd (ASX: IRE) share price has sunk in morning trade after an agreement was unable to be reached with potential acquirer EQT Fund Management. Shares in Iress are currently trading for $12.05, down 11% for the day. What was announced? Iress announced that despite granting an extra 10 days of due diligence, both parties have been…

In a world gone crypto mad, those that didn’t buy during Bitcoin’s early days feel like they’ve missed out. Some buy because they feel ‘FOMO’ and others simply can’t make sense of any of it. Either way, the good news is that there will always be opportunities. You haven’t missed out. What about the 100,000…

In many ways Salesforce.com was ahead of its time. The customer relationship management or CRM provider was just another player in an increasingly popular space except for one key difference. The group was among the first CRMs to be delivered in a web browser, rather than via a downloaded program as was the rage in…

“What we’re seeing is an explosion in the amount of data gathering and measurement and functionality across whole swathes of industries,” says Matthew Reynolds, Capital Group investment director for Australia. “Chips are literally going into every device you can think of – not just the obvious ones, like our phones and computers. It looks like…

Neobank Volt has joined forces with cryptocurrency exchange BTC Markets (BTCM) to offer its banking services to its investors. It is the first partnership of its kind in Australia where a neobank and a cryptocurrency exchange have joined forces. It comes after the traditional Australian banks were accused of “de-banking” cryptocurrency operators, by denying them…