At the December Meeting of Investment held in our U3A room, winners of the two small competitions that we have held throughout the year were announced.

Les Rodgers won the Monthly Selection competition whilst Malcolm Sanders won the Long Term selection.  Both winners were awarded the usual jar of jam.

During the latter part of 2021 Malcolm Sanders had asked members of Investment to suggest a portfolio worth $300,000 for a new retiree. The idea was that we ran with these portfolios for four months, and then saw which portfolio made the biggest increase. We had five people who participated and the winner was Les Rodgers who gained another jar of jam and a loaf of bread to go with it. Thank you Malcolm for running this competition.

During the first part of the afternoon Malcolm showed us an aspect of his share dealing, and also accessed two videos for us to watch.

After afternoon tea we looked at nine shares to watch. These different companies came from the Materials, Information Technology and Health Care sectors and all had interesting aspects which made them worthwhile putting on a watch list for a couple of months.

As this is our last report for 2021, may I take this opportunity to wish you all a Happy Christmas. Hope to see you all again in 2022.

Margaret Jenkins

​The September meeting of Investment was held by Zoom. We welcomed 10 participants including Pat Richardson from Wangaratta who is conducting a group similar to our group through U3A Wangaratta.

Australian equities marked the end of the current Reporting Season in August with an eleven month run of gains, the longest streak in 78 years. We noted the increased dividends paid by a number of companies, including the large miners which had profited from a high iron ore price for an extended period. We noted that the Iron Ore price had decreased considerably in the last month.

We discussed the fact that large amounts of cash were available for shareholders through the Buy Backs offered by both Commonwealth Bank and Woolworths. Wesfarmers were also having a return of capital to shareholders.

We looked at 10 franked income stock ideas for Australian Investors discussed in a special report by Morningstar. These were projected returns for 2021/2022 and needed to be assessed against current charts for each stock.

​The next meeting of Investment will be by Zoom on Friday 1st October 2021 at 2pm. The reason for this is that the Senior Citizens are playing bowls on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday afternoons, and there is a limit of 20 people in the whole building at any time. An invitation to the Zoom meeting will be sent out nearer the time.
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Margaret Jenkins

​During June we have had two Zoom Investment meetings with eight members attending each meeting.  We have been able to use the Screen Share facility of Zoom and show our members CommSec as part of the meeting. This makes the Zoom meeting much more like our previous face to face meetings and seemed to be appreciated by everyone.

In the second session we looked at the use of conditional trading, and discussed the benefits and downside of using it as a tool in share trading. We also mentioned that the end of the financial year was approaching, and that this was a suitable time to assess any capital gains. 

We mentioned the volatility index which this year showed a large spike in March and a smaller more recent spike in June. These spikes are as a result of the economic disruption caused by the COVID pandemic. It will be interesting to see if the volatility index settles back to a more normal pattern later this year.

The next Zoom Investment meeting will be on Friday 3rd July 2020 at 2pm. An invitation to the meeting will be sent out the previous day. 
 
Margaret Jenkins

At the December meeting of Investment we had a special segment on Managed Bonds presented by one of our members Les Rodgers. Les told us about the variety of Funds that are available in Australia including Mutual Funds and Market Neutral funds. Thank you Les for a well prepared and very informative segment.

Malcolm Sanders supplied us with a hand out from Market Index showing current high yielding shares available on the Australian Stock market.

We also looked at some shares which have shown considerable capital improvement over the past six and 12 month periods.

Congratulations to Nola McDonald who won the Monthly Share selection competition which we ran during 2019. This means back to back wins of the Monthly competition for Nola which is quite an achievement.
 
Congratulations also to Margaret Walshe who won the Yearly selection with Nanosonics Limited.  Both competitions keep us informed about how various shares are progressing during the year as well as being a bit of fun and keeping our competitive spirits alive.

Thank you to all members of Investment group for their continuing comments during our sessions.  Best wishes to everyone for a happy, healthy and enjoyable 2020. Hope to see you all next year.
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Margaret Jenkins