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.
Q&As: Woman in Australian shouldn’t sell her house here; Is the house price boom like the great tulip bulb bubble?; Couple disagree over rental property v shares.
Q&As: How well do share funds perform?; Comparison of investment performances.
Q&As: The pros and cons of self employment and income splitting; Comparing shares with property is tricky; How movements in the dollar affect investment in international share funds.
Q&As: Share funds v rental property; Income splitting by the self-employed — is it OK?
Q&As: Should immigrant solo mother get into the housing market now?; What is an index fund?; How exchange traded funds work.
Kids, cash and cards: Help your children learn about money. Also in this issue: From the Mailbox — Saving for the children’s future.
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.
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.
Is it dumb to diversify shares or property? Diversification is not all it’s cracked up to be, according to a man who read my last column, which praised the spreading-your-risk idea. “Bill Gates didn’t diverse much, and it didn’t do him much harm,” he writes. “The fact remains that the richest people on the planet have become that way because they haven’t diversified.