Finance Podcasts

There are lots of finance podcasts listed in iTunes, PodcastAlley and PodcastPickle, and I only want to recommend those where I've actually listened to at least one episode. On the Finance News front, the most comprehensive local (Australian) daily podcast is Alan Kohler's Market Report, published by the Sydney Morning Herald.

For more general advice, I was impressed with Gannon on Investing. He starts most episodes with a "rant" on some area of investing theory or philosophy, then talks about an unknown US company. While the company specifics would be hard to act on from Australia, the rant is quite interesting. In his Diversification podcast he made the excellent point that your approach to diversification will depend on your view about whether you are able to pick stocks that consistently out-perform the market. If you don't have the time or energy to devote to careful stock picking, then you might as well buy an index fund and be fully diversified. If you're going to pick stocks to out-perform the market, then too much diversification will drag your returns down to the level of market returns.

Getting into the swing of things

The semester is well and truly started, and I think I'm getting back into the routine. This semester I'm teaching a new course -- Personal Wealth Management. This class is a first year level course with no pre-requisites. The basic idea is to cover personal financial planning: the various investments available, how to look at risk and return, tax planning and retirement planning. It's a lot of fun to teach because it's an elective, so everyone is there because they are interested in the subject. There's also a wide range of background among the students -- from first year psych students who want to be able to manage their credit card to third year commerce students who know the theory behind everything and want more practical details. Since it's a first year subject, I have to pitch it at the rank beginner in investing while still throwing out something of interest for the more experienced students.

If you're one of my students and you've found your way to this blog, please leave me a comment -- I'd be interested to see how many students make it over here without any publicity in class.

For the rest of the semester I'll try to post here a couple of times each week and will discuss current financial news as well as resources on the web for learning more about finance. My next post (probably Friday) will start with an annotated list of finance related podcasts.