Anthony McDonald

It could be quite an early and hefty confession season in the next few weeks.

But meanwhile, markets are at an all-time high, US markets at least, and Australia's not far off.

You know, 12 sessions in a row on the NASDAQ in the US that have been up.

That's not been done since June 2009.

It's absolutely amazing.

I mean, we've been worried for a little while that markets are dislocated from the real economy.

But is it getting even more dislocated now?

Australia's 100% been left behind, James.

Like you say, 15% earnings growth.

It's something that we just don't see that in Australia.

I mean, we've got some great tailwinds at the moment in terms of aggregate market earnings from the commodity prices and earnings growth is likely to be up, say, 5%.

eight percent across the market for the year to june 30. that's great that's really good for australia it ends a multi-year run of earnings per share actually going down so it's good to be back in the growth yeah but no one's talking about 15 for fy27 15 for fy28 that sort of just burnt itself in as the as almost the minimum expected for the us

So what that means is you're going to have all this capital going to the US, and we've started to see that.

I mean, their market's trading at about 21 times forward earnings.

We're trading at sort of that 17 times.

There's a gap there already to account for the fact that they've got more earnings growth.

And I don't see how that gap's just not going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.

So the problem for Australia is you're going to have all these big American companies attracting a lot more capital.

Meanwhile, in Australia, we're not going to be attracting as much capital.

So we had this period of US exceptionalism, and I think we've still got it, where from a financial markets perspective at least, those companies are just so much better funded and they've got so many more options and they've got productivity growth, they've got earnings growth.