Australian Finance Podcast
Q&A: When NOT to get advice, hedging AUD & your best portfolio
28 Jun 2021
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Property investors often talk about using debt to build wealth. In the share market, that's called gearing. With the BetaShares WealthBuilder range, investors can access moderate gearing into shares, and with the newly launched GG-BL, That means exposure to a diversified portfolio of around 1,300 global companies excluding Australia, all with no loan applications, credit checks, or margin calls.
Gearing magnifies both gains and losses, so it's only suitable for investors with a very high tolerance for risk. You can learn more about the WealthBuilder range of ETFs at the BetaShares website. And don't forget to read the PDS and TMD to decide if it's right for you. BetaShares Capital Limited is the issuer.
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Please remember that all of the information in this podcast episode is limited to general information only. That means the information is not specific to you, your needs, goals, or objectives. So you should seek the advice of a licensed and trusted financial professional before acting on the information.
And before you acquire or apply for a financial product, please read the PDS or product disclosure statement, which should be available on the issuer's website. Lastly, please keep in mind that past performance is not indicative of future performance. Kate Campbell. How you going?
Good. Thanks, Owen. How are you?
I am very well. Thanks, Kate. And today I am extra special well, because we're talking about finance and we have some questions sent in by our dearly beloved listeners. So we have questions on ETFs. We have when to sell them. I'm going to follow up on something from shares month. You're going to tell us all about hedging, when not to hedge, how to hedge, to be hedged or not to be hedged.
And then we're going to answer a question, which is a really interesting one from Aaron, which is when not to get financial advice. So to start off, a disclaimer. Anything that we talk about in this podcast episode is strictly general information or general financial advice only. So please do not rely on it. Even though some of the questions might seem to come from a human, they may not.
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Chapter 2: What are the benefits and disadvantages of hedging investments?
The Australian dollar, if you put that into US dollars, so going from Australia to the US, you would get more US dollars than Australian dollars. So if you put $1 Australian into $1 US, you'd get about $1.05, $1.10, I think is what it peaked at. And I remember speaking to some investors at the time.
If we just took our money, our Australian dollars, and put it into US dollars, then if the Australian dollar fell, meaning that, so there's two ways to look at it, the Australian dollar falls relative to the US dollars. That means the US dollar is going up. There's one going in either direction. So if the Australian dollar falls, the US dollar goes up.
Because we had our money in US dollars, then when we transferred it back, we would have more Australian dollars. And so what you could have done in this instance, there were a few of us that started investing more heavily in the US because we thought now is a good time to get purchasing power to buy US dollars. So we went and invested in the US. We bought companies.
I think at the time it might have been companies like Twitter or Apple or Amazon or something that a few of us invested into. Because then those shares went up on their stock market and then our dollar went down. So you've got the double benefit of being invested in a company that goes up in value while also the currency goes up in value. But it can also go the opposite way.
You can also have it go down in value and the currency keep going up. So that means your foreign investment is worth less. So hedging is effectively a way to neutralize the currency impact, right?
Yeah, protect your investment from the risk of that currency being very volatile, maybe, and sort of not having that exposure to the currency movements. And sometimes like super funds might use different hedging strategies, manage funds. And one of the articles I read said they'll use strategies like foreign currency options and cross-country swaps to protect themselves.
So it's quite a high level strategy.
You usually don't personally... You don't do these, you don't enter these contracts for yourself.
Yeah, you would use a managed funds or you might use an ETF. Like, I mean, Vanguard, BetaShares, they all have some ETFs on their books that have hedged in the heading.
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Chapter 3: What are the differences between hedged and unhedged ETFs?
So they typically forego the performance fees and then it comes back from $1.20 upwards. And that protects you from paying a performance fee twice for something that they're already recouping. So that kind of protects you. So you're looking for a performance fee. You're looking for a good benchmark.
So if it's an Australian shares fund, make sure it's benchmarked to something like the ASX 200 or ASX 300 total return. If it's global, you want S&P 500 or the MISCI All World, the MSCI All World. So these are all valid benchmarks. That all said, you know, you can always just read the PDS. Just go and read it and it has an example of funds and the fees involved.
Yeah, definitely quite a few will provide that breakdown of the last time the PDS was updated.
Yeah, that's it. And then you've got an example of a managed fund fee calculator. We obviously haven't talked about it.
Money Smart have one, yeah.
Yeah, so that's the one there. Kate's going to include that in the show notes. And it just shows you the impact of fees and that can be quite substantial. But one of the things to keep in mind is that performance fee isn't always... It didn't have a performance fee section.
Yeah.
The performance fee is a natural thing that works.
Yeah, and it's quite difficult because performance fee is calculated and taken out daily. So as a retail consumer, unless you can get all the unit prices the last 12 months and who can be bothered to do that, it's quite difficult to get in.
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