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Financial Literacy Investing

A Beginner’s Guide To Stock Valuation

How do you work out which stocks represent sensible long-term investments? We dive into the world of valuing potential investments on the stock market.

With more than 2,200 listings on the ASX, how do you choose a single stock to invest in?

For many of us — especially those of us who hunt for value over the long term — the process begins with valuing a company whose shares trade on the stock market.

It won’t come as a surprise that there are many ways to go about valuing a company.

We all approach investing and building wealth in our own way.

Just as some investors look for high potential growth stocks that could explode hundreds of percent higher in a short time…

And others prefer to buy and hold large, relatively stable stocks for a long time…

There’s a variety of options available to you as you evaluate the value of a potential investment.

Here, we explain a few of the main ones.

First, though…

What Does It Mean To Value A
Stock — And Why Should You Do It?

When you buy shares, you own a fraction of the company whose stock you acquire.

This means that before you buy shares in it, it makes sense that you understand the business you’re buying into.

This, in turn, means you need to delve into the business’s finances.

The phrase ‘due diligence’ refers to this process.

If you don’t know what you’re buying into, then you’re not investing.

You’re gambling.

Your due diligence — the necessary research, in other words — is what differentiates a bet from an investment (which is still a risk, of course, but a calculated one).

Determining a business’s financial health allows you to understand whether or not its share price accurately reflects the company’s value.

The stock market is seldom a perfect reflection of the value of the companies trading shares on it.

After all, everyone in the market is looking for opportunities to make money by speculating on the future.

This means that a company’s shares can easily trade below or above the ‘true’ value of the business they represent.

This is where valuing a stock gets interesting.

Popular Ways Of Valuing A Stock

The simplest measure investors use when trying to get a handle on a stock’s value is the price to earnings ratio, or P/E ratio.

The P/E ratio is the current share price divided by what the company earned for every share over the past year.

Generally speaking, the higher the P/E ratio, the more overvalued you might say a company’s shares are.

A lower P/E, on the other hand, might indicate the market undervalues the shares relative to the overall health of the business.

Other common ways to approach valuation include:

Cash flow: While a stock might not be getting much love from investors and trading cheap, you might fight when you dig into their financials that the business has a strong cash flow (that they make a good return on their spending, in other words). This could be an indicator that the share price will rise higher as the market notices the business making more money in the future.

Debt ratio: Work out how much money the businesses owes to others. Low debt, generally speaking, is a positive sign that a company is healthy and its stock price may rise in the future.

Assets/liabilities: Another helpful ratio to deploy in valuation research is assets/liabilities. This is exactly what is sounds like. Divide the value of the company’s assets by the value of its liabilities. The higher the ratio, the better.

Using Navexa’s Built-In Value Calculator

There are, as they say, many ways to skin a cat.

When it comes to valuing a stock, there’s a huge array of ratios, calculations and methods available to help you get an idea of where a company’s shares are trading relative to its ‘true’ value.

It’s up to you to find the method that best fits your investing style and wealth building goals.

But to make life a little easier for our users when they are trying to value a stock, we’ve built a simple value calculator into our portfolio tracker.

Our calculator uses the discounted cash flow method.

This method determines the value of an investment based on future cash flow.

It’s based partly on hard, current numbers, and partly on predicted or forecast future numbers.

This method is similar to what Warren Buffett uses to value a stock.

If the discounted cash flow works out to be higher than the current cost of the investment, this is an indication that the price could rise in the future.

It’s not guaranteed or 100% accurate. No method that estimates future events can be.

And it is just one of the ways to go about determining value when evaluating a stock.

We recommend you try different methods until you find one that suits you best.

Try ours here!

https://www.navexa.com.au/n/calculators/value-calculator
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Uncategorized

How I Built Two Fintech Startups Within Two Years — And Earned 2X What I Could Have Made If I’d Stayed in My Corporate Software Developer Job

If you’re looking to stop working for an employer and start your own tech startup, I want to share my experience with you.

I’m going to show you how I combined my passion for technology and fascination with investing into a project that allowed me to quit my job.

I became a full-time professional software developer in 2011.

By 2018, I was making good money and working on multiple side projects.

My goal was to transition away from full-time work and focus on my dual passions:

Founding a fintech startup (two, actually) and building long-term wealth through value investing.

The way it worked out for me, the latter sparked the former.

Let me explain.

I realised in my mid-20s that I wasn’t going to be content working a Monday to Friday job.

I was extremely frustrated working in businesses where I could see so many ways to improve things but was powerless to do so.

Big corporates move at glacial speed, especially in technology.

I wanted to be at the cutting edge of tech. Not another face in a big corporate team waiting for Friday to roll around, again.

And like so many beginner investors, I wanted more out of life than any salary a corporate software gig could give me.

I looked at the phenomenal success of Warren Buffet, for example.

What he had achieved got me hooked on the idea of building wealth by investing.

Buffett’s principles of wealth building appealed to me and I wanted to have a go at applying those principles in my own investing.

I’m a long-term, strategic thinker. Probably more so having spent the best part of a decade embedded in development teams in Australia’s biggest financial institutions.

At that point, I wanted to start a business, too.

But, I didn’t know what — or why — so I put my focus into learning about the stock market.

Using the principles of value investing laid out by Buffett and Benjamin Graham before him, I wanted to be able to carefully analyse, monitor and plan my investments.  

And being a tech guy, I went looking for a software solution to help me.

I soon found something that did the job.

You can probably guess what, given that at the time that particular service was the only one on offer in Australia.

So off I went on my journey towards massive gains and stock market wealth!

But I soon found a problem.

The software I was using to track my investments wasn’t what I had hoped for (especially for the price I was paying).

And as a self-confessed software nerd, I quickly started to think I could do a better job.

Why muck around with this sub-par (IMO) solution when I could create my own to better suit my needs?

When I thought about how many people in Australia alone had been investing for many decades, it didn’t make any sense to me that there wasn’t a suite of high quality tools out there to help them.

Specifically, I found it super difficult to get an accurate measurement of my investments’ performance; colleagues and mates I talked to had the same issue.

Many couldn’t even tell me if their portfolio was doing well or not.

That decided it for me.

My next project would be a portfolio tracker that I could use to help me make smarter moves in the stock market.

The idea of using my own tools to help achieve financial success appealed to me a lot.

