How the experts are investing in 2024

Bryce: [00:00:42] Welcome to Get Started Investing, the podcast that answers all of your money and investing questions. My name is Bryce, and today we're covering how our expert advisors are investing in 2024. Joining me, as always, is my equity buddy, Ren. How are you going? 

Alec: [00:01:01] I'm very good, Bryce. I am losing my voice a little bit, which doesn't bode well because we're halfway through a big week of recording our audio books. Let's hope the voice stays strong. But I'm excited for this episode, because one thing we, you know, as we've sort of growing our podcasts and, you know, the equity mates community has grown, one thing that we've been really lucky to do is to build a network of experts that we can speak to. And, you know, hopefully through this podcast, we can bring those experts closer to everyday Australians who are just starting their investing journey. And in this episode, we're going to be speaking to a few of them and asking how they're investing for 2024 and how they're thinking about their personal accounts and their personal investments. So hopefully we get some good nuggets from that. But this is just a part of, I guess, something we really want to build out. We really want to close the gap between advisors and the everyday Australian. And another way that we are doing that is with our live events. On the Equity Mates Investing podcast, we have an episode type called Ask an Advisor where we collect your questions and we put them to some of Australia's best financial advisors, and we're doing it live. 

Bryce: [00:02:21] So come and join us. If you don't listen to equity mates investing, then, I suggest you do search for the Ask an Advisor episodes to get a sense of what they are. We sit down with some of Australia's best advisors, some of whom are going to be on the call today, to get there, to get them to answer any money or investing question that is submitted by the community. And as Ren said, we're doing this in a live format here in Sydney and hopefully in some other capital cities around Australia throughout 2024. So head to equitymates.com/events for tickets. Now before we call, our advisors. We should mention that, to Ren's Point, we want to give you the opportunity to, to get access to these advisors. So, if you head to equitymates.com/advice, if you're looking for financial advice, we're able to, connect you with the right financial advisors, depending on what you're looking for. So head to equitysmate.Com/advice. Fill in the form, and we will then connect you with our trusted network of advisors. Firstly, we've got Charlie Viola who's partner and managing director at Pitcher Partners. He's been on Equity Mates a number of times and always gets great feedback. So we're really looking forward to this one. Let's give him a call. 

Charlie: [00:03:33] Hello mate. Yeah. All right. Thank you. All right. 

Bryce: [00:03:36] That's good. I've got Ren here as well. 

Alec: [00:03:38] Hey, Charlie, you could chat. 

Charlie: [00:03:39] How are you? 

Alec: [00:03:40] Yeah. Good. 

Bryce: [00:03:41] So, Charlie, how are you thinking about your personal investing for 2024?

Charlie: [00:03:45] From our perspective, both as a business for clients, but also my own way or Barb equities at the moment. We probably still continue to think that, as we start to get some rate cuts and, you know, kind of earnings numbers kind of go back to normal a little bit. Yeah, we're probably happy to continue to buy equity. So, depending upon how big bucket size is, look, I'm a big ones sort of dollar cost averaging and just keep edging your way into good quality, kind of broad based, equity portfolios. So the, you know, you know, broad based ETFs and what have you. I still think the US markets will continue to go up. I still think, you know, those kinds of mega-cap stocks, especially in the tech and AI space, etc., will do reasonably well. So, we're probably still allocating, you know, 40, 50, 60% of, of monies to that, especially if you puts a bit smaller again, on the big one for diversity, where you where you put is a little bit smaller. So, you know, good broad based allocation to, allocation to, to, to ETF sort of makes sense from mine. 

Alec: [00:04:55] Love it Charlie. Love the bullishness of it as well. You know even when you're an expert like yourself, one of Australia's best financial advisors, I'm sure there's things that you're working on or focusing on, that you're always trying to get better and learn more about. Is there anything in particular this year that you're focussed on improving when it comes to money and investing?

Charlie: [00:05:18] What are we trying to get better at? We're trying to get better at everything, really? Like, if we could get better, you know, like everybody, it would be nice to be able to tell the future, right? So, like, you know, where's the most recent kind of rally come from? Really, when you've got kind of cost of capital, that sort of, you know, going through the roof and, and what have you. But, look, I think that look, I think for us, it's really just kind of understanding the signs. Understanding what kind of the corporate world is actually doing and having a look at what the transactions kind of look like. I think liquidity is kind of reopening again. I think this, you know, I think with the onset of the huge amount of kind of non-bank lenders and what have you. I think it's kind of opening up lots of kind of commercial avenues. So I think it's reading the signs around some of that and just making sure that we kind of positioning both our own money, the client money in the kind of right in the right areas to try and take advantage of that. 

