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24 December 2024
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Key lessons include expensive stocks can always get more expensive, Bitcoin is our tulip mania, follow the smart money, the young are coming with pitchforks on housing, and the importance of staying invested.
What is the X-factor - the largely unexpected influence that wasn’t thought about when the year began but came from left field to have powerful effects on investment returns - for 2024? It's time to select the winner.
An Australian anthropologist studying Japanese seniors has come to a counter-intuitive conclusion to what makes for a great retirement: she suggests the seeds may be found in how we approach our working years.
The harsh reality is that most women retire with significantly less superannuation than men. There are many reasons for the gender super gap and here are some possible solutions to fix the long-running issue.
Given the amount of money in super, it’s not surprising that there is a lot of focus on risk. SMSFs are often portrayed as the riskier option for the community as a whole, but does that tell the full story?
With plans to retire next year, Mercer's David Knox looks back at the global pension index he helped create, the key trends and developments since inception, and what Australia can to do to get better.
The world and Australia’s retirement landscape have changed a lot since 2020. If the RIC is to achieve its goals, a wider spread of responsibility and a rethink across all five pillars of retirement planning are needed.
While the performance of the largest super funds has been admirable, they’ve become so big that it will make it difficult for them to outperform their benchmarks in future. It will be important for you to pick your fund wisely.
ASFA provides a key guide for how much you will need to live on in retirement. Unfortunately it has many deficiencies, and the averages don't tell the full story of the growing gender superannuation gap.
Most Australians don’t realise they are being charged up to six different types of fees on their superannuation. These fees can be opaque and hard to compare across different funds and investment options.
The concept of an 'equity risk premium' has driven asset allocation decisions for decades. A revamped study suggests it was a relatively short-lived phenomenon rather than the mainstay many thought.
A new survey suggests that most people aged 50 or over don't intend to stop work completely when they reach retirement age. And a significant proportion of those who delay retirement do so for non-financial reasons.
It’s with heavy hearts that we announce Firstlinks’ co-founder and former Managing Editor, Graham Hand, has died aged 66. Graham was a legendary figure in the finance industry and here are three tributes to him.
Last year, I wrote an article suggesting returns from ASX stocks would trample those from housing over the next decade. One year later, this is an update on how that forecast is going and what's changed since.
Australia is in the early throes of an intergenerational wealth transfer worth an estimated $3.5 trillion. Here's a case study highlighting some of the challenges with transferring wealth between generations.
The Future Fund's original purpose was to meet the unfunded liabilities of Commonwealth defined benefit schemes. These liabilities have ballooned to an estimated $290 billion and taxpayers continue to be treated like fools.
The Big Four banks have had an extraordinary run and it’s left income investors with a conundrum: to stick with them even though they now offer relatively low dividend yields and limited growth prospects or to look elsewhere.