The idea of turning those tools into a business that helped others appealed even more.

This was the moment I realised how important it was that the project directly benefit me and others in my position.

I relate it back to investing in companies where the CEO has a huge stake in the company themselves.

It means that their success with the company is also success for them personally.

With this idea at the core of my plan, I got stuck in.

Building a fintech application was more exciting, challenging and rewarding than I could have imagined.

It took two things that I have a passion for — technology and finance — and combined them into one thing I could focus on.

One thing that would benefit me and others and potentially become a viable business in the long term.

For me, writing code that translates into making money on the stock market is pretty damn exciting. 

I love coding. I’m a proud tech enthusiast. Always have been, always will be.

Those close to me probably regard me as the quintessential obsessive nerd.

And they’d be right. When I get stuck into a project I believe in, I tend to go all in. 

At the start, I was still working a full time job at a big corporate in Melbourne and Navexa at night.

I’ve realised over time that what I thought was normal in terms of working on a side project, was not the norm for most people.

I would get home from my full time job and settle in for a solid night of coding before bed. 

Lame, I hear you say.

Perhaps, but like I say, when you find a project you’re passionate about both as a business and as an intrinsically beneficial tool, you feel compelled to really dive in.

Even now that I work for myself full time, I’m still keen on coding all night.

However I balance it out a lot more with family time now.

It was around August of 2018 that I decided to work on Navexa full time and finally take it from being a side project, to a legitimate business.

This was also around the time I welcomed some of my first customers into the then free version of Navexa.

This was a milestone for Navexa. It pointed me in the right direction in terms of what the service needed to be for its customers.

I started building mutually beneficial relationships with my customers.

I can’t stress how important that is.

My users contact me directly to tell me what they like and don’t, and what they want from the service.

I had people suggesting features such as supporting cryptocurrencies.

Others were telling me how the user experience of the site could be improved.

I was able to gather feedback fast and implement the ideas just as fast.

I learned that it was crucial to get feedback from people using the service and adapt the product to help them address their pain points and solve their problems.

Why build what you think people want when you can build exactly what they want by listening?

Many of the features that you can see in Navexa today were built off the back of customer feedback.

To those who generously offered their advice and feedback in the beginning — and those who continue to do so — Navexa wouldn’t exist as you know it without you!

A couple of months into my journey, I was presented an opportunity to help start another fintech business with my brother.

This particular business had the potential to make money very quickly. So I decided I would pause my work on Navexa and get stuck in.

This was a very good decision because it gave me an income very quickly which meant I was less likely to need to go back to a full time job.

Then once that business became established I started to resume work on Navexa and work on both at the same time.

Securing starting capital and cashflow while you’re working on a new business is, of course, hugely important. But there are many other blogs out there that go into that specific side of it in great detail!

So, back to my portfolio tracker.

From that point to mid 2019, was a hard slog of getting Navexa into a state where it could be used by most Australian investors.

I spent many months on stabilising the platform, finding bugs and fixing them and adding new features along the way.

By late 2019, about a year after I really started committing my time to this project, the feedback was growing more positive.

But the work was getting more demanding, too.

More features, more users, more ideas I wanted to implement — and limited startup capital to do so with.

It was time to ask my loyal users for money.

The first time you charge money for a product or service is a big moment for any business.

I loved providing the service for free and got a lot of satisfaction in helping customers get better insights into their portfolios.

But Navexa had taken substantial time and capital to create and develop.

I needed to start generating revenue.

In late 2019, Navexa welcomed its first paying customers.

This was a crazy experience.

I’d never done anything like this before. I had never run a website that someone could sign up for and then pay me real money.

The fact that I now had people paying for this service, made me feel an increased sense of responsibility. 

I want my paying customers to feel like they are getting maximum value out of the service, so it caused me to strive even harder to ensure they are getting their money’s worth.

This leads us up to now. May 2020.

I’m working on Navexa most days. Building new features, helping customers, fixing bugs and working to spread the word about Navexa.

There is no other other job I’d rather be doing.

I know the next six months will be just as crazy and exciting as the last — more, if early indications are anything to go by — and I’m looking forward to what I’ll learn and the people I will meet along the way.

I have an extensive road map of where I want Navexa to get to.

Like any tech startup, we’re monetizing the work that has gone in so far to offering a high-value, competitively priced service.

With the product the best it has ever been and our marketing efforts starting to yield more revenue, we’re on a mission to grow the business substantially. 

The first two years have been the biggest learning curve of my career.

The next 12 months should eclipse that.

Thanks for reading about my journey into the world of fintech startups.

I’m always keen to connect with inspiring, driven people in the technology and investing spaces.

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Categories
Financial Literacy Investing

Explained: The Dividend Reinvestment Plan

What is dividend reinvestment? How can you harness it in building your wealth? We explain this powerful type of income investing.

 You have two options.

Option A allows you bank a capital gain of $400,000 on an investment over 20 years.

Option B allows you to bank $2.4 million on the same investment over the same time period.

Which do you choose?

As far as no brainers go, this one shouldn’t require a nanosecond to decide.

So how is it that the same investment could produce such drastically different gains over the same time period?

The answer is a simple — but super powerful — investing tool called a dividend reinvestment plan.

Dividend reinvestment is exactly what it sounds like: The reinvesting of income earned from a dividend paying stock.

How Does Dividend
Reinvestment Work?  

Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.

— Albert Einstein

Einstein was once asked — allegedly — what he thought was the eighth wonder of the world.

His response: ‘Compound interest’.

‘He who understands it’, Einstein said, ‘earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it’.

A dividend reinvestment plan allows investors to tap into the deep power of compound interest.

Here’s how it works.

Companies that pay a dividend to shareholders can offer a dividend reinvestment option to those investors.

This means that instead of collecting cash then your stock pays a dividend, you instead reinvest that cash into more shares.

In other words, rather than accumulating cash in your trading account, you accumulate more shares.

That means your dividends compound in the form of capital.

The more you reinvest, the more shares you accumulate.

And the more shares you accumulate, the larger (in theory) your dividend grows over time.

As Einstein says, compounding can work for or against you.

If you have a loan you’re paying interest on, generally speaking, the longer you take to repay that loan, the more interest you’ll pay on it.

That means you’ll lose more money the longer you keep the debt.

But dividend reinvestment plans allow you to flip that equation and make compounding your ally.

