I recently had the opportunity to visit the United States and attend the Annual General Meeting for Berkshire Hathaway. For those who know me this was probably one of the greatest moments of my life! You see when I was 11, I picked up this book which was called Buffettology and ever since then Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have become investment idols of mine. The textile; loss making company they bought way back in the 1960’s Berkshire Hathaway, has now grown into a US$400 billion conglomerate and is run from little old Omaha, Nebraska. Every year over 30,000 people descend on Omaha to listen to the two great investors talk and answer questions about the state of the US and global economies.

Towards the end of 2017 global stock markets cheered yet another record year of positive results with the close to 9-year bull market well entrenched in everyone’s psyche. Now in every good bull market there are always signs of excesses and none are more obvious than in the art world.

‘Sacrebleu’ is what I’m sure the famous Leonardo da Vinci would be yelling from his tomb in Amboise, France after his work ‘Salvator Mundi’ was sold for close to US$450 million (well in excess of it’s pre-sale estimate of US$100 million).

The importance of US interest rates is sometimes misunderstood particularly here in Australia. As the dominant force in financial markets, the direction of US interest rates can cause reverberations across the globe. Decisions made by the US Federal Reserve influence the cost of borrowing, the return on savings and are an important component of the total return of many securities across the world. As part of the documents released each meeting by the US Federal Reserve, a dot plot diagram depicting the direction of interest rate movements has become a lead indicator of future interest rate policy decisions.

On any given day, it may seem as though financial markets may be on the verge of Armageddon. Media companies love to sell stories and what better way than to play on people’s emotions and their finances. Headlines such as “$50 billion wiped from local stocks” are common place when the ASX suffers a sell off. Most often these corrections concern some sort of geopolitical event. Whether it is war with North Korea, conflict in the Middle East, acts of terrorism or even a clueless President. People need to understand that these are normal and in fact essential to markets.

The term the Lucky Country is certainly appropriate to Australia after posting over 25 years of continued economic growth, Australia remains in an illustrious global group of countries. Australia’s latest GDP numbers were released recently which showed the country’s GDP growth accelerated 1.1% in the last quarter of 2016. This result means that the country is on a year for year growth rate of 2.4%.