Welcome to the Equity Mates Summer Series. As we take a break over the Christmas period, we will be releasing a series of deep-dive episodes to keep you going until we're back in the New Year. A couple of weeks ago, we randomly generated 5 ASX ticker codes and will discuss one company per episode.

In this episode we discuss Baby Bunting (ASX Code: BBN), Australia's largest specialist baby-goods retailer.

[We know the audio quality isn't great in patches. We're making sure it'll be better for the remainder of our summer series. Thanks for bearing with us.]

In this episode, you will learn:

• Details about Baby Bunting as a company

• About Baby Bunting's major competitors and the major changes that happened in the speciality baby retail industry last year

• How Baby Bunting is preparing to compete with online retailers like Amazon

• How the US Speciality Baby Retailers dealt with Amazon's intrusion into their market

• The two key risks Bryce sees about investing in this industry

• The company's key financials and how they compare to previous years

• Why the company saw revenue (sales) rise by 9% but net profit fall by 25%

• What happened to cause the company's share price to jump 38% the day it released its latest Annual Report

• Baby Bunting's future plans

• Perhaps most importantly, where the boys found this information

Stocks and Resources Discussed:

• Baby Bunting Website (ASX: BBN)

• Baby Bunting ASX Website

• Baby Bunting Yahoo Finance

• Baby Bunting Investor Relations Page

• Baby Bunting FY18 Annual Report

• Baby Bunting Recent Investor Presentation

• Motley Fool's page on Baby Bunting

We are so excited to bring you another episode in our Expert Investor series. Our guest this week is someone who we have been following for a couple of years now, and have longed to have on the show. His name is Jesse Felder.

Jesse is an ex-Wall Street trader, starting his career at Bear Stearns (without even studying Business or Finance) - the largest investment bank on Wall Street at the time. He then went on co-found a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, before moving into financial media, and running 'The Felder Report'.

Jesse's views resonate with us, and if you've listened to our episode 'The Buy-And-Hold Cult' then you will have heard Jesse speak before.

In this episode you will learn:

• Jesse's number one thing that beginners should understand better about markets

• What Jesse's first investment was, and what lead him to that decision

• The worst piece of advice he's ever received

• Why all investors should be wary of recency bias

• Jesse's current approach to investing, given equity valuations are at historic highs

• Why Equity Mates might be wrong about the logic of index investing

• Why Gold still has potential, and why it should be part of every investor's portfolio

Stocks and resources discussed:

• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator - Edwin Lefèvre

• The Felder Report

• Superinvestors And The Art Of Worldly Wisdom

• Wall Street Journal

Before we take a break for Christmas and the New Year period, we take some time to tie a few things off and have a final quick discussion on the state of the market.

But don't panic! We will still be releasing episodes over summer. Each week we're going to deep dive into one random company from the Australian Stock Exchange to see if we can find anything interesting. We'll discuss how we researched the companies, look at the balance sheets and highlight any pros or cons to look out for.

A massive thanks to all of you, our listeners, for what has been an awesome year for Equity Mates Investing Podcast! To those that have been with us since day one, a massive thanks, and to those that have joined us along the way, a massive thank you as well. We have some huge news for 2019, so stay tuned, and have a safe holiday period.

Bryce and Alec

First episode of the month means the next instalment of the Equity Mates Book Club. We're pretty excited to talk about this book - an investing classic - The Little Book That (Still) Beats The Market by Joel Greenblatt.

Greenblatt has serious bona fides as an investor. Running his fund Gotham Capital between 1985 and 2006, he returned an average of 40% per year! That would've turned his initial $7 million into $8.2 billion in just 21 years.

Greenblatt wrote this book for his kids, to teach them the basics of investing. The great news is you don't need to be the kid of a once-in-a-generation investor to understand the concepts. The concepts he discusses are straight forward, and when backtested consistently beat the market.

To get more information on this book, and to join us and read along with our book club head to: https://equitymates.com/bookclub/

End of the month can only mean one thing - Equity Mates ask us anything. Once again we've collected some of our favourite questions from our website, social media and email and will answer them together on the show.

In this episode we answers questions on:

• Individual stock picking or ETFs

• Cyber Monday

• The actual mechanics of how shares are bought once you select 'buy'

• Differences between major indexes

• The key things to keep in mind when thinking about superannuation

• Why Woodside (ASX: WPL) has seen price declines despite stronger gas prices

As always you can ask questions for us to answer next month. Just hit us up on social media or go to the ask us anything section of our website.

Since we began this podcast in January 2017, global markets have been on an incredible run. 2017 was an uninterrupted climb higher and higher, and aside from one hiccup in February, the first half of 2018 looked much the same. Word on the street was that our podcast was a good luck charm: as long as Bryce was talking, markets would keep rising. Alas, it appears this is not the case. Recently markets have started to fall pretty hard. Most of the time we try and avoid talking about the day-to-day movements of the market (because we're trying to think long-term). However, as this drop continues into a downturn across the world, we figured we were well overdue to discuss it.

In this episode you will learn:

• What has happened to the major market indices in Australia, USA, China, London and Germany.

