Getting Started in Shares For Dummies Australia. Dunn James
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Название: Getting Started in Shares For Dummies Australia
Автор: Dunn James
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Зарубежная образовательная литература
Серия: For Dummies
isbn: 9780730320630
isbn:
Figure 1-1: Share investing in Australia 2000 – 2014.
Source: 2014 Australian Share Ownership Study, Australian Securities Exchange
‘Hang on,’ you say, ‘doesn’t the sharemarket crash and correct regularly? What about the headlines that talk of billions of dollars of investors’ savings being wiped off the value of the sharemarket in a day?’ (See the sidebars ‘What happened? The GFC at a glance’, ‘GFC economic recovery: Quick to lose, slow to come back’ and ‘Bouncing back from the GFC: Sharemarket recovery’, later in this chapter.)
Occasionally, that happens. No one who goes into the sharemarket can afford to ignore the fact that, from time to time, share prices can suddenly move in an extreme fashion: Sometimes up, sometimes down. When share prices move down, they attract media headlines. However, what the headlines don’t tell you is that on most other days, the sharemarket is quietly adding billions – or even just millions – of dollars in value to investors’ savings.
Since 1900, according to AMP Capital, Australian shares have earned a return of approximately 11.9 per cent a year, split fairly evenly between capital growth and dividend income, for a real (after-inflation) return of 7.8 per cent a year (which is almost double the return from bonds). Since 1950, according to research house Andex Charts, the All Ordinaries Accumulation Index (which assumes all dividends are reinvested) has delivered an average return of 12.0 per cent a year, for a real return of 6.9 per cent a year. In the 30 years to 30 June 2015, says Andex Charts, the same index has earned 10.8 per cent a year, for a real return of 7.3 per cent a year.
In 1985, according to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), the Australian stock market was valued at $76 billion, about one-third of Australia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP: The amount of goods and services produced in the Australian economy). In mid-2015, the stock market was valued at $1,700 billion, while GDP was about $2,000 billion. Although the nation’s economic output has grown almost nine times since 1985, the value of the stock market has grown by more than 22 times.
Investing is about building wealth for yourself so that you can have the lifestyle you want, educate and give your children a good start in life, and ensure that you have a well-funded, carefree retirement.
When you invest in shares, you get a number of advantages, such as:
Australia is second only to the US as the world’s leading share-owning democracy. But with the global financial crisis (GFC) souring many investors’ experiences with shares, ownership had fallen to 36 per cent (33 per cent direct) by late 2014. According to the 2014 ASX Share Ownership Study, total share ownership (including retail managed funds) in Australia now stands at 36 per cent of the adult population, meaning that about 6.5 million people own shares. About 5.9 million Australians – 33 per cent of the adult population – own shares in their own right. According to the ASX’s numbers, retail investors (as in households) own 13 per cent of the Australian sharemarket by value – about $220 billion worth of shares – and account for 14 per cent of trade by value, 51 per cent of trade by volume of shares and 12 per cent of the number of trades. In addition, in 2014, investment bank Credit Suisse estimated that self-managed super funds (SMSFs) own 16 per cent of the sharemarket.
The 2014 ASX Share Ownership Study also points out that 13 per cent of Australian share owners own shares listed on other exchanges (up from 7 per cent in 2002, but down from a peak of 19 per cent in 2006).
Australian share ownership rose dramatically between 1991 and 2004; in 1991, only 9.9 per cent of the adult population owned shares and total Australian share ownership (including retail managed funds) stood at only 21.8 per cent. Perhaps the memories of the 1987 sharemarket crash and the 1990–1991 recession were too vivid for Australians to trust the sharemarket back then. But two major factors sent the Australian shareholder population booming in the 1990s.
The first was a wave of privatisations, in which government-owned businesses were sold through the sharemarket. Prominent among these were Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas, CSL and the former Totalisator Agency Boards of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.
The second was a succession of demutualisations, in which mutually owned insurers and cooperatives converted their structure to share-based companies and listed on the sharemarket. In this way, AMP, National Mutual (which then became AXA Asia–Pacific, which merged its Australian business with AMP in March 2011 and sold its Asian business to the French parent, AXA), the NRMA (now Insurance Australia Group) and even the ASX itself joined the sharemarket. Both AMP and Telstra brought more than one million first-time investors to the sharemarket.
By 1999, 54 per cent of Australian adults owned shares (41 per cent direct), but this fell to 50 per cent (37 per cent direct) by 2002, in the aftermath of the 2000 ‘tech crash’. The recovery from that slump saw share ownership rise again, to 55 per cent (44 per cent direct) by 2004, making Australia then the world leader.
Thirty-eight per cent of adult males were direct share owners in 2014, down from 40 per cent in 2008. But the proportion of women who were direct share owners fell from 30 per cent in 2008 to 27 per cent in 2014.
The likelihood of share ownership increases with age: The peak level of share ownership is the 75+ age group. People with higher incomes are also more likely to own shares; almost half those earning more than $100,000 a year own shares.
The sharemarket has an exaggerated reputation as a sort of Wild West for money and therefore it can be a daunting place for a new investor. The sharemarket is a huge and impersonal financial institution; yet paradoxically, it’s also a market that’s alive with every human emotion – greed and fear, hope and defeat, elation and despair. The sharemarket can be a trap for fools or a place to create enormous wealth. Those who work in the industry see daily the best and worst of human behaviour. And you thought the sharemarket was simply a market in which shares were bought and sold!
The sharemarket is precisely that: A place for buying and selling shares. Approximately $4.4 billion worth of shares change hands every trading СКАЧАТЬ