s&p 500

Investors and advisers have a tendency to extrapolate recent events into the future, and the last six months have shown how dangerous this can be. For those reviewing and building portfolios as the new financial year begins, five key issues should be front of mind.

The benchmark S&P 500 index is characterised by “narrow, concentrated leadership” by a handful of mega-caps, leading to the “optical illusion” of outsized performance by US equities, says private investment manager Neuberger Berman.

With the S&P/500 index down 21% per cent so far in 2022, investors are asking when will the market finally reach a bottom. There’s no definitive answer, but these three charts suggest there is further pain ahead.

GMO has hit back at critics of its bearish seven-year forecasts, saying “great companies with great narratives can still experience price movements that are too great.” GMO compared asset class forecasts from the seven-year period leading up to March 2000 with forecasts from 2014 onwards, noting that asset prices have both grown around 70 per…

The name is synonymous with investing in Australia, yet Magellan Group remains non-existent in many direct share portfolios. Having been founded in 2006, the group under the leadership of Hamish Douglass has grown to manage over $100 billion in assets and deliver profits exceeding $200 million a year. I’ve always struggled to understand the investment…

The Australian stock market has long been known as the place to be for income-loving investors. Why? Because company dividend yields in Australia are amazingly high. The dividend yield for 2021 and 2022 is forecast to be 4%-5% plus franking, compared to cash rates and fixed-interest products yielding below 1%. According to Morningstar, S&P/ASX 200…

The first quarter of 2021 saw renewed confidence in global equity markets, supported by positive developments in the fight against coronavirus together with better-than-expected economic data. Fiscal stimulus and vaccine rollout have far exceeded expectations, causing equity markets to overcome bouts of volatility. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 indices hit new all-time…

Superannuation research house Chant West, part of the Zenith Investment Consulting group, this week published its quarterly performance update on the industry fund sector. Despite the volatility experienced in March, which spanned both bond and equity markets, returns continued to surprise on the upside in March. Chant West’s research seeks to differentiate between the (at…

We recently covered the mechanics of short-selling in our article, ‘how short selling really works’. This followed the huge popularity of the investment strategy amid the Reddit and GameStop saga earlier this year. In this article a number of benefits were raised ranging from the additional liquidity it provided to markets, the transparency it demanded…

The Australian exchange-traded fund (ETF) sector has seen stellar growth in recent years: after finishing 2020 at $94 billion, it likely surpassed $100 billion in assets under management in early 2021. As is the case for many aspects of financial markets, the structure, opportunities and purpose of these funds seem lost on the army of…