This week on Equity Mates

Hey there Equity Mate,

Another week, another sign that inflation is sticking around a little longer than expected (hoped). Data from the ABS yesterday found that inflation was 3.6% in the 12 months to April 2024. This is up from 3.5% in the 12 months to March 2024.

The RBA next meet in mid-June and we shouldn’t be surprised if another rate rise comes out of that meeting.

The challenge for the RBA (and the shortcoming of using only interest rates to fight inflation) is that many of the largest inflationary buckets are structural and are not directly affected by interest rates - for example rents, which rose 7.5% in the 12 months to April 2024.

Speaking of rents and housing, in today’s episode of Equity Mates Investing Ren has some novel ideas to free up more housing which we’re sure will prove controversial.

If you agree with him, let us know, because we’re certainly going to hear from the people that disagree.

That is just one of five episodes we’re releasing this week across the podcasts:

Equity Mates Investing (Spotify | Apple | YouTube)

• Monday - Nvidia earnings, is it time to buy Tesla & with the Yen so low, should we invest in Japan?

• Tuesday - Ask an Advisor: In the room with Glen Hare & a real client

• Thursday - Ren (tries to) solve the housing crisis, Pimp my Portfolio & the saga of Paramount Global

• Friday - Uncovered: Saving brain cells from stroke damage | Argenica Therapeutics

Get Started Investing (Spotify | Apple | YouTube)

• Tuesday - $100 Challenge: Get paid to walk

Your questions, answered

A general question we often get:
Is financial advice worth it?

Ask an Advisor: In the room with Glen Hare & a real client

We recognise that advice is expensive. It’s a real frustration of ours that those with money can afford quality advice, and get access to a greater opportunity set, and those that really need the support, can’t afford it.

Over the last 2 years we’ve been building out the Ask An Advisor content stream, creating quality content with financial advisors in an effort to help educate us, and to improve the levels of financial literacy. This community question section is part of that.

So to answer this week’s question, we want to highlight a recent piece of content we did with Glen Hare - one of our advisors.

We were inside the room with Glen, and one of his clients, Emily (and her partner), to unpack the process they went through, from establishing Emily’s goals, and current financial set-up, to actually hearing the advice provided and suggested changes.

It wasn’t all theory; this was practical, real advice.

So if you’re grappling with the question of whether taking the plunge and getting advice is worth the initial upfront cost, we hope listening to this episode helps you decide.

If you have a question you’d like answered, hit us up at [email protected] 

A word from this week’s sponsor, Australian Property Scout

The Scouting Australia Podcast is your go to platform for all the latest strategies and information for your success in property investing. Starting with an investment property could be your entry onto the property ladder.

Hosted by Equity Mates regular property expert Sam Gordon, he unpacks everything from Real Life Investor Stories, Weekly Property News Bulletins, Investing Strategies and much more.

Find out how he helped one client, Naaman build a 7 property portfolio and $1.7m in equity in 3 years.

Listen in to The Scouting Australia Podcast on all your favourite listening platforms and start your property education journey.

What we’ve been reading

TikTok, Robots, and Opportunities in Consumerland!

The subheading of this article certainly intrigued us: What can Western startups learn from Chinese consumer companies?

The development of the consumer economy in China is fascinating. The combination of huge populations, densely populated cities and huge amounts of available funding has created an incredibly competitive startup landscape focused on urban convenience.

Amongst this competition, 5 apps have emerged as central to the lives of urban Chinese citizens.

The author outlines what he thinks western companies can learn from these dominant apps.

The interesting feature of China (and many of the countries that have had big steps up in development since i.e. India) is that much of their population and many of their startups are mobile-native. In the west, many of our big companies started on computers and then retrofitted their businesses to the mobile ecosystem. So it is interesting to compare how the ecosystems have developed and consider what we can learn.

Eat a rock a day, put glue on your pizza: how Google’s AI is losing touch with reality

Google has announced their latest AI feature ‘AI Overviews’ that will offer an AI written answer to your Google Search results, above the links to other pages.

This has been particularly controversial, especially for web publishers that rely on Google traffic for their business. But web publishers need not panic too much - it turns out that Google’s AI is fast losing touch with reality.

This article from The Conversation has taken the time to understand why Google’s AI Overviews are getting it so wrong. In terms of eating a rock a day, there is a popular article from The Onion about eating rocks. So it seems Google’s Gemini AI hasn’t yet learned to distinguish satire from real news. We look forward to the Betoota Advocate featuring in some AI Overviews next.

This is early days and teething issues, but the trend is clear. Even in the past year we’ve seen AI get smarter and more sophisticated. It’s amazing (and scary) to think where it will be in a couple of years.

Until then, avoid asking AI Overviews too many important questions. And always use a parachute when skydiving.