And as with debt, the longer you keep it, the more the interest will accumulate.

Compounding is why…

Dividend Reinvestment Is A
Powerful Long-Term Investing Tool 

A large income is the best recipe for happiness.

— Jane Austen

Take a look at this chart.

Source: https://www.hartfordfunds.com/market-perspectives/the-power-of-dividends.html

This shows you how a $10,000 investment in the S&P 500 index could have grown from December 1960 to December 2018.

As you can see, by using the dividend reinvestment policy, you would have accumulated a huge capital gain compared with collecting cash dividends for the duration of the investment.

This is of course a very long-term example.

But it shows you the potentially major long-term power dividend reinvesting represents to investors who are prepared to buy and hold income-paying stocks for a long time.

The biggest upside of dividend reinvesting is obviously the potentially generous lump sum you could access if you sell out of the stock after a long enough period.

The biggest downside is of course that you need to forgo regular income from cash dividends in order to tap into the power of compounding like this.

So, if you are considering using a dividend reinvestment policy with your dividend stocks, you should know this:

Navexa Automatically Tracks Your
Australian Dividend Reinvestment

If you’re a Navexa user, you don’t need to worry about manually tracking your dividend reinvestments.

That can quickly get messy and confusing, as stock prices and dividend amounts fluctuate over time.

The good news is that your Navexa account allows you to automatically track your reinvested dividends.

Simply toggle the dividend reinvestment option to ‘on’ when you view that holding.

Navexa will then record each dividend as reinvested and reflect this in your capital gains.

You can track how many new shares each dividend payment amounts to and chart the accumulation and compounding over time.

All with one click.

We hope this have given you an insight into the power of compounding as it applies to dividend reinvestment.

And if you’re not already a Navexa user…

Start tracking your investment income smarter today.

Categories
Financial Literacy Investing

Why You Must Track Dividend Income

Why earning dividend income from your shares — and tracking it effectively — is vital to portfolio performance reporting.

If I told you that you could make back your entire initial investment in a stock without enjoying a single dollar of capital gains…

Would you want to know how that’s possible?

I know I would.

The fact is this is entirely possible.

I’m actually well on my way to this being a reality with one of my investments right now.

How does this work?

Dividend income.

Dividends are, in many ways, the unsung heroes of long-term wealth building.

Not only do dividend-paying stocks allow you to earn money simply for owning shares…

They allow you to harness the power of compounding (something Einstein referred to as the eighth wonder of the world) to take a modest investment and potentially turn it into a fortune decades down the track.

Understanding the power of dividend yield is vital to a successful long-term investment strategy.

Properly tracking the income you earn from dividends is vital to:

  1. Understanding the true performance of your entire investment portfolio.
  2. Ensuring you crush your annual investment tax returns with full confidence and minimal stress.

In this post, we’re talking dividends and investment income.

If you want to grasp their true power — and learn a smart way to save time tracking and reporting on your dividend income — then read on.

Dividend Income:
Getting Paid To Own Stocks  

The only thing that gives me pleasure? It’s to see my dividends coming in.

— John D. Rockefeller

There are some inspiring stories out there of big time investors who’ve built huge fortunes by hanging on to stocks and living purely off the dividends, without ever having to sell to make money.

Let me start with my own experience.

A few years ago, I bought shares in NAB.

I bought the stock with the intention of holding it for a long time.

My research showed it was going to go up in value over the long term — and that the current market price was fair value.

But more importantly, it told me NAB would pay me cash dividends to hold these shares.

In the four years I’ve owned the stock, I’ve earned enough dividend income from it that I’ve been repaid 40% of my initial investment thanks to the company’s profits.

All I’ve had to do is sit tight and not sell. Which was always my plan.

So $100,000 worth of shares would have made me $40,000.

This is the essence of dividend investing.

It’s the closest thing to free money you can get, short of winning lotto.

Put enough time into it, and dividend investing can help you build substantial streams of extra income for relatively little effort.

Bear in mind this leaves capital gains aside.

In a perfect world, you would buy $100,000 worth of Stock X, collect $40,000 in income over the course of a few years and enjoy a capital gain on top of that when you do eventually sell your shares.

You can see how, deployed across a large and diversified portfolio, over a long time period, dividend investing can be very powerful.

How And Why To Track
Your Dividend Income

Time is the friend of the wonderful company.

— John D. Rockefeller

There’s two reasons why you should track your dividend income.

First, you’ll want to know how much your investments are earning for you — and how much time it could take for your stocks to eventually ‘pay for themselves’.

Second — and this is important — you must report your dividend income in your tax return.

The tax man will generally tax your dividend income in the same way as personal income.

For those using spreadsheets to track multiple stocks that pay dividends in various ways (electronically, via brokers, using cheques in the mail and so on), this can quickly become a burden.

You may find yourself rummaging in drawers, trawling through bank statements and trying to get access to registries in order to properly collate all the information you need to satisfy the taxman.

Headache.

This is a big reason we’ve built a dividend income reporting tool into Navexa.

You can use it to view income generated over a given time period…

Viewing dividend income in Navexa's portfolio tracker.

To track dates and amounts of individual dividend payments…

Records of dividends paid on holding in Navexa.

To add notes and statements for those payments, and to generate a report you can hand to your accountant to succinctly show exactly what you’ve made from your stocks in the past financial year:

Investment income tax return in Navexa.

Keep Your Dividend Income
Flowing Without Stressing
About The Details

Making money in the stock market divides into two distinct things:

Buying shares that you sell for a higher price later.

And earning income from shares for the duration of holding them.

Income is a huge part of investing.

As a private investor, one of my dividend stocks has already paid me back nearly half my initial investment.

Deploying capital into dividend-paying stocks, with enough time, can make investors substantial amounts of money.

As such, income becomes an important part of your performance calculations for your overall portfolio.

But it also becomes a burden at tax time.

The solution is simple — use a portfolio tracker to record, analyse and report on ever dollar of investment income your portfolio generates.

MORE: Learn about the Dividend Reinvestment Plan.

Categories
Investing

Your Guide To The 2020 Australian Stock Market Crash

Coronavirus panic selling, blood in the streets, and potentially once-in-a-lifetime value…

The Covid-19 Coronavirus outbreak has this week plunged the world into a full-blown pandemic.

