The Financial Services Industry: Only serving themselves?
John Kay’s critique of the industry, Other People’s Money, looks at the need for reform to avoid another crisis. John Kay is an economist with both academic and corporate experience, and a columnist for the Financial Times. In his latest book, Other People’s Money (R452, Takealot.com http://www.takealot.com/other-people-s-money/PLID34890927), Kay positions himself as a critic of the current incarnation of the financial services industry, suggesting that its usefulness to society has failed to keep pace with its size and the scope of its involvement in the economy. The financial sector serves society and the economy in (at least) four ways. The payments system enables businesses and individuals to pay and receive wages and to buy goods and services. The sector also enables eff
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Banks: Long-term value outweighs the risks
Despite the meaningful risks looming over South Africa’s banking sector, the current combination of attractive dividend yields and relatively cheap valuations presents attractive prospective medium-term returns for investors in local bank shares, despite fairly muted earnings growth expectations in the low- to mid-single digits, according to Craig Butters, equity portfolio manager and banking sector analyst at Prudential Investment Managers. Banking stocks fell sharply in December 2015 on the back of the large jump in bond yields in reaction to the surprise firing of Finance Minister Nene, to levels well below their historic valuations. They have remained under pressure due to the increased risk of a downgrade of South Africa’s sovereign foreign currency credit rating to non-investm
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The best unit trusts to suit your needs
Investment philosophy and ethics There is no one-size-fits-all option when it comes to unit trusts, as we all have different personalities and investment goals. Start by looking at the top asset managers in your country with excellent reputations. In South Africa, we recommend looking at Allan Gray, Coronation, Prudential and Investec to get you started. Then do some research on each company’s investment philosophy (how they buy and sell asset classes or shares to make you money) and see if you agree with their philosophy or not. After all, there's no point in investing in companies when you don’t believe in their ethics or investment philosophy. Age is important The younger you are, the more risk you are able to take when selecting a unit trust. The reason for thi
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Become an Investment Specialist Today!
Yes you can become an investment specialist today! After going through Asset Classes last week, there is just one quick thing we need to look at before we move on to investing into Unit Trusts. I touched on Asset Allocation briefly in the last post, so in this post I will go through Asset Allocation in a little more detail so that you can build a better understanding and knowledge base. Asset Allocation: Asset Allocation is how you divide your investments between the Asset Classes. So it is deciding how much cash, bonds, property and equity you want in your investment. Asset Allocation is, in my opinion, one of the most important decisions you make when it comes to investing and achieving your investment goals. Before you go ahead and select which bonds, equity etc you want
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Introduction to Investing
What is investing all about? With this post let’s go right back to the very beginning of the ABC, DOE RAY ME of investing and let’s chat about what Investing is all about. When we invest money, what our main objective is, is to buy something that you believe will give you a bigger return than if you had to keep your hard earned money in your bank account or in many cases under your pillow. Let’s look at Investment return and the possible risk linked to that. When we talk about investment return what we’re talking about is the possible profit that you can make in buying something at a certain price and then hopefully selling it later at a higher price. The profit that you earn on the investment is known as the return on the investment. Have you ever heard of the phrase, h
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Investment Return
How Do Investments Earn Return / Profit? When you start to invest, the money that you will invest is called capital. On the other hand the objects that you own, like a house, shares and Unit Trusts are what we call assets. So the money that you have is capital and the objects that you own are assets. If the price of your assets increase over the period that you own them, your capital that you have invested into the assets will then also increase. You could also get certain assets, (that I call bounce assets) that not only grow in value, but also produce an income stream during the growth phase. The income stream could be means of interest payments or dividend payments if the companies perform well over a particular period. If you combine the capital growth and the income that you
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Understanding the Balance Between Risk and Return
Understanding the Balancing Between Risk and Return Video Player Certain asset classes have the potential to deliver a great return/profit over a number of years; however the same asset classes also have the potential volatile returns over the short term, depending on how the asset classes respond to what is going on in the economy at any given time. So the high risk asset classes like equity’s are investments that you would ideally like to invest in over a longer period of time. On the other hand you can also get certain asset classes that are less risky, but the no risk no reward phrase comes into the equation on these asset classes, as the returns are much lower. A typical asset class that will fall into this bracket would be cash/money market.
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Investment Risk
What is the risk of losing your hard-earned money? Well in life there are no true guarantees, so when you enter into any form of investment you need to understand that you can do your best to calculate the risk and to make the best informed decision in entering into the investment or not. But at the end of the day there are certain uncertainties that can arise and change the picture completely. This is why, in my opinion; you want to have the experts in control of the situation, if it ever does arise. So when you enter into an investment you have to come to terms with the fact that there is a certain amount of risk involved, and each investment will have a different level of risk attached to it. However keep in mind the old phrase that if it sounds too good to be true, it most prob
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