The first generation of behavioural finance described people as "irrational", fooled into cognitive and emotional errors that diminish wealth. The second generation of behavioural finance describes people as "normal" - we use shortcuts and sometimes commit errors on the way to satisfying our wants.

Finology - behavioural FINance and investor psychOLOGY - knowledge and skills substantially enhance practitioners' ability to communicate with clients and manage portfolios more effectively. This Backgrounder seeks to foster a greater understanding of and interest in finology.

Finology is the interesting and unique mix of behavioural finance ("fin") and investor psychology ("ology") as it relates to giving investment advice to individual investors.

US President-elect Biden's appointment of Janet Yellen as the next Secretary of the Treasury is good news for the US and the world. No one is better equipped to deal with today's economic challenges.

The fact is that we don't NEED growth. We need high after-tax returns. High growth at a reasonable price will always be attractive. But so too will no-growth at a high risk-adjusted yield.

Incumbent investment frameworks such as Value, Shorting, Passive and Index Aware strategies are failing. Going forward, successful investors will need to be extremely selective when allocating capital.

Since the early 1980s, developed market government bond yields have broadly been falling, with investors voicing concerns that the asset class offered little or no value. Continually, they have been proven wrong.

Decarbonisation and data growth will dominate every aspect of our lives for decades to come. If your infrastructure manager isn’t leveraging off these themes then you need to find a new one.

As financial markets celebrate the coming vaccine-led boom, the confluence of epidemiological and political aftershocks has pushed us back into a quagmire of heightened economic vulnerability.

Private Equity is becoming a more widely available asset class. However, like any asset class, it has its nuances and risks. A key area of complexity is fees. Some seemingly minor differences in fee structure can make a material difference to total fees paid.

The tech-wreck of the early 2000s was ground zero for the birth of a succession of Australian technology companies that have disrupted markets and established themselves as global leaders.

In the past, ESG considerations were seen as a choice or a preference but, going forward, they are increasingly becoming a necessity in the evaluation of investment opportunities in a whole new world!

Beliefs interact with investors' biases and preferences to ultimately influence their behaviour. Two recent papers highlight the impact of individual investors' beliefs about the future and the impact on portfolio behaviour and composition, as well as market returns.

There is a fundamental inconsistency over the long run between an ever-rising share of US debt in world markets and an ever-falling share of US output in the global economy.

To say a lot has changed since I spoke to you back in February at Markets Summit 2020 is an incredible understatement. Between now and Markets Summit in February 2021, I'm going to be watching three things.

It turns out that 'retiring’ and withdrawing from productive life actually conflicts with our own natural drivers of well-being. The concept of ‘retirement’ is an obsolescent by-product of the industrial era that needs to be retired.

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