• How some of the biggest name companies including Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet (Google) and GE, have performed recently.

• How other assets have performed - cryptocurrency, gold, oil, credit and property

• The role the end of Quantitative Easing has played in this market downturn

• Some of the different recommendations you can find online on how to invest in a market downturn... and what Bryce and Alec think of them

• How Bryce and Alec are positioning their personal investments

Stocks and Resources Discussed:

• Stocks

• Facebook (NASDAQ: FB)

• General Electric (NYSE: GE)

• Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)

• Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)

• 3 Articles on 'How to Play Downturn'

• The Street

• Investopedia

• CNBC

• Inverse ETF's

• Please ensure you do your own research and get your own advice before following Bryce into these trades

• Proshares UltraPro Short NASDAQ (NASDAQ: SQQQ)

• Proshares UltraPro Short S&P 500 (NYSE: SPXU)

• US Equities Strong Bear Fund (ASX: BBUS)

• Australian Equities Bear Fund (ASX: BEAR)

Knowing what to do with your cash while you're perhaps saving to invest it in stocks or compiling it to buy the next dip, is sometimes hard. You might also have an emergency fund, or you're saving for a house. In such a low-interest rate environment, putting your cash in the bank doesn't really give you the greatest of returns.

This episode we explore an alternative to putting your cash into the bank. We look at peer-to-peer lending, with CEO of RateSetter Australia, Daniel Foggo. Peer-to-peer lending is lagging in popularity compared with Europe and the US, but people are starting to catch on. Peer-to-peer lending is simply that - you lend you money to someone who wants to borrow some money, and they agree to pay it back, with interest over a period of time. This process is managed by RateSetter. If we focus on the investor, the advantage is that you can put your cash to work, over 1 month, 3 or 5 year periods, at rates up to 9+% (at time of writing). There is criticism around the concept of peer-to-peer lending and the industry, and it is certainly not without any risk, but is an alternative to the banks.

In this episode you will learn:

• what peer-to-peer lending is

• the mechanisms of RateSetter and why they can provide rates better than the banks

• what drove Dan to start RateSetter and some of the challenges faced setting up the business

• the major advantages of peer-to-peer lending

• the major risks of peer-to-peer lending

Stocks and resources discussed:

• RateSetter Website

Cricket is back on the TV (well sort of, we hear its on Foxtel) and Coles and Woolies have brought out their Christmas lines. That means Christmas is right around the corner. Over summer we'll be taking a break from our normal Equity Mates schedule and instead will be presenting our 'Summer Series'. In each episode we'll be doing a deep dive into one randomly selected company. Listen to this episode to find out what companies we'll be looking at (and how we struggled to select them).

However, Christmas isn't the only exciting milestone just around the corner. 2019 promises two massive Initial Public Offerings - Uber and Lyft. The ride-sharing rivals will be going head-to-head in a completely different arena - the public markets. In this episode we break down what's happening, what the companies are being valued at, and most importantly - which would we rather invest in.

85 episodes in, who would have thought?! We've learnt a lot over the past 18 months, and the Equity Mates community has grown significantly, along the way.

Firstly, a huge thank you to everyone for joining the journey, as we all learn to invest. We wouldn't be where we are today without you all.

Secondly, with many joining the show in the last few months, Christmas and the 100th episode just around the corner, we thought it would be a great opportunity to revisit some of our Basic 101 episodes we've done, and wrap them up into a 'what you need to know to get started' episode.

In this episode you will learn:

• What your investment options are when your start

• Why we think stocks are king

• The 3 main ways you can invest in stocks

• Why the share market is the greatest wealth-creating machine known to man

• The importance of keeping track of fees

Stocks and resources discussed:

• Basics 101 episodes - Essential Learnings

• 4. How To Buy Shares

• 17. From balance sheets to supercomputers: The 5 Styles of Investing

• 45. $1000 to $4.3 million | Fees

• 50. WTF Is An ETF? | ETF 101 BetaShares

• 66. The first decision every investor makes | Investing Platforms

If you haven't already heard of the 'buy and hold' strategy, then this is the episode for you. If you have, then this is certainly the episode for you. For a while now, we've discussed the advantages, and disadvantages, of buying stocks with a very long-term focus, as generally speaking, the market does well over time. If you had bought the index right before the Global Financial Crisis, for example, and held through the crash, then you would be well up on your initial investment. The buy-and-hold strategy.

From around 2008, we've seen a rise in the popularity of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), across the globe, as many people move there money from active management, into ETFs, which are a more passive investing approach. In some cases, they've done this thinking that, over time, no matter what happens, the market will always go up, and you will make money. Not all cases, but some. And this is what we discuss today.

One of our favourite investors, and finance commentators, is Jesse Felder. An ex-investment banker, and billion-dollar hedge fund manager, Jesse is well respected and has many strong opinions on the direction of the marker. In one of his recent interviews, he discusses what he as coined as 'the buy and hold cult'. We give our two-cents on his comments.

In this episode you will learn:

• What Jesse means by the term 'buy-and-hold cult'

• If you are part of the cult!

• About Japan's stock market recovery

• Our opinions on passive investing

Stocks and resources discussed:

• The Felder Report