Geldzug: AN INTRODUCTION TO INDICES, ETFS AND BENCHMARKS

3 Jul, 17

SHARE MARKET INDICES

The Dow Jones is one of the oldest share market indices and probably the best known. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (to give it its full name) was created in 1896 by Charles Dow and Edward Jones in order to give an aggregate picture of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The Dow is currently owned and managed by a subsidiary of S&P Global, which also owns and manages the Standard & Poor’s indices. It is based on the share prices of its thirty constituent companies, which are selected by an arcane process.

The Dow started out in 1896 at a value of 40 and has now passed 21,000. This growth tends to show how much the value of the US share market has increased in the last century… [read more]

Geldzug: STOCK MARKETS ALWAYS LIVE IN THE PAST

15 Jun, 17

Way back in 1981, the writer William Gibson remarked “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Investors tend to think of stock markets as predictive, but they are mostly the result of economic activity in the past.

The largest sectors of a stock market are those which have done well in the past. They are made up of companies which have consistently made large profits and raised large amounts of capital. Investors have come to expect that these companies will keep making profits and paying dividends. But most companies don’t survive for long… [read more]

Geldzug: THE PERILS OF STOCKMARKET INDICES

23rd May, 2017

Many people choose the passive approach to investing – they put their long-term money into index ETFs or index funds which mirror the standard share market indices, such as the S&P500 in the USA or the S&P/ASX200 in Australia. This is perfectly reasonable. After all, one of the greatest active investors of all time has recommended the passive approach. In 2014 Warren Buffett told his wife that, after he died, she should put 90% of her money into an index ETF which tracked the S&P500, and the other 10% into a high-quality US government bond ETF… [read more]