InvestNow has made it easy and cheap for New Zealanders to get to their investment destinations via a huge range of managed funds

But it doesn’t map out the route for them.

“And that’s because we started with the premise that most InvestNow clients would probably be experienced, self-directed investors – or even advisers,” InvestNow founder, Anthony Edmonds says.

However, Edmonds says a surprising number of novice investors have signed up to InvestNow with many of them searching for further guidance on how to build a diversified portfolio of funds.

“Clearly, InvestNow isn’t licensed […]

Take the mid 1970s, for example, when the NZ dollar out-flew the US greenback – the big bird of global currencies – by about 50 per cent.

But the days when NZ$1 could purchase US$1.50 are long gone. Since that ‘70s high-point, the Kiwi has plummeted back to earth hitting a low of about US40 cents early this century.

More recently the Kiwi has been flapping around erratically in a broad range of between US50 cents and over US80 cents.

The bizarre, unpredictable flight pattern […]

Property is the foundation of wealth for most New Zealanders. 

According to the latest data from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ), the value of all the country’s houses now surpasses $1 trillion (albeit with about a quarter of that tied up in debt).

KiwiSaver, by comparison, is getting on to about $50 billion – or 5 per cent of the residential property market.

Yet despite the national obsession with houses prices, relatively few Kiwis could claim to be ‘property investors’: most of […]

Let’s not kid ourselves, investment markets are chaotic, noisy and self-centred – just like children.

Over the long term, though, markets settle down into pattern-like behaviour that rewards the patient investor in proportion to risk. (Disclaimer: this argument cannot be applied to children under 18.)

Of course, in the midst of a market hissy-fit it’s a little more difficult to remember that this will all be worth it one day. And, for the first time in many years, markets are testing investor tolerance in 2018 with a series of public tantrums.

In February, […]

InvestNow clients know what they want. But why do they want it?

“That’s what we want to know,” says Mike Heath, InvestNow general manager, “so we asked them.”

Heath says the InvestNow survey sent out earlier this month, yielding over 300 responses, found the platform’s clients are strategically-focused investors.

Excluding performance, about 75 per cent of respondents ranked the overall investment approach as important when selecting a fund manager. Investment team experience also ranked highly (60 per cent) in determining fund manager choice, he says.

“Those […]

And the award for the best-performing asset class for the 10-year period ending June 2017 goes to (wait for the drum roll)…

GLOBAL BONDS!

A shock result perhaps, but this is no envelope malfunction à la La La Land.

According to Auckland-based consulting firm Melville Jessup Weaver (MJW), offshore bonds were the place to be for NZ investors from the onset of the global financial crisis (GFC) in September 2008 until almost exactly a decade later.

The MJW September 2017 quarter NZ investment survey, which plotted the performance of the five main asset classes […]