Nations, governments, economies and businesses have entered crisis mode.

Here in Australia, Qantas has slashed 90% of its international routes.

Border restrictions are now in place.

But, most shocking for investors…

Australian shares are down around 30% in less than a month.

That’s about four years of stock market gains wiped out in the space of just a few weeks.

Twelve years since the global credit crisis of 2008 drove the ASX200 down more than 50%, we find ourselves in the midst of a full-blown stock market panic.

On Monday, March 16, marks the markets biggest one-day fall since 1987.

The catalyst is obviously different from the last time investors faced such panic and losses.

But the net result is — and will probably continue to be — dramatic and severe.

In this post, we’re going to analyze what the crash could mean for the market — and how certain investors turn conditions like these into opportunities.

This Market Crash Could Be A ‘Blood In The Streets’ Moment  

“The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.”

— Baron Rothschild

Eighteenth century British nobleman, Baron Rothschild, often gets quoted when we talk about market crashes.

He made a fortune buying in the crash that followed the Battle of Waterloo.

Why?

Because he didn’t allow the market’s fear to prevent him from seizing the opportunity to buy good assets for dirt cheap prices.

Not that Rothschild didn’t take some pain himself during the crash.

The full quote is allegedly:

“Buy when there’s blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own.”

That’s contrarian investing in a nutshell.

When everyone is selling and freaking out, you go the other way, buying shares others can’t wait to wash their hands of.

Trying to pick the exact market bottom is generally about as treacherous as trying to catch a falling knife.

If you’re buying right now, chances are you will take some pain before you see the fruits of brave contrarian buying.

But, if you were eyeing up a stock last month and you reckoned it was undervalued…

Then how much more undervalued might it be now in light of the panic selling taking hold of the market?

You can use Navexa’s value calculator for free.

Stock Market Fortunes Have
Been Made In Times Like These 

“Investors do get paid for stepping in and buying in times of turmoil.”

— Barron’s

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has only fallen more than 10% in a week 17 times.

That’s less than 0.3% of the time stocks have been trading on it.

So moments like these are, in the grand scheme, few and far between.

And in the past, savvy investors who’ve kept their heads and not allowed the market panic to dominate their decision making have used times like these to sow the seeds for huge gains.

In 1973 and 1974, an oil crisis, combined with the ‘Nixon Shock’ economic measures and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system triggered a 45% stock market crash.

The Washington Post Company was among the victims.

At the worst point, the company had a market cap of just $80 million.

But while most investors bailed on the company amid the panic, wily old Warren Buffet swooped in.

Buying shares at a deep discount, Buffett pulled of a ‘blood in the streets’ masterstroke.

The investment recovered and went on to rise to more than 100 times what Buffett paid.

Here’s another example.

The September 11 attacks in New York hit airlines particularly hard.

Not many people would have bought Boeing stock at that time.

The company’s stock price bottomed about a year later…

And then went on to rise more than four times in value in the following half a decade.

And…

If you’d bought an ASX200 index fund in December 2008 — right when pessimism was peaking and the selling was most brutal — you would have copped a rough few months as prices plummeted even further.

But then…

As the recovery kicked in and investors began flooding back into the market…

You could have made a 40% gain over the next five years, or a 60% gain over the next 10.

What we’re getting at here, is that in situations like this one, it can pay to…

Keep Calm & Carry On Investing 

“Be greedy when others are fearful.”

— Warren Buffett

We’re not claiming to know any more than the next analyst, blogger or investor about how this Covid-19 led market panic is going to play out.

But, looking at history, you can see that this is not the first time we’ve gone through a rapid market selloff that has seemed to come from nowhere.

The reality is probably that this current crash could get a lot worse before it gets better.

But…

It’s also probably true that in the weeks and months to come, there will be opportunities.

Those who can take some pain and buy when there’s blood in the streets could stand to make great gains on investments that are trading at incredibly low valuations.

Our two cents?

Try not to let emotion hijack your decision making.

Stay cool.

Remain objective.

Keep an eye on the big picture — and don’t be afraid to buy when there’s blood in the streets.

Ready to start tracking your stocks smarter? Go here.

Categories
Financial Literacy Investing

Managing Your Portfolio In The Information Age

Part III in our series on self-directed investing.

Welcome to the third and final installment of our series on self-directed investing.

In Taking Ownership Of Your Investments, we covered what it means to take charge of your investment portfolio, as opposed to trusting your financial future to a money manager.

In Choosing A Strategy & Assets For Your Portfolio, we looked at the main types of investment assets and portfolio management strategies at work in the markets today.

In this post, we’re showing you how building wealth today is more dependent than ever before on technology and data.

You’ll see why the old ways of analyzing your portfolio are now obsolete, and why we’re about to witness an explosion in software that helps investors harness the unprecedented amounts of financial data.

If you’ve not read parts one and two in this series, we encourage you to do so before reading this.

And if you’re new to Navexa, you should check out our homepage for a quick overview of the online portfolio tracker offer (and why!).

How Big Data Has
Changed Investing  

“There’s no avoiding the realities of the Information Age. Organisations that continue to use 20th Century tools in today’s complex environment do so at their own peril.”

— Retired United States Army General Stanley McChrystal

This is the Age of Information.

We’re living in a time when we’re more connected to the world through technology than ever before.

We’re also generating and consuming more data than ever before.

Retail, advertising, medicine — you’ll be hard pressed to find a market or industry that hasn’t been disrupted or transformed by what we often refer to as ‘big data’.

Funnily enough, however, the world of finance has been a little slower than other sectors in its adoption of — and disruption by — technology and data.

Maybe that’s because the financial markets and banking systems are massive and deeply dependent on government for regulation and oversight.

But, things are changing for investors now. Fast.

According to Forbes:

‘Making money is no longer viewed simply as the result of the insightful decision making of market wizards. Rather, returns in markets are seen to follow from rigorous research. Investing and trading are becoming increasingly evidence-based.’

How, exactly, is big data transforming investing?

The biggest factor in the shift toward data-driven investing is that now there is nowhere to hide.

There’s so much information available about the historical and relative performance of stocks, sectors and markets…

That there is no longer any excuse for making decisions based on ‘a gut feeling’ or an opinion.

Everything you need to know about a trade or trend is available to you in the form of digital information.

Consider that more than $4.6 billion changes hands on the ASX alone each day.

