Here’s what you need to know today

• Private hospital operators’ bad year is getting worse. All year Ramsay and Healthscope have been pushing private health insurers to pay more for the rising cost of health care. The conflict escalated on Friday as Healthscope cancelled its contract with Bupa, meaning 6.5 million Bupa-insured Australians will have to pay more out of pocket to use Healthscope hospitals. (ABC News)
  
  

• Adding to private hospital operator woes, Ramsay nurses are preparing to strike asking for a 20% pay raise over 3 years and improved staffing levels. Ramsay shares are down 27% year-to-date. (AFR)
  
  

• In an effort to resolve these conflicts with insurers and with staff, the private hospital sector will ask the Australian government to approve higher price increases for private health insurance to resolve the cost dispute with insurers and to increase pay for nurses and other staff. (AFR)
  
  

• It is hard to think that things could be getting better for Nvidia, but they just might be about to. Their latest-generation Blackwell AI chip is now sold out until the end of 2026. (Quartz) It puts into perspective the 25% selloff in Nvidia stock in late July and early August over concerns about the Blackwell Chips. (Forbes)
  
  

• The US Department of Justice has officially asked Google to sell its Chrome internet browser. This is part of the proposed punishment after Google was found to be violating antitrust law. There is no way Google accept this order without a fight, so we can expect to see it in court in the coming months. (BBC)
  
  

• American trade sanctions against China continue to ratchet up. The US government has banned 29 companies from importing products to America given suspicion the companies use forced Uyghur labour in the Xinjiang province. (Wall Street Journal)
  
  

• Swedish battery giant Northvolt has filed for bankruptcy. The company had raised more than $15 billion and was seen as Europe’s great hope to challenge Chinese dominance in the battery sector. (Reuters)
  
  

• Northvolt isn’t the only European company struggling. Overall Euro-zone business activity fell to a ten-month low, surprising many economists. European manufacturing has been in a recession for months, but the services sector shrank for the first time since January. Expect the European Central Bank to continue cutting rates in an effort to stimulate the economy. (Reuters)

What the…?

If anyone had any doubt Elon Musk was going to use his position as Trump’s right-hand man to his advantage, doubt no more. Musk’s largest rival in the race to privatise space is Jeff Bezos and his space company Blue Origin.

Last week, it came out Elon has been telling everyone in Trump’s orbit that pre-election Bezos was telling people that Trump was about to lose. Bezos was quick to reject Elon’s story, but this whole story shows how those looking to do business with the US government (like the space industry) are working to gain favour with Trump. (Quartz)

Investing is a lifelong journey

Here’s what you can learn today.

This is an excerpt from our book Don’t Stress Just Invest, which last week won Best Investing Book at the 2024 Business Book Awards. Pick up a copy here.

The #1 goal of building wealth isn’t to build wealth

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

It would be really helpful if someone was able to quantify exactly how much money we were going to spend in our lives. If they looked at our genetics, our lifestyle and our diets and calculated how long we were going to live for. Asked us if we wanted a family, where we wanted to live, when we wanted to retire and what we enjoyed doing. Punched it all into a giant computer and spat out our number: In your lifetime you will spend $3,562,902. 

Every year, we could work, earn and spend and watch our counter tick lower and lower: You have $2,112,364 remaining.

And we could retire once our bank balance matched our remaining spending number.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t work like that. Who we are in the future is just as uncertain as the future of technology. Even the future value of our money is uncertain because of inflation. When faced with an uncertain future, what are we to do?

Invest and build wealth. Not so we can keep score and buy a bigger house, but so that we can build resilience into our lives. Managing your money, budgeting, investing, building wealth: these are not ends in themselves. They are ways to give our future selves more flexibility and choice. Because, as much as we hate to write this, money matters.

Angus Campbell, a psychologist at the University of Michigan studied happiness and found it was difficult to group those who were ‘happiest’ by any demographic factor. Income, education, location, age and geography weren’t great predictors of happiness. Instead, Campbell concluded that ‘having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered’.

Building good money habits today will give us that control in the future. In most cases, having money available is what gives us control. Control over where we live. Control over what job we take (or, importantly, what job we leave). Control over our family size, our travel destinations, our retirement age. Over the course of our lives we will be hit by randomness, uncertainty and chaos. Financial shocks happen. Whether it is an unexpected pregnancy, a long-term illness, a business collapse, a messy divorce or a death in the family, the only thing we can be certain about is that our financial future is far from certain.

Much like Taleb, we want to be the fire and wish for the wind. We should start the journey of building wealth today, so we have choice tomorrow.

Whatever you feel about income distribution in our society, widening wealth inequality and what basic needs a wealthy nation should guarantee, the fact is our lives are short and change is often slow. This is the system we’re stuck with. It is up to us to do our best within it. Don’t let your desire to change the system stop you from taking the steps to change your life.

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Recent winner of the Best Personal Finance & Investing Book at the 2024 Australian Business Book Awards

If you haven’t read our latest book Don’t Stress, Just Invest now is the time to pick yourself up a copy. And with Christmas around the corner, you can pick up the only gift that has a guaranteed return on investment.

Pick up your copy of Don’t Stress, Just Invest wherever you buy books.

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