The mechanics of solving Europe's crisis are in place. The US's fiscal position is considerably worse and holds greater uncertainty...

The Financial Markets Authority has been busy. In the last month, it has announced the Trans-Tasman mutual recognition of financial advisers as well as releasing a guidance note on giving KiwiSaver advice. financialalert spoke with advisers, researchers and industry associations about what the changes mean to advisers...

This heading is THE question being asked within the depths of the Financial Markets Authority's guidance note on the Sale and Distribution of KiwiSaver. And, it does appear that RFAs may be able to advise those going into KiwiSaver after all...

Politics are messy. Reforms have stalled. The economy is slowing. Some question whether India's economic miracle is over.

Is gold a good means of diversification? Is it a hedge against inflation and currency depreciation? Or is the last decade an anomaly?

Woody is one of the world's leading economic thinkers. He view is that China is the worst case of currency manipulation in history.

While we tend to focus on sharp market crashes, sudden declines that recover quickly within just a year or few are not necessarily problematic. What is far more destructive are extended periods of mediocre returns...

Helping clients understand portfolio risk is one of the most difficult challenges faced by advisers. Following on from my previous blog in which I looked at how often a portfolio might be falling, recovering and rising, now we turn to showing investors how often and over what periods falls might occur, how deep they might be, and how long the portfolio might take to recover...

TNP launches new professional association; guidance note for adviser remuneration disclosure; check business interruption cover; Asia-Pacific ahead in ESG ratings; site offers director of parliament and government agencies; Auckland Council ratings upgraded...

Investors need to major in three subjects to get asset allocation right in 2012 - plus, they would do well to study psychology.

We might wish our clients’ investment journeys will invariably be beautiful experiences - but we know that things will turn ugly from time to time. How do we prepare our clients for the ugly times? What do they need to know?

Most emerging countries were able to counter an economic slowdown in developed countries in 2008-09. Can this scenario be repeated?

We asked the fund research houses - how much (if any) of an international equities allocation should be hedged, assuming a 10-year investment timeframe?

Fueling fears of a China bubble is the rapid rise in prices of its residential property market in many of its key cities. Structurally, however, while residential house prices may be vulnerable near term, over the long term, the uptrend would appear to be underpinned...

The tectonic plates of the Arab world have ruptured and the geopolitical fault lines that have shaped and defined the region for sixty years have shifted inexorably. What does that mean for investing?

The Summer Seminar 2011 debated the following three carefully selected topics, in a Socratic learning environment: Forever blowing bubbles; Avoiding avoidable mistakes; and, Agency risk and portfolio construction...

The business, economic and investment landscape of the 21st century will be defined by the Big Rapidly Industrialising Countries, in particular Brazil, Rusia, India and China. Delegates left this Emerging Markets Masterclass with a deeper understanding of the global emerging markets and their growing role in investment portfolios - as well as hearing from the BRIC Ambassadors to Australia on their first joint appearance...

The 7th annual Portfolio Construction Forum took place in what for many professionals would be considered the eye of a financial hurricane. The news over the prior 12 months had been awful in virtually every domestic financial sector, and the world was fighting through a global credit crisis that had replaced the days of easy money and leverage with a liquidity crisis and flight to quality that threatened international returns for the next half-decade. Delegates arrived with a single mission: to deconstruct the root causes of the domestic and global meltdown, and figure out how to help their clients ride out the storm...