I started this month in sunny Bangkok. I end it in a chilly Sydney. Much of the month was consumed by thoughts about retirement. And not simply because I wish I had longer in Thailand. I ran Morningstar’s retirement bootcamp over the course of the month which was a great chance to connect with the Morningstar community on the challenges of retirement planning. You can watch the replays here.

I explored the core retirement challenge in my article on the mindset shift that retirees must undergo when transitioning from accumulating retirement savings to spending them. Never one to offer a problem without a solution I wrote about a way that retirees may be able to get higher returns safely.

In a recent podcast episode Shani declared that I was “obsessed” with dividends. Obsessed is a bit much. But I am interested in income investing and it is a rare month that I don’t cover the topic. I explored the prospects for some of the top dividend shares in Australia including the miners and the banks. I didn’t like what I saw and speculated that we may be in the last days of ASX dividend dominance.

If local dividend prospects are poor it might be time to turn our attention overseas. I am on the hunt for a global dividend ETF. I went under the hood of an ETF offering a high yield and global diversification. One reason that many Aussie income investors ignore global income opportunities is because of franking credits. Are franking credits valuable? Yes. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and figure out what they are worth. I walked through a process for valuing franking credits.

I’ve been on a bit of a behavioural finance kick in my own reading lately. Nobel laurate Daniel Kahneman passed away in March and the tributes keep pouring in. I read Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project and listened to countless podcasts on Kahneman, his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler who also managed to haul in a Nobel while continuing their work at the University of Chicago.

Going down this rabbit hole I kept thinking about how our desire to accumulate wealth is impacting our lives. After a certain level of financial security is established the thoughtless pursuit of a higher net worth can be counterproductive. We shuffle through life attempting to add zeros to our bank accounts without pausing to ask ourselves if we are measuring financial success in the right way.

And finally, I’ve been thinking about the way professional investors are portrayed in the media. Many investors turn to these experts for ideas. Yet these picks are presented with little context and are often delivered with a degree of jargon that make them indecipherable to the average investor. I attempted to decode stock picks from experts.

Please email me at [email protected] with ideas for topics you would like me to cover in August. 

Articles mentioned

Get Morningstar insights in your inbox

Mark LaMonica