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What You Need to Know About Finance & Robo Advice

Business Tips
Ted richards

Hub Australia

30th October 2018

Hub Southern Cross is home to hundreds of varied growing companies, each fuelled by motivated and skilled team members helping their businesses grow.

Ted Richards became Six Park’s Director of Business Development through his strong interest in equity analysis and analytics in the finance and investment industry.

As robo-advice is still in its infancy in Australia, Six Park is a leader in the field.

Read more: Business growth with Six Park’s Ted Richards

3 things everyone should know about finance

1. An important thing to know from the beginning is that there’s good debt and bad debt. Unfortunately, some bad debt can spiral, so I wish everyone had an awareness of how bad debt can be, and the importance of paying that down.

2. The power of compounding returns and interest in finance, especially the importance of young people making decisions around their superannuation, so they can harness the full benefits of compound interest.

3. The importance of diversification in investment.

“The only free lunch you’ll ever get” according to Nobel Prize winner Harry Markowitz.

It can be more expensive than putting all your eggs in one basket, but there are ways to get low cost diversified investments.

What’s the history of Robo Advice?

robo advice

Robo advice originated in the US on the back of the GFC, where people were frustrated with the traditional model and overpaying for underperformance.

Australia’s been behind the curve in terms of robo advice, but what we’re seeing now is pressure on the fees businesses have been charging for decades.

Many investment managers can’t justify the fees they charge anymore, which guides people to robo-advisors like us who charge a fraction yet deliver great performance.

Read more: How to Make Sure Your Business is Investable

Investment is never going to be completely automated – no matter how good technology gets, there’s always important roles face-to-face, and oversight needed in monitoring algorithms and relationships.

What we do at Six Park is a privilege.

We’re trusted with peoples savings, and the nature of the finance market is sometimes volatile, which needs human communication and explanation.

What do you wish you knew at the start of your career?

I had naïve overconfidence in my ability to pick stocks. Unfortunately, I chose a few shares I wouldn’t have if I had my time again – but it’s a learning curve a lot of people have to go through.

That’s what’s brought me to Six Park, and what I like about them – you get professional advice and management at a fraction of the price others are charging.

Investment is a career path where you can never know it all – even when I’m older there’ll always be lots for me to learn.

What I’ve learned from my mentors in the industry is that you need a constant, healthy amount of paranoia.

If you get in a comfort zone while overseeing your own investments, it has a risk of backfiring – constant monitoring is a necessity you need to embrace, which is relevant to a lot of industries.

Working under John Sevior I learned an incredible amount about discipline, staying in your circle of competence and constantly being open to new ideas and opportunities to learn.

Read more: Brand You: What Are You Known For? – Happiness Concierge

How is Six Park growing?

Six Park helps individuals with low-cost professional investment advice. We conduct a risk assessment online, and with the help of robo advice we invest clients in the market according to their risk profile.

Our clients have their own globally diversified portfolio over 7 asset classes with their investments overseen by our own investment committee.

For the calendar year of 2017 our growth portfolio returned 11.2%.

As a business, Six Park initially focussed on a B2C model. With that section of the business now running sustainably and smoothly, Six Park has now focussed on the next phase of the business – B2B.

Six Park are partnering up with institutions that want to utilise their robo-investment technology to offer it to their clients, helping other businesses attract and engage those they may previously have had to turn away.

In the last few months, Six Park have grown our team with three new members.

The business and industry are growing and evolving, with plans of rolling out new products in the future.

What we’re seeing is that a lot of robo-advisors have grown and evolved quite quickly, and we have to do the same and adapt.

Read more: How to Plan for Business Growth

Being able to recognise opportunities is essential – one-third of our clients are self-managed super fund trustees and there are constantly legislative changes that could happen there.

Our responsibility for those clients is to ensure their quality of life in their retirement, and that’s a different offering compared to clients in a different life stage, where we’re trying to work out ways to help them save for a house or to start a family.


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