Here’s what you need to know today

• Australia’s housing affordability crisis is having a very real human cost. A new report from The Grattan Institute found that two-in-three retirees who rent are living in poverty. (Grattan Institute)
  
  

• President Trump has announced 25% tariffs on all aluminium and steel imports from all countries. At this stage, the Trump Administration hasn’t made any exceptions although Trade Minister Don Farrell says Australia will again argue its case with the White House. (AFR)
  
  

• Australian steelmaker BlueScope Steel was a surprising beneficiary from the announcement, with shares up 2%. The Australian steelmaker has extensive operations in the US and makes more than half of its profits in North America, meaning it may be a winner from these tariffs. (Yahoo Finance)
  
  

• Another Big Tech company has made another big AI infrastructure commitment. Amazon has committed to spending $100 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025. Add this to Microsoft’s $80bn, Google’s $75bn, Project Stargate’s $100bn and Meta’s $65bn - all commitments for spending in 2025 - and it seems like DeepSeek’s launch has not slowed down Big Tech’s commitment to building out AI infrastructure. (Quartz)
  
  

• JB Hi-Fi reported its half year results, with revenue up 10% to $5.7 billion. These stronger-than-expected results suggest the Australian consumer is still holding up okay despite higher interest rates and cost-of-living pressure. (AFR)
  
  

• The Australian government has committed $573 million for women’s health, including subsidies for contraception, menopause care and endometriosis treatment. Australia’s Federal Opposition has pledged to match the funding. (ABC News)
  
  

• Commonwealth Bank is cracking down on ‘coffee badging’. The practice, popularised as companies enforce return-to-office mandates, sees employees head into the office for an hour, show face, and then head back home. Commonwealth Bank has said employees must be in the office for a minimum of 4 hours for it to count as a day in the office. (AFR)

What the…?

Have you heard of Ben Dawkins, independent MP in Western Australia’s state Parliament? Well, if you haven’t yet, you won’t because he now goes by the name Austin Trump a.k.a Aussie Trump.

Dawkins legally changed his name to Austin Trump as a political protest. What he’s protesting, we’re not quite sure. Dawkins was a member of the Labor Party before being expelled for 35 breaches of a domestic violence restraining order. Then he was tapped to lead One Nation, only for Pauline Hanson to dump him from the role.

Whatever he is protesting, the trend is notable. Experts believe this will be the first of many Australian politicians trying to closely align themselves with Trump in the lead up to the WA and Federal election this year. (ABC News)

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Investing is a lifelong journey

Here’s what you can learn today.

Beware following professional investors

This is an excerpt from our conversation with Mark Lamonica, Director of Personal Finance at Morningstar Australia (Apple | Spotify | YouTube)

Question: What conventional wisdom in the industry do you think is wrong?

Mark: I think there's a lot of it. I'll concentrate on one thing, but I think one of the challenges that individuals have is we take our cues from professionals. So you think about a typical AFR article, they get some portfolio manager, he or she picks a couple names that they're investing in, and you have no context, right? You don't know if they own 500 shares or if this makes up a tiny percentage of their portfolio. You don't know if they will sell it a week later. And what gets portrayed in the media, sort of the behaviour that professionals do, and I understand why they're doing it, there's these structural impediments to doing what I think is good for individuals. 

There's all these structural impediments and I think that we take too many cues from professionals. And number one, and I could go through a long list of them, the number one thing is equating risk with volatility.

For people that may not understand those terms and understand how this works in the investment industry, when they talk about risk, anytime they talk about risk, they talk about volatility. So basically share prices bouncing around. 

And they have to do that because they don't know any of their investors. Somebody managing a super fund has no idea. They just have this pot of money. And so they use this common measure, this volatility measure. 

So whether it's standard deviation or beta or whatever. For investors, that's not risk, right? Risk is defined as something bad happening. So what's something bad happening to me? It's not meeting my goal. And so when people take that volatility lens, they invest too conservatively and they're scared of things bouncing around when they're investing super for 30 years.

You can listen to our full conversation with Mark wherever you listen to podcasts.

And remember, if you’d prefer to watch, all of our content is now available on YouTube. Check out our conversation with Mark here:

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