Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

ASF and Financial Advice

Well, obviously, if I'm not invited, I'm generally not going to be interested in your dinner.
However, on this occasion, and, as you have pointed it was a yummy one, pray tell, what was it and how was it prepared?
I think 500 words would suffice... ??

Sorry I am not a qualified chef. Should I provide any opinions or discussion on cooking, plating or matters associated with gastronomic delights, I'd likely have the Australian Culinary Federation on my case. It's the legalities you understand.
 
Sorry I am not a qualified chef.

It's the legalities you understand.
I guess, just like the legalities, what is influence?
When someone can't say what they had for dinner?
Sheesh, it's a bad situation!

dogfoodagain.jpg

PS; I had fish fingers, mash and broccoli. Fish fingers have always been a mystery to me, as I've never seen a fish with hands, let alone arms.... however, some fish have fans, which means there's gotta be some fingers somewhere right?
 
Still they cannot make up their bloody minds despite the reforms being introduced two decades ago.


However, I should be generous and recognise there needs to be reviews and it should not be a matter of an "It's always been done this way" approach.
 
ASIC are a mob of underfunded muppets.

Educate yourselves and don’t trust anyone except Joe Aston in the AFR who has exposed more crooks, lazy advisers, incompetent money managers, and banks than anyone else I know.

gg
 
Just an observation but some of the “advice” I’ve seen in the mainstream media over the past ~2 years has been so wrong it’s not funny.

Anyone who took that as fact could well be in huge trouble going forward.

If ASIC wants anything to crack down on then forums like this aren’t it.
 
Just an observation but some of the “advice” I’ve seen in the mainstream media over the past ~2 years has been so wrong it’s not funny.

Anyone who took that as fact could well be in huge trouble going forward.

If ASIC wants anything to crack down on then forums like this aren’t it.
Just fade the MSM and get rich ?
 
Educate yourselves and don’t trust anyone except Joe Aston in the AFR who has exposed more crooks, lazy advisers, incompetent money managers, and banks than anyone else I know.
he's moving on
.
The Financial Review’s Editor-in-chief, Michael Stutchbury, said Aston was leaving at the top of his game as he took a break from the daunting mission of holding power and hypocrisy to account day in and day out and to open up the options for the next phase of his career.

"[Joe Aston] took the helm of the Rear Window gossip column in late 2011 as a 28-year-old,” Stutchbury said in a note to staff.

“Over the next dozen years, he turned it into Australia’s must-read business and political column, capped by his sustained dissection of Alan Joyce and Qantas over the past year.

“Joe graduated from corporate star spotting at Global HQ, aka Rockpool Bar & Grill, to high-level corporate analysis. He turned a ‘gossip column’ into a form of journalism never seen before in Australia, and arguably the world
.."
 
he's moving on
.
The Financial Review’s Editor-in-chief, Michael Stutchbury, said Aston was leaving at the top of his game as he took a break from the daunting mission of holding power and hypocrisy to account day in and day out and to open up the options for the next phase of his career.

"[Joe Aston] took the helm of the Rear Window gossip column in late 2011 as a 28-year-old,” Stutchbury said in a note to staff.

“Over the next dozen years, he turned it into Australia’s must-read business and political column, capped by his sustained dissection of Alan Joyce and Qantas over the past year.

“Joe graduated from corporate star spotting at Global HQ, aka Rockpool Bar & Grill, to high-level corporate analysis. He turned a ‘gossip column’ into a form of journalism never seen before in Australia, and arguably the world
.."
Thanks @Dona Ferentes

Joe Aston dissected the crooks, grubbers and over inflated egos of the Australian finance and investing world.

He will be missed from the AFR.

I wonder where next Joe turns up?

gg
 
I'll put it here. punched journalism in Search and the usual flyweight, topic hijacking posturers showed up.
.

