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When investors are confident, greater risk is taken, greater debt levels are serviced, and greater liquidity is prevalent. And the opposite is also true.  The response to a loss of confidence is to reduce risk, pay down debt, and “batten down the hatches”. Liquidity can quickly get tight.

When the ANZ-Roy Morgan Australian Consumer Confidence survey for the week to Sunday 22 March 2026 was released, I thought it was worth highlighting, given consumer confidence fell to its lowest level since records began in 1973 (1). Continue…

by David Buckland Posted in Insightful Insights, Market commentary.

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As Agentic artificial intelligence (AI)’s threat to jobs spreads ever wider, the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is shifting from theory to, frighteningly, a central pillar of Silicon Valley’s vision for our future.

Love him or hate him now, OpenAI’s Sam Altman was the first to publicly discuss a UBI, announcing in early 2016 that Y Combinator would fund a multi-year, large-scale UBI study to prepare for an automated future. Elon Musk followed later that year, saying in a CNBC interview that UBI is “going to be necessary” because “there will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better.” Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Global markets, Insightful Insights, Market commentary, Technology & Telecommunications.

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by Roger Montgomery Posted in Global markets, Investing Education, Market commentary, Market Valuation, Radio.

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This morning on ABC Newcastle Mornings with Paul Turton, I discussed how markets respond to geopolitical shocks and why investors should keep their focus on underlying fundamentals. While conflicts can cause short-term volatility, history shows markets often recover as investors anticipate recovery spending and economic growth.

Beyond the headlines, markets are still grappling with elevated valuations, the potential disruption from artificial intelligence, and weaker economic signals such as the recent U.S. jobs report. I also noted that prolonged conflict could lift the cost of oil, fertiliser, plastics and energy, which can flow through to higher prices across the broader economy. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Market commentary, Radio.

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I recently wrote an article for The Australian, titled, How AI boom and a liquidity crisis are threatening to upend markets. It garnered quite a few comments highlighting a range of opinions about where artificial intelligence (AI) is headed and where it might be taking humanity.

The “AI Revolution” is being sold to us as either a sleek, inevitable future of effortless productivity or one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse bringing destruction to humanity, first by laying waste to the workforce. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Market commentary, Technology & Telecommunications.

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Recognising this isn’t the first time I have expressed concern about the ultimate fate of humans in an artificial intelligence (AI) world, I pondered several AI-related questions over the weekend. 

The first is that if many, and maybe most, of us are using AI already – and some very effectively – with existing infrastructure, how many more data centres do we really need? Flipping the question, if the competition among AI agent providers is driving the cost of AI access down to zero – many use Google’s Gemini daily, and it costs nothing – for what purpose are a thousand more data centres really being built?

The second question is related: AI tools are already so ubiquitous and cheap they amount to a commodity. Consequently, AI infrastructure players may believe that to make any money, they’ll have to race to be the first to create something dangerously powerful. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Market commentary, Technology & Telecommunications.

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I joined Juliette Saly on Ausbiz to discuss how AI-generated content is becoming so hyper realistic that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality.

For investors, this pace of improvement highlights both the extraordinary power of the technology and the speed at which competitive advantages can erode. If breakthroughs are emerging globally and alternative approaches reduce reliance on massive chip and data centre buildouts, the dominance and pricing power currently assumed for some AI leaders may not prove as durable as markets expect. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Technology & Telecommunications, TV Appearances.

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I think a lot about how higher-yielding income products, such as the Aura Private Credit Income Fund and the Aura Core Income Fund, might fit in a retiree’s portfolio and how to articulate that. 

It’s a challenge to explain, primarily because we don’t know the future. We don’t know how long we’ll live; we don’t know when/if the stock market might crash, and therefore we don’t know how much we can withdraw each year from our retirement savings because we don’t know how much we will spend in retirement, nor how much we’ll actually have left each year.

It leaves many investors paralysed; “I’ll worry about it tomorrow.” Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Aura Group, Investing Education.

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Business is like a piano accordion. Sectors and individual companies expand and grow, then contract, necessarily becoming smaller than they once were. If you keep this metaphor in mind when investing, it can help you understand the business’s stage of life. 

There are exceptions, of course – those businesses that rise above the cycle of invention, adoption, scale, saturation, disruption and destruction, but they are few and far between. Most will eventually reach a natural limit to their size, and then they either sit there, churning customers for lower margins, or are disrupted, or their customers move on to the next trend. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Market commentary.

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While Israel pursues a high-stakes military campaign and President Trump plays ‘Deal or No Deal” with an Iranian regime that might not even have a leader in charge, investors are doing the only sensible thing left: Hiding.

With the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s ‘asymmetric’ threat to the Strait of Hormuz continuing and the U.S. increasing its on-the-ground footprint as America’s 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit arrives in the Middle East, the risk of a recession has also risen. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Global markets, Insightful Insights, Investing Education, Market commentary.

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