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ABE Weekly 06/09/2020 Market Update   “Be so good they can’t ignore you” - Steve Martin  The new world order of Government control and Central Bank intervention continues across the markets! The FT reported this week that FX is now becoming the new playground for bond traders given central banks have continued selling free puts, strongly reducing trading opportunities in fixed-income markets. As we all remember, bond markets went into meltdown [...]

ABE Weekly 09/09/2020 Market Update   A wise man once said “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift that’s why they call it the present” Well, despite the push back from manyeconomists, the prospect of negative interest rates in Australia is drawing all the closer. Bloomberg reported recently in a survey of 11 economists that 7 are expecting the RBA to boost bond [...]

ABE Weekly 02/09/2020 Market Update   The big global headline this past week was the annual US Fed meeting in Jackson Hole where the future of US monetary policy was outlined. That said, they didn’t really say anything the markets didn’t already know namely low rates to remain for the foreseeable future and an allowance of higher inflation – which further strengthened the view that Central Bankers around [...]

ABE Weekly 19/08/2020 Market Update      Bank term deposits are for many investors close to retirement traditionally their primary source of income and recent statistic show that Australian household deposits are now over $1 trillion¹. They are of course particularly popular in these uncertain times because they offer savers less risk and volatility than many other investments. However, at rates of 1% or less they are hardly appealing and are forcing investors to [...]

ABE Weekly 12/08/2020 Market Update   It was a challenging week following the massive explosion in Beirut - our thoughts go out to all those affected. The pandemic situation globally is still far from over but closer to home what’s happening in Melbourne has the rest of the country on high alert. A second nationwide lockdown would really hurt the domestic economy, but we have [...]

ABE Weekly 05/08/2020 Market Update   So probably no surprise that the RBA kept rates unchanged at 0.25% - there is still a school of thought that suggests rates may turn negative - can you imagine being paid to borrow money and having to pay the bank to save. You can feel the frustration in the air as people really start [...]

ABE Weekly 29/07/2020 Market Update   It has been another interesting week in financial markets where despite continuing global increases in COVID cases, risk assets continue to push higher with the US$ gold price increasing strongly towards US$2,000/oz on the back of more upcoming global money printing and a weakening US$. One example of this of course was the recent successful European agreement on a massive Euro1.8 trillion stimulus package. [...]

ABE Weekly 22/07/2020 Market Update     It’s starting to feel a little like groundhog-day unfortunately. Like Denis Denuto said in “The Castle”, it’s all about the Fed, it’s about COVID, well it’s just about the Fed, oh and maybe China. It seems the Fed has the whole world wrapped around its finger. If the Fed sneezes, we all catch a cold, perhaps not the best analogy [...]

ABE Weekly 15/07/2020 Market Update     The big news once again belonged to the second or third wave of renewed COVID-19 outbreak with Melbourne’s renewed lockdown costing an estimate $1bn per day. Westpac’s Bill Evans estimated a further 0.2 percentage point hit for overall growth this year. ‘‘We have slightly lowered our annual forecast for 2020 from a contraction [...]