Rear Window
ec4e2451514f597f7c1053bb930b9eddeb534380.png

Joe Aston’s farewell column

Joe AstonColumnist
Oct 12, 2023 – 6.06pm

Twelve years ago next month I was employed as a staff writer on The Australian Financial Review Magazine – back in the days when magazines had staff writers. My brief, hilariously, was to profile the international tastemakers of architecture and industrial design.
This mission-critical role lasted but a few weeks, until the Financial Review’s then-deputy editor James Chessell insisted I do some real work. So I took over the Rear Window column in January 2012.
Six months after that, Fairfax Media laid off another 400 journalists. Nobody on staff specialising in Italian sandwich makers survived. I had squeaked into journalism.

b0ed7a61548fa304529ef817d9abfec54945c731.jpg
Joe Aston’s farewell card. David Rowe

Rear Window has changed profoundly since, as my editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury has already observed. Back then, it was a column of snippets – who gave how much to the Red Shield Appeal, and which AGM had the best sandwiches.
It was no particular extension to park myself at Sydney’s establishment canteens – mostly Rockpool Bar & Grill but also Azuma, Mr Wong and sundry others – and catalogue the power diners of the day, to draw aside the privacy screen on the cliques of financiers, politicians and industrialists dividing the spoils of oligopolies over their Cape Grim eye fillets or their dumplings.

The conspicuous truth is that in the early years of writing this column, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, which was anything. A smidgen of overconfidence can be an asset in journalism, but I was unconstrained by self-awareness and the Dunning-Kruger effect was in full force. Being inexperienced, immature and occasionally out of control made Rear Window a bit hit-and-miss, a bit loose.
I recall an evening when broadcasting doyen Kerry O’Brien called to confront me over an item I’d written about him, which was incorrect and which I hadn’t bothered to check. “You are the pits, sir!” he exclaimed, before hanging up. And he was right.
There’s no way I could’ve done this for more than a decade if I’d just kept filing merry reports of who was lunching at Rockpool or attending another charity ball. That would’ve been indentured torture for me and incredibly boring for you. It also would’ve made me a part of the problem, by perpetuating the ridiculous oxymoron of the business celebrity.
In these names and faces, there was a whole other story staring me right in my face. This was the wealth-without-work crew, this was the soft-palmed caste bludging off the nation’s savings. It’s always the ones who want to be seen the most who are the most trivial, or overcompensating for something dark or dubious. This was the fabulous triage point, to observe these creatures striving, spinning, preening, misrepresenting and incrementally, I learned to stop and ask, “What’s really going on there?” The real story lay beneath, and how lucky am I that I twigged?
Rear Window’s style evolved (and its rigour improved), but my primary motivation never really changed, and that was to entertain. It was simply the most riotous fun exposing the rampant spin over substance in Australian business and politics, and demonstrating just how thin that veneer is.
There was a public service aspect to it, no doubt, but let’s not get too deep here – that’s just a collateral effect. It’s a “nice to have.” The real reward was the belly laughs I got to share with AFR readers as, again and again, we denuded the most fantastic pretenders in the nation.

My prize was colluding with the readers, asking “Do you see what I see?” as together we waded through the daily barrage of hopeless, ridiculous, turgid, untrue spin in a money-go-round system where everyone else is enfranchised to play along.
Almost all the participants in this circus – in this ticket-clipping extravaganza – are incentivised to applaud, but I was never incentivised in the same way. I was paid to be on the reader’s side, and ours were the best seats in the house.

The beauty of a daily column is that in its innate incessancy, it invites the pursuit of a theme, the chipping away at a charade. It looms over its subjects like Paul Keating’s immortal promise that “I wanna do you slowly.”
It wasn’t always about personal motivational discrepancies, either. The daily format also afforded me the luxury to return to policy themes. It was the perfect place to unpick implausible policy positions, freestanding – paradoxically – of the daily news cycle; to unpick the substance of them, not just the personal foibles, like the epic waste in the JobKeeper program or, more recently, Australia’s scandalous aviation policy settings.
And frankly, who wouldn’t want to laugh at Alan Joyce, the man with the enchanted spectacles? Or barking mad Andrew Forrest hanging on by a thread, or that cartoonish, self-declared “miserable bastard” Gerry Harvey. It’s a target-rich environment!