That’s more than a trillion dollars a year.

Every single transaction is now a datapoint in a huge, ever-growing big picture which you can look at to determine how best to position your own investments.

If, that is, you have the tools to do so…

(And you’re not clinging on to the old spreadsheet, thinking the old ways of tracking your stocks will be good enough in the Age of Information.)

How To Harness Data In
Managing Your Portfolio

“To beat the market, you’ll have to invest serious
bucks to dig up information no one else has yet.”

— American Economist Merton Miller

We like this quote from Merton Miller.

Knowledge, as they say, is power.

When you’re investing, the more information you can gather, the more knowledge you have.

And the more knowledge you have, the better you can understand a situation and take action.

The only thing Merton (who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990) got wrong with this quote is that you have to invest serious bucks to dig up the information you need to beat the market.

Maybe 10 years ago, this was true.

But today, with a portfolio tracker like Navexa, you don’t have to invest serious bucks.

For zero cost (or for a meagre monthly payment, depending on your requirements), you can now access analytics tools that give you massive insight into how the markets — and your own portfolio — is behaving.

Here’s an example.

Portfolio Contributions

Navexa’s Portfolio Contributions Screen

This is just one tool we’ve created to help our users see at a glance one vital thing about their portfolio:

Which stocks are pushing your total returns higher, and which are dragging the portfolio down?

Twenty years ago working this out would have been a painstaking, manual process open to human error.

Today, with our service, you can literally see in one click how each holding in your portfolio is contributing to your overall performance.

This is one of many analytics tools we’ve built to help our users understand not only how their investments are performing, but how their entire portfolio compares to the wider market.

Use Navexa’s Online Portfolio Tracker To Make Smarter Decisions

Investing in the Age of Information, where big data makes it easier than ever to clearly see what your money is doing in the market, is arguably the best time ever to be building wealth.

The trends we’re seeing (and which we’re able to see because of data) show that more of us are ditching advisors and money managers to take ownership of our portfolios.

We have a huge number of assets and tactics to choose from on our wealth building journeys.

And by harnessing the power of data through modern portfolio tracking tools like Navexa, we can see more clearly the path to our financial future.

We hope this series on self-directed investing has been helpful to you!

Ready to start tracking your stocks smarter? Go here.

Categories
Financial Literacy Investing

The Truth About Ethical Investing

Ethical & unethical investments may not be what you think

Last month, Australia suffered destructive and widespread bushfires.

Debate around climate change, fossil fuels and sustainability heated up as large parts of New South Wales and Victoria burned.

But this debate is not new.

You might have seen the ‘clean money’ ads for Bank Australia, targeting customers who want to know their savings and investments are not funding destructive, unethical business activities.

The idea of ‘ethical’ investing is the idea of aligning your investments with your own ethical code.

In this post, we’re taking a quick look at what makes an investment ‘ethical’ or ‘unethical’.

Before we launch into it, a disclaimer: We’re not trying to tell you what you should do with your money.

(However you choose to invest, we provide a powerful portfolio tracker to help you track and analyze your portfolio.)

We’re exploring the question because we believe it’s beneficial to consider how your wealth building lines up with your personal — and your community’s — values.

So, pour yourself a glass of scotch or herbal tea (no judgment from us either way!) and let’s get into it.

Gambling, Drinking & Sex: Classic ‘Unethical’ Investments  

“A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.”

— Max Weber, German Economist

You can generally classify unethical investments as those which derive profits and returns from activities that harm or negatively influence people and the environment.

Making money from casino businesses, the sale of tobacco and alcohol, or prostitution are classic unethical investments.

Why?

Because those activities rely on consumers who are — in the case of tobacco — addicted to a significantly harmful product.

And yet, as the great Warren Buffett (who we seem to mention time and again in our posts — see the post that sparked a comment war on social media) says…

The sale of tobacco not only generates high profit margins.

It also cultivates a vast and loyal consumer base that supports business even as regulation and tax drives prices higher.

In other words, what makes that product unethical is the very thing which makes it a sound investment from a purely financial point of view.

As society has become more conscious of peoples’ impact on the planet and climate, the definition of unethical investing has evolved.

Today, you can say that any business that damages the planet is not an ethical investment.

Fossil fuels, logging, mining and other operations that seek to extract value from the earth by plundering natural resources for profit.

Again, though; these businesses can deliver huge returns.

Consider the returns rare earths and industrial metals mining have produced as we’ve moved through the industrial and technological ages.

As the German economist Max Weber pointed out, the market can be a tricky place to practice one’s ethics.

Because generally speaking, we enter the market to make money for ourselves.

But for many investors in the midst of the current generational shift, there are other considerations than simply maximising returns.

Protecting Planet And People:
Modern ‘Ethical’ Investments

“Being an economist is the least ethical profession,
closer to charlatanism than any science.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ethical investing largely boils down to the idea that we should not make money from any business that profits from inflicting harm to living things.

People, animals, the environment; these things must be protected and respected at all costs.

So instead of investing in fossil fuels, you might put your money into renewables.

Instead of investing in aggressive property development that impacts the environment, you might invest instead into community-focused, sustainable housing projects.

Or, you’ll park your money with a fund or bank who pledges to manage it in line with a clear ethical code.

You might think that investing ethically would drastically compromise your potential to earn a good return.

But one look at Canstar’s managed funds comparison table and you’ll see one ethical Australian fund is vying with the established aggressive players.

History shows that some of the most unethical businesses — illicit drugs, gambling, mining and burning fossil fuels — are some of the most lucrative.

The way of the ethical investor has tended not to bring such generous returns.

That’s because ethical investing is an attempt to balance the inherent selfishness of wealth building with a broader minded, ecologically-driven attempt to give back — or at least to take sustainably.

But don’t underestimate the shift happening in the economy and broader society right now.

In Australia, you now have options for ethical investing from banking and superannuation through to investment funds and companies that are ‘B Corporation’ certified.

Would you have guessed that an ethical managed fund could offer an annual return within a few percent of the top performing ‘unethical’ fund?

The times they are a changing.

‘Ethical’ Doesn’t
Always Mean ‘Green’

As with most things, the ethical investing debate is not black-and-white.

There’s a grey area.

And it is vast and shaded.

When you break it down, an ethical code is an ethical code.

Whether that code is good or bad is subjective and open to debate between individuals and within the community.

