Monthly Archives: September 2009

Bonuses and finance

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Peter Martin tweets a reference to this blog post outlining Dan Pink’s well documented argument that bonuses might be good for productivity for simple tasks, and that they’re at best a double edged sword for complex tasks, where intrinsic motivation is more important, and bonuses can either reinforce or undermine intrinsic motivation, depending on a bunch of circumstances that (I suspect) are pretty context dependent and are not particularly well understood.

I’ve always wondered whether the success of the industry fund sector – which is not profit driven or perhaps I should say much less profit driven than the commercial fund sector – is a piece of quite strong evidence to this effect. I’m not that close to it, but my strong impression is that the industry funds have been more innovative with their investment strategy and generally speaking, intelligently innovative. They’ve been smart in diversifying into non-traditional assets and of course they’ve not charged the fees that the others charge – while generating as good or better performance.

The Electoral Reform Dream Paper

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The Electoral Reform Greenpaper has mostly received coverage for the two particularly stupid proposals that are raised: lowering the age of franchise and replacing the paper ballot with electronic or — much worse — internet voting.

Robert Merkel points out at LP that there is an almost universal condemnation of the latter idea by IT security professionals. Probably because creating a system that satisfies security, integrity and the secrecy of the ballot is impossible.

By “impossible” we don’t mean “expensive” or “highly impractical”. We mean impossible. It simply cannot be done. The requirements are mutually exclusive.

Of course the green paper covers much more than wishful thinking from non-security professionals, including voting systems, legal arrangements, AEC structure, enrolment arrangements and so forth. They’re asking for submissions up until 27 November. Here’s mine (PDF).

Why we needed a fiscal stimulus

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There are two interesting pieces in todays blogs and newspaper articles.

The first is from Robert Reich

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2009/09/is-government-helping-or-hurting-business.html

He makes the evident point that the Dow is hitting the 10,000 mark because, while market-induced spending is well down, government-induced spending is up and holding up the US economy.

The other feature is by Alan Wood in todays Australian

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26116016-7583,00.html

He warns that, despite the firm regulatory structure in Australia, our securitisation market shut down along with those of the US, Europe, Britain. Why? Because our market suffered from what is referred to as broad damage the fact that US and other investors shied away from all asset-backed securities regardless of their quality

This must put paid to two arguments: firstly, that the US economy could have survived as well without any fiscal expansion; and, secondly, that Australia’s stronger regulatory institutions could have prevented us from running into a financial malaise.

Do financial advisors improve portfolio performance?

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Short answer? No.

Do financial advisors aid their clients in making wise investments? This column shows that investors who delegate their portfolio management achieve better results. But thats due to the fact that advisors tend to be matched with richer, older investors. In fact, financial advisors tend to lower returns and raise risk relative to clients who manage their own investment.

More here.