All Posts Tagged With: "superannuation"

Needless to say, watching (and feeling) your money being eaten alive by a multi-year bear market is not pleasant. In fact it’s the kind of experience that might prompt you to make a change by, say, selling your shares and giving up on the market once and for all.

We said that despite an outlook for the world that was full of de-leveraging and falling asset prices, there is a time and a place to go on the attack. But is now that time and is here that place? And how would you attack anyway? Well, there is certainly a place (albeit small) for speculation in any well-diversified portfolio. But it’s important to remember that Black Swans – statistically improbable according to conventional models, but with very large consequences – don’t always have to be bad things.

Any real recovery would be accompanied by interest rate increases from the Federal Reserve. Instead, the Fed stuck to its guns and butter interest rate. Dan Denning is another step closer to his free beer bet coming off.

But despite that warning, and despite debt far in excess of their incomes, Aussies are STILL spending money like it’s going out of fashion.

Maybe she didn’t support an effective 30% compulsory super contribution after all. Time for some humble pie we thought.

And then we ‘un-thought’ the idea of eating some humble pie.

It seems that rather than coming to the wrong conclusion, instead we made a schoolboy error by quoting the wrong part of the submission.

The market begins the month of August trying to prove that the Great Recession is over and the earnings recovery has begun. On Friday, US GDP data came out and seemed to confirm that just maybe the worst is behind us. According to the cryptic figures, US GDP is shrinking at annualised pace of just 1% – considerably less than the 6.4% from late last year.

If the Senate bill is different than the House bill (and it almost always is, given the different agendas in both bodies and the need for more bribes), the two bills go to “reconciliation.” That’s where a committee made of members from both houses settles on a final compromise version of the two bills and sends them back to their respective bodies to be voted on. Then it gets sent to the President to become the law of the land.

For the superannuation industry, the bigger problem is that the generational bull market in stocks is over. There are still sectors and industries that will do quite well and that fund managers can profit from. But finding them and managing to get capital into them at attractive prices is going to be a lot harder. People might actually have to work for a living and even think, rather than just clipping tickets and surfing a bull market higher…