Investor Insights

With Australian retail, housing and car sales in the doldrums, an election likely to cause business nervousness and lack of new investment, (which in turn keeps wage growth low), where can investors find opportunities? Exclusive Content This is exclusive content to subscribers on rogermontgomery. com. View the full article via your subscription or sign up for access.

We are often asked to explain how we manage the cash weighting, and the most recent market pullback at the end of 2018 provides a useful example to illustrate our approach to managing cash. Most readers will be familiar with the investment philosophy that drives The Montgomery Fund.

Over the past few weeks we have had the pleasure of meeting with clients and friends of the firm around Australia and New Zealand. The turbulent and challenging final quarter of last year was of great interest to many, despite, or perhaps because, of the quick rebound in stock markets in the first couple months of this year.

On Wednesday, New Zealand online goods trading and classifieds platform TradeMe will hold an extraordinary general meeting so that shareholders can vote on the proposed acquisition of the company by one of the private equity funds of Apax Partners for NZ$6. 45 per share.

We have recently been asked about the Australian currency from several of our investors, and while it’s impossible to predict the future, do we foresee continued pressure on the Aussie dollar against the US dollar over the next 6 – 12 months?

We received the following feedback from an investor this week: It’s a mystery to me how MOGL is priced, the dynamics on the share price seem to defy the market. So we thought we would give you some more information on this.

  In this week’s video insight Tim takes a look at Telstra’s half-year results. Revenue, earnings and cash flow all broadly lined up with expectations so there weren’t many surprises. Although since we last looked at Telstra there have been some interesting developments. The Montgomery Funds own shares in Telstra.

At the end of January, the market took a sledgehammer to the share price of Challenger (ASX:CGF) following a trading update. Clearly, many investors did not like what they saw. But was the update really that bad?   Exclusive Content This is exclusive content to subscribers on rogermontgomery. com.

As regular readers will know only too well, one of my pet peeves in investment markets is a lack of understanding of the role played by chance. A further rant on this topic follows. The issue – in a nutshell – is this: The performance of any risky investment strategy will be some combination of merit and luck.

Most investors have an intuitive sense of the benefits of diversification: it’s easy to see how having all your eggs in one figurative basket could end very badly if the chosen basket were to hit the rocks at some point and most people are more comfortable spreading things around a bit to achieve more consistent and predictable results.