The Last Straw

‘Blue-chip’ is a term often applied to the more established, higher-quality businesses; a name that originates from the poker table where the highest value chips were traditionally blue in colour. These stalwarts are typically considered lower risk and are the stocks sensible investors supposedly focus on. Perhaps. But for many of these so-called blue-chips the shareholder experience has been woeful. Consider these examples from the ASX20, […]

This week, the Aussie market entered what is popularly called a ‘technical correction’ — that is, a fall of 10% or more from a previous high. In so doing, it wiped off all of the gains from the past year.  Exactly who decided that a 10% drop is a correction I have no idea, but it sure can seem pretty scary. You certainly […]

In preparing for this week’s update, I was considering rehashing an older piece I’d written a few years back. Why not? All the big ideas in investing are timeless and as relevant today as when they were first conceived.  (More to the point, I was running desperately short on time and — as usual — was struggling to think of something original […]

Of the many challenges that investing brings, the emotional ones are arguably the hardest. There’s little value in being the smartest person in the room if you can’t muster the necessary discipline and temperament to face the chaos of the market. One of the more prickly behavioural challenges we face is the inertia of our beliefs. We tend to be […]

No matter what approach you take with investing — and here at Strawman we’re certainly a broad church — it’s impossible to avoid the narrative bias. That is, our tendency to interpret a set of facts or events in terms of a story. A story helps us connect things together, and gives them meaning. It sets out an arc that helps us make predictions […]

The live Melbourne event was a lot of fun, giving us the chance to connect with over 50 of our members and share some interesting investment ideas. It was also great to put a face to a few familiar Strawman usernames. For those that couldn’t make it, you can check out a couple of the presentations on Youtube. Owen from […]

This week was the 10th anniversary of the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers, the event that’s seen as precipitating the Global Financial Crisis. The milestone has many in the media questioning the current bull market, one that is starting to get rather long in the tooth and is showing more than a few red flags. In fact, parallels […]