Markets will continue to digest the news of Kevin Warsh's nomination as Fed Chair this week, while monetary policy decisions loom in the UK, Europe and Australia. It will be a holiday-shortened week here in New Zealand, with markets closed on Friday for Waitangi Day. Ahead of that, we'll get the results of another dairy auction as well as the December quarter labour force report. The international reporting season will be in full swing too, with more than 150 S&P 500 companies due to announce results.

There were plenty of lessons for investors in 2025, as is the case every time we close the book on a calendar year. However, there was one in particular that stood out, because if investors didn't do this they left some significant gains on the table.

There's plenty to watch this week, including the first Federal Reserve meeting of the year. However, investors will get the chance to refocus on what matters most for share prices, and that's corporate earnings. More than 100 S&P 500 companies are set to announce results, including four of the so-called Magnificent 7 cohort. We'll hear from Meta, Microsoft, Tesla and Apple this week, which collectively represent some 16% of the S&P 500 by size.

It’s been prediction season on Wall Street, with all the gurus consulting their crystal balls to firm up their forecasts for where the S&P 500 index will finish 2026. Let's take a closer look at how the market is expected to perform this year, how that compares with history, and how investors should think about these.

A busy week looms locally, with the highlight likely to be the latest quarterly inflation report on Friday. If it comes in above RBNZ forecasts for a 2.7% annual gain, which might this mean for the path of interest rates?

While almost every country in the world has been reducing interest rates from multi-decade highs, Japan has been doing the exact opposite. The Japanese economy isn’t as dominant as it once was, but it is critically important in terms of global financial markets, especially for foreign exchange and bond yields. We’ve seen some big moves in bond yields, with the 10-year Japanese Government Bond yield rising above two per cent for the first time since 1999. We need to keep a close eye on how the landscape is changing, and watch for ripples across other markets too.

Will the OCR start to rise again this year, how might sharemarkets perform and where is the NZ dollar headed? Nobody has a perfectly working crystal ball, but its a useful process to go through to help firm up your thinking nonetheless. Despite the futility of trying to forecast where financial markets are headed, here's our contribution to the noise!

Welcome to a new year! Let's tackle an important and popular topic that every self-respecting kiwi has a strong opinion about - the housing market. Why have prices done nothing for three years, is 2026 the year of the housing market recovery, and what should prospective homeowners or investors be expecting?

There’s just three trading days to go in 2025, and that’s all. We’re pretty much at the end of 2025, so let's look back on how returns from most of the main asset classes stacked up and make a few observations for investors.

Inflation is back the target band and while it's not dead and buried, it's at least contained. However, that doesn't mean we can declare the cost-of-living crisis over. The things with inflation is that it measures the rate of change in prices, not the level of prices. Let's talk about why that matters.