Bryce: [00:06:12] Love it. Well, thank you so much, Charlie. I'm sure that, a lot of the community will have taken something out of that, so I appreciate it. Thank you very much. 

Charlie: [00:06:18] Always.

Bryce: [00:06:19] So it was great to hear from Charlie. We now have Luke Larative, CEO and investment advisor from Seneca who again has been on equity markets investing. Check out the episode. Luke, how are you? 

Luke: [00:06:29] ABryce, Alec, how are you? 

Alec: [00:06:31] Very well. We're good where? We're ringing around and asking, some of our expert investors and financial advisors how they're thinking about, I guess, their personal accounts for the year ahead. So, Luke, how are you investing in 2024?

Luke: [00:06:48] Same way I always has. I invest in three things and three things exclusively. Doesn't matter whether it's in or in super and outside of super. And that's the Seneca Australian share, as I said I did. I ran the Seneca Australian Small Companies Fund that I run and the Seneca Global Equity SMA, which are investment committee rounds there. So it's essentially a 50-50 split between Australian shares and international shares. It's about a 35, 25 split between, sorry, 35,15 split between the large cap and the small cap. Yeah, I mean that that's kind of it in terms of those portfolios, you know, we've got a few different things playing out locally, but probably more interesting. So globally we've got a pretty big tilt to emerging markets. We think that there's a lot of value there. And you know we've seen pretty good returns out of Indian and we think in the future Chinese equities. So that's probably our biggest tilt in the global on the global side of things. But yeah I mean from our perspective it's the same every year. 

Bryce: [00:07:52] Nice consistency.

Alec: [00:07:54] Yeah. Keep it simple and consistent.

Bryce: [00:07:55] Yeah consistency is key. 

Luke: [00:07:57] Yeah I don't really say why your asset allocation needs to change. You feel like you are lost. Doesn't change that much. I mean I'm pretty stable and my loss pretty boring. So why would I challenge myself? Well, no. Well, you know what? Would my asset allocation change, you know. Yeah. I think it's pretty crazy if people are trying to, you know, run around chasing tactical tilt there and everywhere every 6 to 12 months. Like, I think it's good to learn to see, to be honest. You know, just wasting money on fees and bro. 

Bryce: [00:08:21] Brokerage. I assume you mean by bro.

Luke: [00:08:23] Yeah. Brokerage. Yeah. Sorry. Is that industry? 

Alec: [00:08:26] Industry? Sure. 

Bryce: [00:08:30] God, I'm paying too much bro. 

Alec: [00:08:34] Oh, well, that's why. 

Luke: [00:08:35] New segment name. 

Bryce: [00:08:41] Now, if, if you're not listening to us over on Equity Mate's Investing podcast, we suggest you do just to at least hear the segment that we have with Luke called Pimp My Portfolio, where community members submit their portfolio for Luke to put a critical eye over and give some constructive feedback on perhaps how it may be able to improve. So it's a great segment. Come and join us. 

Alec: [00:09:03] Well, now I'm just realising how boring Luke's portfolio is going to be. It's gonna have three lines.

Luke: [00:09:10] I told you I do the stocks. I do the stocks. 

Bryce: [00:09:14] Anyway, Luke loves it. Thank you for that. Very much appreciated it. We'll see you over on Equity MAtes. 

Luke: [00:09:19] My pleasure. Gentlemen. 

Alec: [00:09:20] All right. Price two down, two to go. We've spoken to Charlie and Luke. We're going to take a quick break. And then on the other side, we're going to speak to two more experts about how they're investing for 2024. Welcome back to Get Started Investing. Today we've got the phone connected to the studio, and we are calling some experts in our network to ask how they're investing for 2024. Next up we've got Andrew Page. He's the founder of Strawman.com, a private investing community. He was also my mentor last year. So I learnt a lot from Andrew. Let's give him a call and say how he's invested. 

Andrew: [00:10:03] Hello. 

Alec: [00:10:03] So, Andrew, how are you approaching your investing in 2024? 

Andrew: [00:10:08] Look, it might be a bit of a cop out, but honestly, the same way I was in 23 and 22 and probably will be in another ten years. You know, it's it's just boring. And it sounds simple. And like I said, it is, simple but not easy, as Buffett says. But good companies are good prices, you know, hold on to them for as long as the company is executing and the thesis is playing out and wash, rinse and repeat. Sometimes you'll get it wrong, you know. You know, cut that one off and move on to the next opportunity and just build up that portfolio. And, you know, forget about what the RBA is going to do next month. You know, forget about what the unemployment rates are at or whether the quarterly result, you know, was off by 0.3 of 1%. It's sort of you get the big picture stuff, right. And it'll always work out well. So I know it's a boring answer, but that's how I'm doing it. 