One definition of unethical is any decision that goes against one’s own ethical code.

So if you believe that climate change is not real, that there is no cost to burning fossil fuels and so forth, but you invest in a business focused on planting sustainable forests, you could say that you are making an unethical investment.

Even though the place you’re putting your money is considered ethical based on its actions, your investing in it would be unethical because it doesn’t line up with your beliefs.

The debate around how we make money at this point in history, which businesses and organizations we choose to support, is more heated than it has ever been.

So where do you stand? To what extent do your beliefs inform your investments?

Today, more than ever, it might pay (financially and otherwise) to take a look at how your portfolio lines up with your own ethics.

Whatever your ethics, understanding how your money is performing in the modern financial market requires a specific set of digital tools.

Navexa provides these tools.

Go here to learn more.

Categories
Cryptocurrencies Investing

Is Warren Buffet Wrong About Bitcoin?

You might not know this about Navexa yet, but we don’t just offer portfolio tracking for traditional Australian investments.

We also provide full portfolio tracking for the cryptocurrency markets.

This isn’t because we’re Bitcoin fanatics or Blockchain evangelists.

It’s because about one in five Aussies will buy crypto assets in the next six months.

By 2025, more than half under the age of 40 will own cryptos.

That’s according to the Independent Reserve Cryptocurrency Index (and backed by our own user statistics).

We’re growing our service in line with what our growing community of customers requires.

The numbers show cryptos are becoming an increasingly significant part of Australians’ wealth building strategies.

So providing crypto analytics for Navexa users makes sense.

However, there are those who wouldn’t agree.

Top of the list in terms of influence would be the great Warren Buffett.

We’ve written about Buffett before.

The ‘Oracle of Omaha’ (worth approximately $90 billion USD) is a legend in value investing circles.

He’s renowned for making big bets on businesses that generate big long-term returns for investors.

But…

Warren Buffett Is Not
A Big Fan Of Crypto

“Warren Buffet just gave up on newspapers and sold his last investment in the industry after fighting the rise of the internet. It took him 20+ years.
No wonder he doesn’t see crypto coming.”

— Blockfolio

Buffett is known for avoiding the complex in favour of the simple.

He goes for relatively boring, traditional companies as opposed to speculative startups trying to take big technological or financial leaps.

So, you can understand why he believes cryptos will “come to a bad ending”.

You can’t deny Buffett’s approach has worked out well for him.

But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t made mistakes.

While the investment titan ideally prefers to hold a position “forever”, he recently bailed on an underperforming group of assets.

More than 20 years ago, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought a swathe of newspaper business across the United States.

You might recall that about 10 years ago, the print news industry started coming under serious pressure from digital media.

To many, the writing for newspapers was on the wall around the turn of the millennium.

Circulation and advertising revenues were plummeting.

Traditional publishers scrambled to find a way to move online and remain profitable.

But Buffett grimly held on to his newspaper businesses, believing the rise of digital news to be a fad and the challenges facing the print media to be temporary.

Ten years later, and Reuters reported last week that Buffett has finally dumped the struggling newspaper businesses.

In other words…

Buffett Just Admitted
He Was Wrong.

“[Bitcoin] is a remarkable cryptographic achievement…
Lots of people will build businesses on top of that.”

— Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

Buffett’s anti-crypto stance squares with his long-term reliance on investing in simple, relatively traditional businesses.

He doesn’t put money into things he doesn’t understand.

You have to admire that. To a point.

But as his newspaper investment saga reveals, Buffett doesn’t always get it right when selecting assets and sectors.

Buffett was wrong.

Not only that, but he stuck with an investment that went nowhere for many years.

It’s possible he was blinded by his conviction that the traditional could withstand the pressure from new, disruptive digital competition.

So perhaps it’s worth entertaining the idea that Warren Buffett is wrong, too, about cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin launched in 2013.

Between 2013 and today, the original cryptocurrency has rocketed more than 100,000% higher.

The newspaper business, in that time, has foundered.

Buffett made no money on his decades-long newspaper investment.

He lost about $2 million.

In contrast, you could have made $2 million from just a $2,000 investment into Bitcoin when it launched in 2013.

And right now, the numbers show that here in Australia, crypto adoption is progressing.

In just five years there will be a majority of investors under 40 holding crypto assets.

More broadly, in the next 10 years, Generations X and Y will control more than two thirds of the world’s financial assets (more on that here).

Cryptos would appear to be a big part of this generational shift.

And as Eric Schmidt says in the above quote, cryptocurrencies offer a platform for a whole new breed of digital businesses.

Just because people like Warren Buffett don’t understand or approve of disruptive new tech and the associated financial instruments they create…

…does not mean cryptos or blockchain technology is going to fade into obscurity and leave the current financial status quo untroubled and unchanged.

Categories
Financial Literacy Investing

Choosing An Investment Strategy & Assets For Your Portfolio

Part II in our series on self-directed investing.

Welcome to the second post in our series on self-directed investing.

Part one introduced the idea of taking ownership of your portfolio.

For those of us with the time, inclination and discipline, taking ownership of our portfolio makes more sense than trusting our financial future to fund managers who charge fees and who don’t always beat the market.

(Go here first if you haven’t read the post yet.)

In this second post, we’re going to discuss some of the important choices you need to make when creating and managing an investment portfolio.

These choices divide broadly into two major questions.

  1. How will you approach building your investment portfolio?
  2. Which assets will suit your approach?

There’s a lot to cover in this installment of the series, but we’re going to keep it simple to give you a broad overview (see the bottom of this page for a list of great in-depth articles we recommend for continued reading).

Before we get into the types of strategies and assets you might wish to consider, a quick word about investing in general.

No two investors are the same.

That might sound obvious, but it’s worth remembering that no single investment strategy can suit everyone.

In our experience, your best bet is to learn how different investors use various strategies to create and manage their portfolios…

Cherry pick the aspects that you identify with and that fit with your own goals…

And create a strategy that fits your own financial and personal situation.

This is better than trying to replicate what other people have done in the past.

Because they are not you. And now is not then.

There’s a vast number of factors to consider when forming your strategy and selecting investments for your portfolio.

Your financial goals, your obligations, your appetite for risk, the amount of time and energy you’re prepared to put into researching and monitoring your investments — these are just a few.

