Hedge Clippings | 14 November 2025

Any lingering chances of a rate cut before Christmas - already unlikely given the uptick in the September quarter CPI to 3.2% - went out of the window yesterday when the October Labour Force figures were released, showing unemployment had dropped to 4.3% after rising 4.5% in September. The number of unemployed people dropped by 17,000, while the ranks of the employed increased by 42,000.

If that's the case, there's no RBA meeting in January, so speculation will have to wait until February, but mid-2026 or even beyond is looking more likely.

At the same time, the chances of a rate cut in the US - widely expected just a few weeks ago - also dropped to around 50/50 as a result of conflicting economic signals, thanks in part to the lack of data as a result of the US Government shutdown, a weakening labour market, and concerns about sticky inflation. There's time for the odds to move either way before the next FOMC meeting due on the 9th-10th of December.

Meanwhile, among signs of stretched valuations and increasing equity market volatility - not only in the tech sector, but also amongst some local high-flying small-cap stocks we have taken a look at the performance of managed funds in the Australian Small to Mid-cap Peer Group. Not surprisingly, given the performance of the respective ASX200 and ASX Small Ordinaries indices, small caps outperformed large cap funds.

The average return of all 97 funds in the small cap universe, broadly in line with the index over 1 - 5 years, will give encouragement to those who advocate passive investing via ETF's with their accompanying low fees.

By filtering the list using AFM's Star Rankings, and only selecting funds with 4 or 5 Stars over 3 & 5 years, we created a portfolio of Top 10 funds which significantly outperformed the index.

Using the same process to look at those funds with only 1 or 2 Stars, to come up with the bottom 10 funds, the result was equally predictable.

Obviously, as in stock selection, manager selection is essential. Given that past performance cannot be guaranteed, how does one look at historical fund performance?

We would suggest ignoring (or at least not jumping at) one-year performance. It can be misleading unless 3, 5 or 7 years is equally good. Taking 5 years covers a sufficient period, and then ensuring that the shorter-term performance is consistent.

AFM's Star Ranking enables filtering on both performance and risk/volatility, and while not in-depth, it provides an initial, and significantly effective, and fast process to sort the wheat from the chaff and then allow concentrated analysis of the resulting funds.

Of significant interest was the analysis of the funds at the bottom of the list based on recommended research ratings. In spite of these having a track record of being in the 3rd or 4th quartile performance over 1, 3, and 5 years, most of them came with "recommended" and in a couple of cases "highly recommended" research ratings from Zenith, Lonsec, Morningstar, or SQM.

In fact, only one of them (yes, 1 out of 10) didn't have a rating.

Which leads us to the question: What value can you put on (paid) research?

News | Insights

New Funds on FundMonitors.com

Research house scrutiny needed | Fundmonitors.com

Trip Insights: The US | 4D Infrastructure

October 2025 Performance News

DS Capital Growth Fund

Bennelong Emerging Companies Fund

Quay Global Real Estate Fund (Unhedged)

Bennelong Twenty20 Australian Equities Fund

Bennelong Long Short Equity Fund

Airlie Australian Share Fund

Cyan C3G Fund

ECCM Systematic Trend Fund

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What Really Causes a Market Crash

Marcus Today

October 2025

4-minute read

What could tip the market over? Well, let me ask you this question - what caused the 1987 crash?

Don't know? No, you don't know because there wasn't one specific reason for the 1987 crash.

When the dam cracks, you don't go looking at the first drop that came through the first crack and analyse it to find out why it cracked. Because the reason the dam cracked is that, in the year and a half prior to the 1987 crash, the Australian market went up over 100%.

What cracked the dam and caused the crash was a build-up of pressure over a long period of time, which eventually broke. Analysing the first drop - why it happened - was irrelevant.

We were sitting in Buckmaster & Moore in the UK, and we had one guy on the desk who was a young bloke.

He had a client in the US, and doing a few tickets in those days was meaningful because the commissions were about 1.6%, and they went up if the order was larger. Anyway, this young guy started ripping off red tickets - red ticket, red ticket - writing out another one, couldn't write fast enough.

He was on the direct line to the dealer at one particular institution - red ticket, another red ticket, another order, another order.

By lunchtime, the partners, who sat on the plinth higher than everybody else (such was the hierarchy in those days), took us all out to lunch at the Mithras Bar for pints of Pimm's to celebrate how much business he'd done.

We came back from lunch, and he started writing more red tickets - more and more. The hilarity and joy turned to concern. The partners started ringing up people in the industry to check whether these orders were legitimate.

They rang the bosses of the dealer at the fund manager, and they said, "Yes, it's okay - keep doing the orders. They're legitimate. He's not a rogue trader."

So, the first thing the partners did was start selling their own shares. Then they started ringing their best clients and saying, "This fund manager's selling - you need to start selling, because the market is way up there."

And this big institutional fund manager started to sell.

Before you knew where you were, everybody was trying to get ahead of everybody else selling.

It turned out that these partners had rung other brokers to ask, "Are you, by any chance, getting a particular institution selling a lot of stock?" And they said yes. It turned out that this institution, which was US-based, had sat in its ivory tower in New York and decided it was going to reduce its equity exposures across the world.

That meant, in the UK, it had so many billion pounds of stock to sell. It passed the order to the UK office, and the UK office, in order to get it done, had to go to every broker and give them a whole load of orders - and everything cascaded from there.

That's what starts a sell-off - a big institution, part of the herd, takes the lead and starts selling.

So, what we have to watch out for when the market's up here - and we're not in a bubble at the moment, but we're certainly elevated - is this:

For some reason, and it won't necessarily be logical or obvious (and the guy who writes the morning report in the newspaper won't know, but he'll make something up), someone is going to sit in an asset allocation meeting in New York or Singapore or Sydney and decide that their funds management group, which is running hundreds of billions, is going to start exiting Big Tech or exiting equities.

And before you know it, you're going to see sell orders coming into the market.

The moment the herd - already sensitive to a top - hears that, it'll join in, and the market will cascade.

It may not need a catalyst. There may be no headline that day. It'll just start.

If it hasn't really got a catalyst, it probably won't last long - it'll probably come back pretty quickly. But it can happen when the market's under pressure, as it is now, with this year's performance and the benefit of the doubt still being given to Big Tech earnings.

All the Big Tech stocks are priced for perfection - and many others as well. We're vulnerable to some big fund manager deciding to sell.

And everybody will chase them.

We're doing 200 miles an hour with our hair on fire. Fund managers aren't stupid - they know one of them will change their mind.

Look out for that day.

DISCLAIMER: This content is for general information purposes only and does not constitute personal financial advice. Please consider your own circumstances or seek professional advice before making investment decisions.

Funds operated by this manager:

Marcus Today Equity Income SMA , Marcus Today Growth SMA

Thirsty servers, hungry investors: how sustainable is AI?

abrdn

October 2025

Funds operated by this manager:

abrdn Sustainable Asian Opportunities Fund , abrdn Emerging Opportunities Fund , abrdn Sustainable International Equities Fund , abrdn Global Corporate Bond Fund (Class A)