Stock prices have been moved more by macro events than by individual outlooks in the current business cycle, but that’s all starting to change, says Andrew Martin, Portfolio Manager at Alphinity Investment Management. As bond prices recently begun to fall, there was divergence among many of the ‘bond-proxies’. One beneficiary of... Show More

Looking for quality and value is so popular that it’s hard to find an edge. Undervalued stocks can stay that way for years on end, and high-quality stocks that have run hard can come to a sudden stop. Andrew Martin, Portfolio Manager at Alphinity Investment Management, says the earnings cycle... Show More

Technological, environmental, and political changes could result in the commodities sector changing significantly in the coming decades. Following our recent discussion of the major commodities and mega-cap miners, we asked our contributors to look into the future and tell us about the commodities that will matter most. Rare earth processing: it’s... Show More

Bruce visited Bunnings in March. This might not seem terribly noteworthy, after all, he does tend to end up there most weekends, but this visit required more time: to the first Bunnings store outside Australia and NZ. Show More

2016 again showed how difficult it is to predict equity market returns over time periods as short as 12 months. After a dramatic fall at the start of the year, the Australian equity market went on to produce its best annual return since 2013 and its fifth consecutive year of... Show More

Johan Carlberg, Lead Portfolio Manager at Alphinity, identifies three key drivers of relative sector performance in the Australian equity market in 2016: 1) the turnaround in commodity prices and resources stocks beginning in February; 2) the rise in bond yields and subsequent underperformance of yield proxy stocks from July; and... Show More

Our Principal and Portfolio Manager, Bruce Smith, recently made a trip to the UK and USA to look for insights into likely future developments for the Australian-listed globally-focused property companies. There were two in which we presently have positions (Goodman Group and Lendlease) and one we don’t presently own but... Show More

In September, I conducted four days of energy-related meetings in Dallas and Houston. The goal was to review current industry conditions and the production outlook for 2017. I met with majors (BP, Shell, BHP), large US shale producers (Range, Anadarko, EOG, Apache), services companies (CBI, Schlumberger, Halliburton), US LNG producers/projects... Show More

The telecommunications sector is made up of a handful of companies but the most substantial is Telstra with a market cap of more than $60 billion. Telstra presently makes up more than 4% of the ASX300 so it has the opportunity to be a meaningful positive or negative contributor to... Show More

The August FY16 reporting season as usual provided winners and losers. While we are likely to do some portfolio adjustments as a result of the new information released with company results, the most important question in coming months will most likely be how to position for a potentially changing macro... Show More