Here’s what you need to know today

Australia

• Treasury increases inflation forecast to 3.75%. In the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook report, the Treasury has increased forecast inflation for this financial year to 3.75% from the original 3% set in March. Next financial years forecast has also increased from 2.5% to 2.75%. (Reuters)
  
  

• Meg O’Neill resigns as Woodside CEO to join BP. O’Neil has been in charge of Australia’s largest oil and gas producer since 2021 and will assume the head role at British Petroleum early in the new year. Woodside plans to name a permanent replacement for O’Neill in the first quarter of the year. (AFR)

  
  

• ASIC enforces $100m compensation penalty for Netwealth. The wealth platform has agreed to compensate more than 1,000 clients who invested in the failed First Guardian Superannuation platform. Netwealth acknowledged it failed to get enough information about First Guardian and risks posed to investors. (ABC)

  
  

• Triple Zero outage report released with Optus flagging possible job loss. The review found the Optus call centre did not escalate warnings from five callers who reported Triple Zero wasn’t working. Optus said it is taking action in relation to “individual accountabilities” from the incident. (ABC)

Global

• Global demand for coal to reach record high. The International Energy Agency forecast 8.85 billion metric tons will be consumed by the end of the year, a record high. The IEA believes we’re nearing peak-coal and demand will decline by 2030 as renewable, nuclear and natural gas become more prominent in our energy mix. (Reuters)

  
  

• US technology stocks fall as Oracle loses data centre funding. Concern over spending on AI infrastructure increased after Oracle lost key funding for a US$10 billion data centre. Oracle is down 46% from it’s September all-time high. (Financial Times)

  
  

• UK inflation hits 8-month low. Annual inflation dropped to 3.2% led by falling cost of food. The news was welcomed by British mortgage holders with economists now predicting a pre-Christmas rate cut. (The Guardian)

  
  

• Lithium prices reach 2-year high. Prices were up 8% after the Chinese city of Yichun revoked 27 mining permits in the country’s major lithium mining region. In the past 6 months, Pilbara Minerals is up more than 200% as the lithium price rebounds. (Reuters)

Companies

• ANZ shareholders reject executive pay for second year running. More than 32% of shareholders voted against executive pay in a “heated” Annual General Meeting yesterday. One shareholder blamed ANZ chair Paul O’Sullivan, saying, “you’ve stood up there for the last six years … and there’s been continuous missteps, failures and collapses of governance”. (Capital Brief)

  
  

• YouTube to stream the Oscars from 2029. The streaming giant has won the right to host the entertainment industry’s night of nights from 2029 to 2033. The Oscars has been hosted on ABC since 1976 but has seen viewership decline in recent years as free to air television continues to struggle globally. (The Hollywood Reporter)

• Medline shares soar in largest IPO of 2025. Shares in the medical supply company jumped 41% in it’s debut whilst raising around US$6.3 billion. The strong debut gives a note of optimism for more IPO’s in 2026. (FT)

  
  

• Waymo eyes US$100 billion valuation. The driverless taxi company owned by Alphabet is hoping to raise US$15bn at a US$100bn valuation. The company is the market leader in driverless robotaxi rides, currently completing almost 500,000 paid rides each week in the US. (Reuters)

What the…?

The Noosa Council is the latest organisation to fall for an AI scam. The council accidentally paid $2.3 million to overseas fraudsters acting as suppliers. (ABC) This comes after the Gold Coast City Council lost $2.8 million in a similar scam back in November 2023. (ABC)

Take this as your reminder to stay vigilant for scams as fraudsters become more sophisticated with the power of AI. And, given these two stories, be extra careful if you’re located near a popular beachside town!

Investing is a lifelong journey

Here’s what you can learn today

Arden Jennings on his investing inputs and information sources

Last week Ren sat down with Arden Jennings from Ausbil to talk all things small and micro cap funds in the Equity Mates Investing episode titled ‘Best of the Best: Ignore the noise & find great companies - Arden Jennings | Ausbil’ (Apple | Spotify | YouTube)

Ren: When you are running through the process both at the top down, thinking about macro and then bottom up looking at an individual company and it's prospects, are there any particular inputs you rely on? Any source of information that you go to? And I guess on the flip side, any that you perhaps don't put as much weight in as other people would?

Arden: Certainly, firstly you've got to back yourself and your team as well. So I think they're the most reliable inputs. You only get out what you put in and you've got to back yourself and the team and what you think is right. So we are high conviction bottom up managers, but also what I'd avoid is FOMO and meme stocks and retail mania that gets caught up in these narratives and themes, hot IPOs. We try and avoid that, we're investors, we're not traders, we're not speculators. We just want to invest in quality companies and there's so many to choose from in our space that we can still make really strong risk adjusted returns for our clients and meet our investment objectives, which we've done really successfully to date without having to take that sort of risk.

Ren: To go back to the philosophy where you said we're looking for earnings upgrades and we're trying to avoid earnings downgrades, part of that is understanding the company, but then it's also understanding the company relative to the forecast it's making and relative to what the market expects from the company. What sources do you rely on to really get a sense of where the market's expectations for the companies are?

Arden: We all have access to Bloomberg, if not FactSet or Visible Alpha, which have various collations of all the data that the analysts are forecasting. Then we make our own assessment on what we think the revenue earnings should be relative to the market, but also having input from the banks both globally, domestically here, whether it's on the investment banking side or also on the sales side and what the views are of the market. We also monitor how crowded trades are and how well held some of these names are, and also the structural rise of passive investing, which has had a huge impact on the market for us. So we're aware of positioning as well.

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