This one has been around for a while now. We have seen how the sub-prime lending crisis brought the US and European banking systems to their knees. The story goes that the Australian banking system is also a time bomb waiting to happen...

It's with considerable trepidation that I take on the world's central bankers who are protecting the world against the evils of deflation...

Despite an appalling 2008, the hedge fund industry spin continues, with managers comparing hedge fund returns to equity market performance. But what if we make a sensible comparison – against diversified funds? With the tide now out, the myths are laid bare...

Risk profiling is generally agreed to be an important part of the financial planning process – and, yet, it is something that generates large measures of skepticism, controversy and, from time to time, attention from the regulators. Ensuring a portfolio is within the bounds of both a client's risk tolerance and risk capacity is critical - just getting one right is not good enough...

Credit failure season is upon us. Most recently, subprime mortgages, Bridgecorp and Basis Capital have been the stars of the show. Before them, it was Westpoint. Like cockroaches, you can be sure that for every one that rears it's head, there are dozens more lurking just out of sight. The critical issue is not whether advisers avoid credit failure, but how they manage it...

If you invest even a small proportion of your portfolios in non-Investment Grade fixed income securities, you will from time to time experience a default – it’s an issue of when (and how much), rather than if. This session shows you a simple method to better manage credit risk in your portfolios...

The meltdown of Basis Capital has highlighted the need for much greater clarity of communication from research houses – particularly when it comes to describing product risk. With the benefit of hindsight, it is fun to look back and see what the research houses were saying about the risk of the Basis Capital Yield fund before the event. We see nothing on the two pieces of information that really matter...

Many planners still use long term historical returns to estimate future market returns on the basis that, if the historical period is long enough, everything smoothes out. This is pure bunk. In order to demonstrate this as conclusively as possible, we illustrate the impact of using 20 year historical returns as forecasts for the subsequent decade across six major equity markets over the past 107 years...

Near the end of each decade, a bubble seems to emerge in financial markets...

The last six weeks, the markets have been something of a rollercoaster ride. Because the farrelly’s forecast methodology changes as markets go up and down, so too have the forecasts been jumping up and down. Now, it goes without saying that the last thing that you want to be doing is using a strategy that flip flops from one extreme to another in the space of a few weeks. So what do we do? Difficult or not, strategies are still required...

Not all rules of thumb make sense, and one of the sillier ones in this industry is the way it labels assets as either growth or income…

I'm not sure we got an answer to the question "Should international equities be actively or passively managed?" - at the last Portfolio Construction Forum Researchers' Roundtable meeting of 2003...

When all was said and done, five key points came through clearly from the first topic - how much to international equities in 2004? - at the last Researchers' Roundtable meeting of 2003...