Late last year, when Harvest was thinking about factors that would drive the investment landscape in 2022, four key themes emerged. Just quickly they were: Monetary & Fiscal Policy (reduced Quantitative Easing and increased Government spending)Inflation (inflation now looking to be more systemic than transitory)Interest rates (now clear the US Federal Reserve will increase US
As you can see from the chart below, the Australian Share market (as measured by the ASX200 Index) peaked back on the 13th of August. Since that time, the market has shown increased volatility (ie more extreme day to day movements) and more or less tracked sideways but with a bit of a downward trend.
Although share markets in the developed world have recovered in recent days (see Chart below), the falls that occurred in the previous few weeks all have a single point of origin: China! Source: Bloomberg Markets The first reason for this is the Government mandated reduction in steel production. This flows on to to
Interest rate announcement - September 2021The RBA last changed the cash rate in November last year, reducing it to an unprecedented low of 0.1%. This was an unprecedented move from the RBA which reveals that, while the economy has begun to bounce back, the path to full recovery from impacts of COVID-19 is likely
Back in our March newsletter we discussed rapidly rising bond yields and how, traditionally, this is seen as a strong signal of imminent inflation. Some commentators at the time also expressed concern that rising bond yields would cause equity markets to fall (this is based on the fact that the discount rate used to
Interest rate announcement - July 2021The RBA last changed the cash rate in November last year, reducing it to an unprecedented low of 0.1%. This was an unprecedented move from the RBA which reveals that, while the economy has begun to bounce back, the path to full recovery from impacts of COVID-19 is likely
Your humble scribe has fielded a few enquiries recently about the merits, or otherwise, of investing in Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. So it’s timely to demystify this cryptic world. Cryptocurrency is a digital payment system that doesn’t rely on banks to verify transactions. It’s a peer-to-peer system that can enable anyone anywhere to send and
Interest rate announcement - June 2021 The RBA last changed the cash rate in November last year, reducing it to an unprecedented low of 0.1%. This was an unprecedented move from the RBA which reveals that, while the economy has begun to bounce back, the path to full recovery from impacts of COVID-19 is
Interest rate announcement - May 2021 The RBA last changed the cash rate in November last year, reducing it to an unprecedented low of 0.1%. This was an unprecedented move from the RBA which reveals that, while the economy has begun to bounce back, the path to full recovery from impacts of COVID-19 is
As expected, markets have continued their steady rise since the pandemic induced downturn bottomed out on March 23 last year. As can be seen in the chart below, the Australian market moved sideways during March as investors rotated out of the high growth tech stocks that had driven most of the strong returns into cyclical
