Are you a trader or an investor?

Source: Stansberry Churchouse Research

Any kind of asset, whether it’s a stock, bond, ETF or commodity, can be held as a long-term investment or can be traded for a short-term profit. For the traders, they will buy and hold it anywhere from a fraction of a second to a few weeks. But, they all have one main objective – to make short-term gains on an investment.

The different types of trading strategies:

Momentum traders look for assets that are making a major move up or down and have a large number of shares trading hands. They hope the momentum will continue, and they hold the asset until the price reaches a pre-set level, which can take minutes or days.

Technical traders look for patterns or trends in stock, bond, index or currency charts. They make trades based on what those patterns have done in the past. They may not know anything about the asset they’re buying or selling. Their decision is solely based on what the chart looks like. There are 2 kinds of technical traders:

How are the expert money managers performing this year? Is anyone making money in 2018?

Source: FE Trustnet

The markets are not having a good year - but how are the fund managers doing: below we show the returns so far in 2018 - the best and the worst - interesting reading.

We highlight in the table below the sectors where every fund has made a loss as well as those sectors where a percentage of fund managers are in positive territory.

If you have any inquiries regarding your existing portfolios please make contact with Just Service.

All content provided is for informational purposes only. Just Service makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information contained or found by following any link. Just Service will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor the availability of it. Just Service will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. This policy is subject to change at any time.

The world's best and worst performing markets 2017-2018

Source: Stansberry Churchouse Research

A sharp correction in global stock markets of 5% like last week’s makes it important to step back and take stock of where markets have been in recent months… starting with last year.

In 2017, it was hard to find a market that did poorly

No stock market with total market cap greater than US$100 billion declined last year.

→ The worst performing markets (still in positive columns), United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Russia, were all major oil producers that suffered as the oil prices were weak.

→ The best performing markets, Vietnam, Austria, Poland, posted gains of over 50%.

• Vietnam with its soaring economy, recovering real estate market and strong investment inflows from China, was the market to be in last year.

Alternative Investment

There is another asset called alternative investment which is not the same as some common conventional investment types, such as stocks, bonds, and cash.  Alternative assets allow high net worth investors to put their money into private equity, hedge funds, futures, real estate, commodities, and derivatives.  These assets have high minimum investments and fee structures, compared to mutual funds and ETFs.  In addition, alternatives have low liquidity than most of the common investment assets.

8 ways Blockchain has been influential in our lives

You probably haven’t noticed… but blockchain has been infiltrating our daily lives. The Bitcoin blockchain is a network of computers, known as miners, that verify transactions. Every ten or so minutes the transactions are locked in place. Then another block is added, which forms a “chain” of secured and verified transactions. In short, blockchain is the basic building block that allows bitcoin to exist separately of authorities and central banks. 

Crypto Currencies: An Objective View

On January 7 of this year, the total crypto market valuations  peaked at approximately US$830 billion.

Today, some three months later, that market value has cratered to US$260 billion. That's a correction of nearly 70%.

This begs the question: Is the crypto market "finished"?

Let’s get this out of the way first. Many of the thousands of cryptos currently trading in the market on exchanges are “finished”. In fact, the vast majority of the 2017 generation of cryptos will die out.

Some will die out more quickly, like Centra (CTR) which took in over $30 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) last year, after being endorsed by none other than boxer/convicted woman-beater Floyd Mayweather.

HMRC is warning about offshore tax dodging

The countdown has begun before strong penalties, for anyone, who did not uncover his offshore

belongings to the HM Revenue & Customs. In fact, the agency is taking the time to inspect closely undeclared revenue abroad.

Source: www.lifehacker.co.uk

UK taxman recommended recently that any offshore assets have to be brought to light or the owner would face huge fines. “As is always the case, we will prosecute the most serious cases of tax evasion” warned the HMRC.

Penalties for the new policy could hit 200% according to the agency and would be set up from October 1st, 2018. This is a government move to prevent taxpayers from planning to get their assets in safe heavens and avoid what is owed to the state. The relevant consultation document legislates to extend periods of tax investigation for overseas income; it will be effective on May 14th, 2018. Investigation period limits would then triple from 4 to 12 years according to regulators. 

What is an emerging market - and should you invest?

Experts in the early 1980's firstly used the term “emerging market” to specify investment in developing economies. Emerging markets can include:

• BRIC countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, are those that had been booming during previous years

Source: Interlogic

Many emerging markets like South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong have a developed economy and a deep market.

Investing in emerging markets like Southeast Asia allows you to realise significant returns for a relatively tolerable amount risk. Since these economies have not yet matured, one can profit from numerous opportunities to grow its asset base or plan its retirement.

Aside from potential for growth, emerging markets provide various investors with diversification opportunities. Investing globally could help diversify your portfolio by balancing your total risk because economic recession in one region, including Europe, could be offset by expansion in another one.

Why should I invest in Asian real estate?

Six prominent countries in the region: China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam, will see a migration of 300 million people into cities over the next decade, accompanied by a growth in the middle class. China itself is experiencing a monumental increase in its middle-class population with 76% percent expected to make up China’s urban population by 2022. To put that into perspective, this will amount to 550 million people, making China’s middle class alone large enough to be the third most populous country in the world.

According to the World Economic Forum, India’s middle class will be larger than China’s by 2027. Think tank Brookings Institute suggests that by 2030, two-thirds of the global middle class will be living in Asia. This translates to a staggering increase in demand for housing, offices, factories, shops and a wealth of other public facilities and infrastructure types. About 67 billion square feet of housing will need to be but to accommodate these rural-urban migrants. This is equivalent to building 28 Londons over the next decade!

How you have an advantage over institutional investors

It’s not often that individual investors get the upper hand on the big institutional asset managers

Credit: Cristopher Minese/Mashable

There is one frontier asset class where you truly hold the advantage over the bigger guys and that is in cryptocurrencies. Right now the current total market capitalisation of the cryptocurrency space is approximately US$160 billion (Bitcoin accounts for around 45% of the total, followed by Ethereum at around 20%). This is still extremely small when you consider that it’s the same size as the market capitalisation of the Walt Disney Corporation or Intel.