Data Diary

Spent too much of my weekend scraping and reshaping data – all in the cause of stepping aboard the Val Harian holodeck. One (relatively) interesting by-product is the following chart – that attempts to get a sense of the valuation of Australian equities as adjudged by consensus earnings estimates. A green colour has the respective [...]

Caught up with a colleague who has just spent two weeks drinking coffee with portfolio managers around Australia – he is an economist by trade, it’s a perk of the profession. He noted that the only time he could remember fund managers being this bearish was in the depths of the GFC. Now, one of [...]

First, our thoughts are with all those impacted by the Japanese earthquake – the seeming too-common occurrence of disasters does nothing to diminish their import. The world was already awash with rising risks but this new disaster is likely to become a seminal event in changing people’s attitudes to risk. The magnitude and breadth of [...]

And to place the previous post in context, every six months or so, we step back to have a really long term look at the Australian equities market. From the market low in 1884, the market added around 5% per annum – the blue line above illustrates what straight line growth of 5.2% per annum [...]

A colleague in the fresh produce trade remarked at the weekend that exports out of the US have surged over recent months. Typically, US producers sell most of their product to the domestic market, but with the US$ plunging relative to Asia, these guys are finding better prices offshore.  If the Fed’s strategy was to [...]

Australian equities have benefited from two major trends over the last couple of decades (casting aside the credit bubble on the grounds that it hurt).  They are 1) the growth in our compulsory superannuation investment pool and 2) the growth in China’s demand for all things resources.  It’s interesting then to compare and contrast the [...]

Reflecting on the following chart via Pragmatic Capitalism (here) – got to thinking about how the same might apply to Australia: So herewith is the log chart of the All Ordinaries price history since 1875: Now you might argue about the choice of market cycles – I admit to liking the symmetry of ~27 year [...]

Sometime back we suggested that the PE ratio for the equities market was likely to fall relative to recent decades.  Based on some spurious pointing at historical charts, we came up with an expectation that the average PE ratio might be more like 12x (see here).  On our numbers that suggested ‘fair value’ was around [...]

The current selloff has the market staggering.  Unlike previous tick-downs in the rally since March 2009, fear is making a comeback.  Our measures of relative risk appetite have broken out.  It’s reason to tread carefully cause until we get some signs of normalisation, further downside is more likely than not: The evidence that it’s a [...]

Of this much I am certain, Australia’s new Resource Super Profits Tax – the ‘RSPT’ (where are MacBank’s master acronym makers when you need them) – is going to be a bureaucratic nightmare to administer.  Still with the sums involved, I guess we can forgive the government for doubling the size of the ATO. After [...]