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3 September 2023
Even if you could fund a business venture yourself, that doesn't mean you should. I explore why seeking external funding can make sense even when you have the means — touching on expected value, utili…
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2 April 2023
I've always said my crystal ball broke sometime in my late teens or early twenties. But right now, that feels more true than usual. The emergence of AI has me genuinely uncertain about what comes next…
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15 July 2022
In late 2021 Tesla peaked at a $1.23 trillion market cap; Bitcoin at $1.26 trillion. From a narrow view their subsequent drops "destroyed" hundreds of billions in wealth. I think that framing misses s…
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8 July 2022
Hurricane Camille hit in 1969 and narrowly missed New Orleans. When Katrina came in 2005, many who had lived through Camille didn't evacuate — and died. They'd learned the wrong lesson. I worry the qu…
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3 June 2022
Bonds have been performing terribly, yet I still call them defensive assets. Every asset class has bad years; regression to the mean is real; bond losses remain smaller than share losses; and your cap…
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17 September 2021
When it comes to investing, I have a personal rule of thumb: if someone offers a high guaranteed return on an investment, I walk in the other direction. Bonds issued by Governments or reputable instit…
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30 July 2021
Term deposit returns can look dismal next to inflation — but that might still be the best place for your money. It depends on when you'll use it. If you need the money soon, prioritise return OF capit…
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4 June 2021
Every time I work with a client, I make a bald statement of fact. If you invest in growth-oriented investments, there WILL be times when the value of those investments drops. Sometimes significantly.…
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28 May 2021
Investing actively is great. By this, I'm talking about putting your time, energy, talents, knowledge, and expertise into how you invest. On the other hand, investing passively is great too. It really…
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22 January 2021
Asset allocation — how your investments are split up — is really, really, really important. Get it right and you can make plenty of other mistakes and still be fine. Get it wrong and you're choosing b…
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18 September 2020
Finance is important — it wins wars, and it helps allocate capital to where it's most valuable. There are two broad forms of investing: putting money into creating new capability (think Paypal, Tesla,…
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14 August 2020
I've watched loads of videos on knife skills. Turns out, advanced knife skills only really matter if you're a professional chopping the same things over and over. For the rest of us, paying attention…
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7 May 2020
April 2020 was the S&P 500's best month in over 30 years — the same month tens of millions of Americans claimed unemployment. How? The sharemarket isn't the economy, and more importantly it's a predic…
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17 April 2020
For most of my clients I recommend widely-diversified, low-fee index funds. They're steady, sensible, and almost no one gets really rich from them. Investing in a business is one of the few things tha…
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31 March 2020
It's not fun being asset poor and cash poor. It's rarely fun to be asset rich and cash poor either. If you've got cash on hand right now, you're probably feeling better than most. But there are real r…
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27 March 2020
COVID-19 had me questioning a lot of things, including my long-standing devotion to index-based investing. In retrospect it felt like I could have picked the crash — so could I have? Probably not. The…
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7 February 2020
"Past performance is no indication of future performance." If you've looked at any investment product with proper disclosure, you'd be familiar with this refrain. It's a statement that's required by l…
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29 November 2019
When it comes to the things that really matter, focus on what you can control. Checking your KiwiSaver balance every week isn't one of them — and yes, I'm a hypocrite about this when it comes to Trump…
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1 November 2019
Ethical investing sounds simple: invest in line with your values. In practice it's a minefield. What counts as ethical varies wildly from person to person, the labels on funds often don't mean what yo…
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16 August 2019
How would you invest if you were 60 with $5 million and spent $100,000 a year? Some of my clients in this position sit heavily in defensive assets. Others sit 80-90% in growth assets. Both are right —…
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19 July 2019
I don't think markets are efficient. Markets move up and down for all sorts of unpredictable, weird reasons. But they're inefficient in ways we can't predict — and valuing a share means betting on a f…
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14 June 2019
Kiwi personal finance forums are full of smart people endlessly debating which fund or platform is "best". I get frustrated with those debates, because they're operating in shades of good. Get your as…
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3 December 2018
"Past performance is no guarantee of future performance" isn't just compliance-speak. It's especially true for property. A client recently asked whether there's long-run data for NZ residential proper…
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16 September 2018
The most important thing to get right when investing in financial assets is asset allocation. It refers to how your funds are invested across different classes, such as shares and bonds. If you get th…
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14 September 2018
Paying off the mortgage ASAP is usually the smartest move — a guaranteed, tax-free, risk-free return. But I often recommend clients also put some excess income into investments: it builds liquid asset…
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27 August 2018
Simplicity is now cash flow positive, sooner than its founder expected. Even when it wasn't, I was sanguine about recommending it. The underlying assets are highly liquid, and the Public Trust holds t…
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6 August 2018
I'll start with a prediction. At some point in the future, the sharemarket will go down. It might go down in a big way. That's as accurate a prediction as anyone can make — timing and scale are out of…
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16 July 2018
People sometimes tell me they don't want to take any risks with their investments. I have to tell them all investments have risks — even "safe" ones like term deposits and cash under the mattress. For…
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20 May 2018
If the first thing you ask a financial adviser is where they get their research from, you're probably conflating two very different roles. Advisers work with clients; investment managers sit in front…
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8 March 2018
You're lazy sometimes. I know this because you're human. The trick is to use that laziness — or, more charitably, behavioural inertia — as a feature rather than a bug. Set things up once so wealth-bui…
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29 October 2017
For most people, I recommend low-cost, index-based funds — don't try to beat the market, just make sure the market doesn't beat you. But the honest answer is that you *can* get better-than-market retu…
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2 October 2017
People often ask me what investment return they can expect. I wish I could give them a number. I can't. Nor can anyone else — historical outcomes for the exact same portfolio vary wildly depending on…
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23 May 2017
My kids pulled out the Monopoly board recently and it struck me how narrow a view of commerce the game offers — buy property, collect rent, hope for capital gains, win by impoverishing everyone else.…
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12 April 2017
In most of life, the best things go to those who hustle. Spend more, get more. Investing is the inversion: the riches go to those who wait, and performance and fees are inversely related. You’re rewar…
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4 April 2017
For most people, I advocate investing in low-cost passive investments. Warren Buffett is probably a bigger advocate than me. He bet $500,000 that a low-cost S&P 500 index fund would beat a basket of h…
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27 March 2017
If you pick stocks, you aren't playing in a Little League. You're playing against the best full-time professionals in the world — the equivalent of stepping onto a tennis court with Federer, or a rugb…
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24 January 2016
Paul Graham, having sold a startup and become wealthy, started paying attention to how fortunes are actually lost. Not through excessive expenditure — it’s hard to blow a fortune on luxuries without n…
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14 November 2014
A financial planner's job isn't to pick stocks. That's the work of someone at a Bloomberg terminal all day. A planner's focus should be you — your circumstances, goals, risk tolerance, cashflow. Asset…