It’s important to be clear on where you’re at in your investment journey, your career and your life in order to build a strategy that will best serve your goals.

Your Game Plan: Buy And Hold, Value Investing And More

“You can’t adjust your portfolio based on the whims of the market, so you have to have a strategy in a position and stay true to that strategy and not pay attention to noise that could surround any particular investment.”

— John Paulson, Multi-Billionaire American Businessman

Like we said, our aim here is to give you a broad overview of the types of strategies you can deploy for your portfolio.

These portfolio management styles are by no means a comprehensive list of those at play in the markets today, but they do broadly represent the spectrum of approaches you’ll find among investors.

Buy & Hold Investing

‘Buy and hold’ investing is the ultimate slow and steady strategy.

This style of investing is exactly as it sounds: You buy investments with a view to holding them for a very long time — like decades.

This strategy hinges on the idea that, over the long term, stocks always go up and the returns are always good, if not spectacular.

You may have heard the phrase ‘time in the market is better than timing the market’.

Buy and hold investing is hands-off in that you make your decisions early, and then largely leave your portfolio to grow and generate income for a very long time.

Value Investing

A ‘value stock’ is a stock which an investor calculates to be trading at a lower price than it should be.

Value investors look to create portfolios full of assets that — according to their research and analysis — will rise over the medium term as the market price catches up to the true value of the business.

Warren Buffet is widely regarded as being one of the greatest at picking undervalued stocks and holding them long enough to generate substantial returns.

Value investing is more hands on than buy and hold.

But it is flexible, depending on what sorts of sectors and assets you dive into.

Growth Investing

Growth investing is more aggressive than the two strategies above.

The idea is to ‘buy high and sell higher’, using the momentum of a rising stock market to capture short and medium term gains from stocks riding high on a wave of optimism and economic growth.

Many tech companies can be classed as growth stocks.

Growth stocks tend to be smaller, faster growing businesses that are capturing market share.

Growth investing requires a higher tolerance for risk, and in most cases a more active approach to portfolio management (more frequent buying and selling).

Portfolio Theory

Portfolio theory is less about which types of stocks you invest in, and more about balancing the mix of assets you hold in a particular way.

The idea is to capture maximum upside from your portfolio while minimising the risk you take by being exposed to the market.

Key to this is diversification, which you no doubt have heard about before.

Diversification is a way to spread risk between distinctly different type of investments, like stocks, bonds, exchange traded funds and so forth.

Diversification is about creating a mix of investments that balance out gains and losses in the short term, and grows in value over the longer term. 

Choosing Investments
For Your Portfolio

“The secret is if you have a lot of stocks, some will do mediocre, some will do okay, and if one of two of ’em go up big time, you produce a fabulous result.”

— Peter Lynch, averaged 29.2% return for 23 years straight

There are many different types of assets you can invest in within your portfolio.

The sort you go for will depend on the strategy you pursue, which as we mentioned will depend on your goals, risk tolerance and so on.

We often talk about the types of assets and financial instruments in terms of a ‘risk ladder’.

At the bottom of the risk ladder is cash (or precious metals if you prefer, but we won’t discuss that here).

Cash

Cash in the bank is the simplest investment asset.

It guarantees your capital and gives you exact knowledge of your return (the interest rate).

It’s how most of us store our wealth by default.

The problem with cash, though, is that interest rates tend not to beat the inflation rate (meaning your cash’s value will diminish over time).

Bonds

Bonds are next up the risk ladder. A bond is a debt instrument.

You buy a bond from a government or business and they guarantee to pay you a fixed interest rate while you hold it.

Bonds are a common way for organizations to raise capital.

Interest rates on bonds tend to be better than what your cash will earn in the bank.

Stocks

Stocks essentially let you participate in a company’s activities.

You own a shares in a business. Those shares can rise, fall and pay income in the form of dividends.

Within stocks (or equities), there is another risk ladder, which spans from the bottom to the top of the business world.

Big, established companies that pay good dividends and have a record of climbing over the long term are known as blue-chip stocks, or sometimes income stocks.

Growth stocks are smaller businesses on an upward trajectory. They are riskier but can deliver bigger, faster returns.

Risker and more dynamic again are small-cap and penny stocks — small, unproven companies aiming to capture market share.

These stocks can rise and fall dramatically, meaning investors who hold their shares stand to gain and lose proportionally.

Mutual funds & ETFs

A mutual fund is an investment fund where many investors pool their capital and allow a professional fund manager to control it.

Mutual funds focus on certain sectors or types of investments.

Some mimic particular markets and all aim to deliver solid, reliable returns.

These funds do charge management fees, though, and require you to allow a third party to select the assets the fund invests in.

An ETF — or exchange traded fund — tracks an underlying index, like the ASX200, for example.

Owning shares in an ETF exposes your capital to a specific mix of assets.

Like stocks, ETFs vary greatly in risk depending on the sector or market they track.

Their popularity has exploded in the past few years.

The approach ETFs allow you to take — essentially buying an entire market or sector with low fees — appeals to some of the heaviest hitters in the financial world.

Buffett told CNBC he thinks using ETFs “makes the most sense practically all of the time”.

Mark Cuban, another billionaire rockstar of the investing world, also likes cheap index funds as a way for new investors to start building their wealth.

The growing FIRE (Financial Independence & Retiring Early) community is also quite fond of ETFs as a wealth building tool.

Again, this isn’t an exhaustive list of the types of assets available to Australian investors — we haven’t covered commodities and derivatives — but this gives you an idea of the basic options you have when creating a portfolio.

Selecting The Right Mix Of
Assets For Your Chosen Strategy

Choosing an investment strategy and a mix of assets for your portfolio requires, above all else, clarity.

You need clarity on what you want to achieve, what you’re prepared to risk, and how much time and energy you want to put into managing your portfolio.

Building a portfolio is a lot like buying a new car.

No car is going to suit two drivers the same.

Maybe you want a people mover that offers great fuel economy so you and your family can take a long, relaxing drive.

On the other hand, perhaps you want a high performance sports car that costs loads to fuel but which delivers extreme speed and handling.

Carefully consider your goals and what you’re prepared to do to hit those goals.

If you’ve never bought a stock before, go read about my experience buying my first shares and how a careful, deliberate approach has allowed me to more than triple my investment.