Advertisement
Ironically, it’s the social regulation that helps these people rise to the top that abandons them when they get there. The higher they rise, the less tethered they are and when the self-delusion takes over, along come the wild flights of fantasy.
I’ve seen it again and again. It’s always the lies they tell themselves. Human beings are endlessly fascinating and our capacity to delude ourselves is limitless, especially if we’re being rewarded at every step of the way.
.
All of us inherently have reward bias. Why would you change something that’s worked so well to date? The reward bias is mirrored by their acolytes who will never risk their epic sinecures by speaking up.
Who gives them the sense check? Who’s in the room saying, “Twiggy, you are speaking complete nonsense.” Absolutely nobody. When you’re running on the treadmill of high corporate life, people only say, “Great idea Hamish Douglass, that’s a ripper!” Nobody says, “Hammer, buddy, you’re being a gigantic fool.”
The spoils of power and status – the material wealth, the silly Order of Australia pins and the unbroken deference – cons our Australian business legends into thinking a) that they deserve it and b) that people might be interested in what they have to say about the world. There’s this bizarre idea that the mercantile businessman proficient at selling widgets for quadruple what they’re worth has any meaningful contribution to make to public policy.

Placebo salesman Marcus Blackmore acknowledged he’s only voting “No” in the Voice referendum because Jacinta Price told him to. There is almost no fashionable cause Mike Cannon-Brookes won’t hold forth on. When he’s proposing energy market policy that would fit on a fridge magnet, no tech bro in his inner circle is saying, “Dude, we’re just coders.” They’re saying, “Yes, Double Bay Jesus! Save my soul! I bow down before you and your employee stock scheme.”
Nobody at Sportsbet is saying to CEO Barni Evans, patron saint of problem gamblers, “Boss, we’re up to our noses in **** so for heaven’s sake just shut your mouth.”
Nobody said that to Tom Seymour at PwC. How easy it was to deconstruct his tortured logic. He had nothing. He fell apart. Lies depend on plausibility and his had none.
I got to be that person they don’t have, saying “Yeah, nah, but good try. That’s a stupid idea, pal. Call me anytime.”

That’s what you can do in a format like Rear Window. You can analyse their inventions and half-truths – because the best lies are lies of omission – and you can say “This man is talking pure crap, dear reader.” That’s difficult or even impossible to do as a reporter, when you’re relying on their voice, not your own, to tell the story.

These people are often just the highest-paid person in the building. I mean, if Twiggy wants to be crazy, at least he’s got his name on the door. The ones who are completely deluded are the ones who’ve just commando-crawled to the top of the steaming pile and then expect us to adore them. You haven’t taken any risk pal, you’ve just lucked in! That’s the other inopportune truth about this caper: luck plays a huge role in business, though you’d never know it from the heroic self-narratives of chief executives.
It’s never enough, either, to be recognised for your commercial acumen. That’s the soulless part of the capitalist endeavour. You also need to be loved for your charity patronage and your (highly selective) corporate social responsibility. You can’t just be Mr Profit, you’ve got to be Mr Altruism, Mr Community. The desire to be feted is all a part of the rarefied delusion state.
I got to stand at the watchtower and say “Sorry, not doing that champion. The money will have to be enough.” I got to turn to the reader and remind them, “Hey, their **** smells the same as ours.”
We all wrap ourselves in soothing stories, to dilute our insecurity and feel legitimate and worthwhile in the world. That’s how I recognise the patterns of delusion in corporate egomaniacs because I’m accustomed to seeing them in myself.

It was ultimately my choice not to be the good guy, and so yeah, I’m often met with hostility when I walk into a room. Whatever. The social favour of these people is mostly worthless.

You can’t be a good journalist if you need to be loved, at least in an interpersonal sense. All you’ve got in the end is your family and your health, and I’m now blessed with both. I’m reminded of the words of distinguished philosopher Miley Cyrus, who said, “I can buy myself flowers. I can love me better than you can.”
I’m so glad I graduated from corporate star spotting. Phoning it in from Global HQ at 5pm while another Super Tuscan decants, having the cosy relationship with the Prime Minister’s Office, being on the Qantas gravy train, haunting the BCA salon – that’s the jammy life.
This version of Rear Window is vastly more rewarding. Mining the source material, pulling apart the logical incoherences, doing the work, landing the belly laughs.
I was privileged enough to learn at the feet of some of the smartest people in the Australian market, all of whom are AFR readers. I learned from my terrific colleagues in the newsroom, subject matter experts like Neil Chenoweth and Matthew Stevens, my contemporaries Anthony Macdonald, James Thomson, Jonathan Shapiro, Vesna Poljak and Ed Tadros, and many others.
One of the real delights of this job was working alongside Myriam Robin, my co-columnist of the past six years, whose gimlet eye I leave you with.

