Shares and share funds

The Investor 13 December 2005

Can’t see the forest for the houses?Also: Christmas shopping. Quick question: Which of the following grew fastest in the last year: New Zealand house prices, New Zealand shares, hedged overseas shares (hedging removes the effects of foreign exchange movements), or unhedged overseas shares? Surprise, surprise, it wasn’t house prices. Bigger surprise still: house prices came last.

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The Investor 4 October 2005

A message that goes too far — Shares beat mixtures over long term. I take exception to a recent New York Times article entitled, “The long-term lesson: It pays to diversify”. If you look hard at the numbers quoted by the writer, they show just the opposite.

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The Investor 6 September 2005

Share pickers respond to my doubts. Even as I typed it, I thought a certain sentence in my last column was bound to cause trouble. “Lots of research,” I wrote, “shows that an individual investor who researches companies doesn’t tend to do any better than someone who chooses shares at random.” Sure enough, a man who describes himself as “a paid-up member of the share pickers guild” emailed me.

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