Recommended articles for further reading:

https://www.thebalance.com/top-investing-strategies-2466844

https://investormint.com/investing/types-of-stocks

Categories
Financial Literacy Investing

How To Become A Self-Directed Investor

Part I in our series on self-directed investing.

Do you trust your financial future to someone else, or do you take charge yourself?

It’s a fundamental question you have to answer on your journey to building wealth.

If you’re just getting into investing, or you’re considering taking over control of your portfolio for the first time, there’s a lot of information to get your head around.

In this series of posts, we aim to introduce you to the ideas, skills and discipline involved with taking ownership of your own portfolio.

Never has grasping the principles of self-directed investing been more important.

According to Canstar, ‘we are in the midst of the most significant shift of power in the finance world of the past decade’.

What is this shift?

It’s the rise of the self-directed investor.

Generation X and Y will control about 70% of financial assets within the next 10 years.

We’ll control these assets amid unprecedented trends using new technology and services as we create wealth and build our financial future.

So, will you leave your investments and wealth building to a third-party advisor or manager?

Or…

Take Ownership Of Your
Portfolio Management

“The better you understand yourself, the better you’ll become.
You’ll be better. You’ll do better.” — Jocko Willink

Managing your own portfolio is a way of taking direct control of your financial future.

You choose what to buy, what to sell and when to buy and sell it.

You choose your asset allocation.

You choose the types of stocks you invest in.

If you have a vision for how you want your life to be — especially when you retire — then it makes sense that you should steer your investments instead of paying someone else to do so.

But, it only makes sense if you have…

The time, the inclination and the discipline.

Portfolio management requires focus and energy.

But when you look at how those whose full-time job it is to manage other people’s money perform; you can see why it can be worth taking ownership.

This article from Liberated Stock Trader reveals that more than 60% of fund managers failed to beat the wider market over a 12-month period.

Over three years, a staggering 92.91% failed to beat the market index.

Now, if the market is rising, it’s not the end of the world if a fund manager fails to beat it.

If stocks rise 10%, you theoretically increase your portfolio’s value by the same amount.

The thing is, you’ll pay the advisor or fund manager a percentage for achieving nothing more than the broader market did anyway.

Worse, you’ll pay them for a return that is actually below what you would have made simply investing in an indexed fund.

And worse still…

You won’t gain the knowledge and understanding that comes from taking ownership of your own investing.

As retired Navy SEAL commander, Jocko Willink, points out, the better you understand yourself, the better you’ll do.

In other words, by taking ownership of your own investments rather than paying someone else (who probably won’t beat the market)…

You can directly guide the investments that will determine your financial future.

Are you ready for that?

Great. Next, you’ll want to…

Learn From The Portfolio Management Masters.

“Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone
planted a tree a long time ago.” — Warren Buffett

Taking ownership means you will need to take guidance from others who have done the same.

You can save yourself having to learn hard lessons by studying those who’ve learned them before you.

You will have at least heard the name Warren Buffett.

The finance world generally regards Buffett as the king of investing.

Buffett followed the principles set out by Benjamin Graham to amass a multibillion dollar fortune.

If you’d invested $10,000 with Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, that investment would now be worth more than $50 million.

But more amazing than the gargantuan long-term gains the man has achieved are the simple principles he has followed to get them.

Buffett researches his investments in depth, sticks to a proven formula for selecting sectors and companies, and doesn’t let emotion or hype dictate his decisions.

He’s also deeply patient, claiming his favourite holding period for an investment is ‘forever’.

He has built his wealth by thinking about the long term.

His mentor, Benjamin Graham, is the man behind the ‘value investing’ idea so central to Buffett’s success.

This is the idea that an investment should be worth a lot more than you pay for it.

Graham believed in fundamental analysis. He looked for companies with strong balance sheets, little debt, above-average profit margins, and ample cash flow.

In other words, good companies with favourable outlooks. Simple, right?

Buffett and Graham are just two investing masters you can learn a lot from.

But the list of intelligent, wealthy investors willing to share their knowledge is long and worth diving into as you create your own strategy.

Check out Ray Dalio, John Templeton and Peter Lynch (and feel free to suggest your personal favourites in the comments!)

Three Questions To Ask
Yourself Before Becoming
A Self-Directed Investor

OK, so you know you’re living in a time of massive change.

Generation X and Y are becoming the dominant forces in the financial markets.

The way we invest — our values, objectives, the tools and tech we’re using — is changing rapidly.

Financial advisors and mutual funds tend not to deliver great returns (especially when you take their fees into account).

The masters like Buffett and Graham prove that self-directed investors can flourish if they deploy strategy, patience and critical thinking in a disciplined fashion.

You want to take ownership and start managing your own portfolio.

This great article from Forbes suggests you ask yourself four key questions before you take the reins.

Are you truly motivated to
become a self-directed investor?

This isn’t as simple as yes or no.

Rather, define the precise nature of your motivation.

Maybe you’re taking control back from a financial manager and want to maintain a certain performance level while saving on fees.

(Consider that a $1 million portfolio might cost up to $12,000 in fees a year.)

Perhaps you want to test out a particular strategy to boost your returns and take on more risk.

Or, maybe you’re looking to invest in a specific area of the market you understand and are passionate about.

Whatever your motivation, be clear about it from the outset of managing your own investments.

Will you make the time to manage your portfolio?

Managing your portfolio isn’t a full-time job.

But it will take a serious commitment of both time and energy.

If you’re just learning about investing your money and implementing a strategy, be patient and prepared to dig in — especially at the start.

Your investing style will also affect how much time you need to commit week to week.

If you’re a buy-and-hold type of investor, you might not need to keep tabs on your portfolio as much as you would if you were a day trader.

Either way, understand that taking ownership of your investments like this requires a significant time commitment. 

What knowledge do you already have — 
and how much will you learn as you go?

You don’t need a finance degree to manage your own portfolio.

But, you do need to be able to interpret large amounts of information — about the markets, the business world, your own financial goals — to make good decisions.

Don’t invest beyond your current level of knowledge.

Seek guidance from those more experienced.

Use second and third opinions to your advantage.

But most of all…

Turn every experience you have managing your own portfolio into a lesson you can implement next time you make a decision.

Taking ownership of your invested wealth means making a commitment to learning all the time.

I hope this first part in our self-directed investing series has been helpful to you.

Please let us know your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

And keep an eye out for part two, coming soon.