Bryce: [00:10:56] No, I think that's a great answer, Andrew, but I think there's a glaring omission in your response related to cryptocurrency. I have to ask, how are you feeling at the moment with the price of Bitcoin? 

Andrew: [00:11:09] I'm feeling bullish. Here's the thing, right? Like this is this talk about a little. Yeah. So yeah. 

Alec: [00:11:18] Yeah. This is Bryce asked. Yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 3: [00:11:21] What have I done? What have I done?

Alec: [00:11:22] Tell us what. Tell us what you're at. Tell us what you got. 

Andrew: [00:11:25] Well, I was just going to say. I mean, it's such a weird thing, this thing. Because there's no CEO or earnings or cash flow or anything like that. So it's sort of that every ten minutes in your book is introduced, you know, gradually, day after day, the network continues to grow in terms of its uses and adoption. And that's a pretty reliable sort of extrapolation to continue. And as long as that's the case, it's yeah, okay. It's up a lot, but it's still cheap. This thing is, I said to you guys before, is either worth it remains a very niche obscure thing and probably not worth, you know, much more than it is now. Or it's, you know, potentially in decades case comes a future reserve currency. So, you know, it's great that it's going up. It's better than when it's going down. But I think we're still in the early stages of the game. 

Bryce: [00:12:09] Huge. Well we're going to leave it right there. 

Alec: [00:12:10] Yeah yeah yeah I'm sure I'm sure we'll check in and have a longer conversation with you about this and everything else at some point this year. So we'll save that as a bit of taste. But Andrew, thanks for joining us. 

Andrew: [00:12:22] My pleasure guys. Always love chatting. 

Bryce: [00:12:24] All right. Ran. Well let's give our last expert a call. It's Dylan Pargiter-Green, director at Bold Wealth and one of the advisors in the equity mates community. Let's give him a buzz.

Dylan: [00:12:33] Hello.

Bryce: [00:12:34] So, Dylan, thanks for joining us. Can you talk us through how you're thinking about your investing for 2024? 

Dylan: [00:12:40] Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, as always, we invest on an individual client basis. We're looking at, you know, what the client's circumstance where the momentum starts with the strategic asset allocations and, you know, figuring out what he calls out and making sure that whatever the investments, we decide, is right for them, he's going to achieve that goal. So more broadly, though, I would say that our thoughts are bold, probably leaning a little bit more or have lent so far this year a little bit more towards the international space where we think that, you know, interest rates are probably going to come down sooner overseas. So we're overweight, international and also overweight small caps and a little bit in emerging markets as well. So we see that international space being a better growth area for our clients. We also have a much larger allocation to defensive assets. So fixed interest and and and bond bonds because of the high interest rate environment. So it's a wonderful space for our retiree clients to be able to get some relatively good risk free returns compared to a couple of years ago when interest rates were zero, pretty much all around the world, we're now seeing lots of sort of 4 to 5% expected over the next three years. And being able to lock that in is really positive. So that's our position guys. 

Alec: [00:14:01] Nice. Now, as investors and you know, I guess people were always trying to learn new things and, you know, become better with money and better investors. Is there anything you're personally working on or trying to learn about to become a better money manager or investor?

Dylan: [00:14:19] Do as much, you know, new things in terms of exposing yourself to different ideas, but come back to the fundamentals. So at the end of the day, the really basic stuff is what works and trying to keep something small. Or micro-cap or a penny stock and hoping for the best. It is a lot harder than what it looks like when you read about it online. So, you know, people share a lot of their wins. And then I share a lot of our losses. We come back to this, come back to the basic stuff and just, you know, regularly invest small amounts and live your life. 

Bryce: [00:14:55] Love it. Dylan, thank you for taking the time. As always, we really appreciate it. 

Dylan: [00:14:59] Pleasure boys. Happy to be here.

Bryce: [00:15:02] Well, Ren, firstly, a massive thank you. We should say to all of the experts, Charlie, Luke, Andrew and Dylan for sharing their time with us. Any key takeaways?

Alec: [00:15:10] Well, I think the big one is consistency. Like, I wasn't expecting to say I'm blowing up my strategy and doing something completely new in 2024. But where, you know, Luke and Andrew especially first went was just my strategy is exactly the same. So I think that's what we should all strive for, have a strategy that we can just be very confident with, that we're just going to do it over and over again forevermore. 

Bryce: [00:15:35] Oh, good news is we both have that. So yeah, I feel like we're on the right track.