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21 January 2025
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The Retirement Income Covenant mandates super funds create retirement strategies, but progress has been uneven, leaving retirees underserved. Retirement licensing could enforce standards and improve outcomes.
Retirees want better returns but they have limited appetite to dial up their risk exposure in order to achieve it. Financial advice and protection strategies in portfolios can enhance investment outcomes.
Regulators are insisting that large super funds become more innovative to assist their clients, but what are the traps within businesses that inhibit creativity and fresh solutions?
The future leaders in superannuation will be those who successfully shift from an accumulation-phase focus to a whole-of-life approach, and there are many different ways of getting there.
The development of user-focused tools enabling SMSF members to direct their investments, receive information, make decisions and intuitively reach their own goals is moving ahead quickly.
Looking at the decade ahead, who are the likely winners and losers in the wealth management industry as it adapts to technological innovations, with a particular focus on superannuation? (Plus see related video)
The Centre for International Finance and Regulation (CIFR) recently hosted a conference on the Financial Systems Inquiry, and has just released videos of the sessions with many high profile speakers.
Australia's super industry has confused or complicated the primary purpose of providing for retirement by fostering these five retirement myths. While some are based on truths, others are not worth believing.
Sit through a dozen fund manager presentations and they all start to sound the same. There's been little significant innovation in the managed funds industry in the last 15 years. Why is this and what are the consequences?
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.
The housing market was subdued in 2024, and pessimism abounds as we start the new year. 2025 is likely to be a tale of two halves, with interest rate cuts fuelling a resurgence in buyer demand in the second half of the year.
The renowned investor has penned his first investor letter for 2025 and it’s a ripper. He runs through what bubbles are, which ones he’s experienced, and whether today’s markets qualify as the third major bubble of this century.
This examines the performance of key asset classes and sub-sectors in 2024 and over longer timeframes, and the lessons that can be drawn for constructing an investment portfolio for the next decade.
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.
Check out the most-read Firstlinks articles from 2024. From '16 ASX stocks to buy and hold forever', to 'The best strategy to build income for life', and 'Where baby boomer wealth will end up', there's something for all.