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.