Of course, there’s no way this column works without a staunch and unflappable editor, and in that regard, AFR editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury really stands alone. I was also very lucky to have the backing and encouragement of Fairfax Media CEO Greg Hywood until 2018.
Every journalist and media organisation says it operates with independence, but it is so often a chimera. I was granted genuine, often excruciating independence. I remember towelling up Domino’s Pizza over its fanciful growth targets, which the company is now busy falling short of, among other things, while the largest shareholder in Domino’s, Jack Cowin, was a member of the Fairfax Media board. I gave just as much hell to another Fairfax director, Todd Sampson.
My long-time nemesis, Gerry Harvey, was one of Fairfax’s (and now Nine Entertainment’s) largest advertisers. To his and Katie Page’s enormous credit, they didn’t chuck Alan Joyce-style tantrums; they pretty much copped it sweet. Plus, Gerry gave as good as he got!
All of these stories would have hit the cutting room floor of any other Australian media company.
I’ve also been supported by an honourable network of people out there who have provided me with the information needed to do this job. They believed, sometimes at personal risk or cost to themselves, that these things needed to be said. I salute them.
But above anything else, it’s always been about the readers.
My column only ever succeeded because there is a critical mass of Australians who want this job to be done, who want the craven opportunism, greed, hubris, hypocrisy and plain absurdity of Australian business and politics exposed.
Please stay hungry for that, and continue to support journalism that uncovers it.
 
I'll put it here. punched journalism in Search and the usual flyweight, topic hijacking posturers showed up.
.

Rear Window
View attachment 163931

Joe Aston’s farewell column

Joe AstonColumnist
Oct 12, 2023 – 6.06pm

Twelve years ago next month I was employed as a staff writer on The Australian Financial Review Magazine – back in the days when magazines had staff writers. My brief, hilariously, was to profile the international tastemakers of architecture and industrial design.
This mission-critical role lasted but a few weeks, until the Financial Review’s then-deputy editor James Chessell insisted I do some real work. So I took over the Rear Window column in January 2012.
Six months after that, Fairfax Media laid off another 400 journalists. Nobody on staff specialising in Italian sandwich makers survived. I had squeaked into journalism.

View attachment 163932
Joe Aston’s farewell card. David Rowe

Rear Window has changed profoundly since, as my editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury has already observed. Back then, it was a column of snippets – who gave how much to the Red Shield Appeal, and which AGM had the best sandwiches.
It was no particular extension to park myself at Sydney’s establishment canteens – mostly Rockpool Bar & Grill but also Azuma, Mr Wong and sundry others – and catalogue the power diners of the day, to draw aside the privacy screen on the cliques of financiers, politicians and industrialists dividing the spoils of oligopolies over their Cape Grim eye fillets or their dumplings.

The conspicuous truth is that in the early years of writing this column, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, which was anything. A smidgen of overconfidence can be an asset in journalism, but I was unconstrained by self-awareness and the Dunning-Kruger effect was in full force. Being inexperienced, immature and occasionally out of control made Rear Window a bit hit-and-miss, a bit loose.
I recall an evening when broadcasting doyen Kerry O’Brien called to confront me over an item I’d written about him, which was incorrect and which I hadn’t bothered to check. “You are the pits, sir!” he exclaimed, before hanging up. And he was right.
There’s no way I could’ve done this for more than a decade if I’d just kept filing merry reports of who was lunching at Rockpool or attending another charity ball. That would’ve been indentured torture for me and incredibly boring for you. It also would’ve made me a part of the problem, by perpetuating the ridiculous oxymoron of the business celebrity.
In these names and faces, there was a whole other story staring me right in my face. This was the wealth-without-work crew, this was the soft-palmed caste bludging off the nation’s savings. It’s always the ones who want to be seen the most who are the most trivial, or overcompensating for something dark or dubious. This was the fabulous triage point, to observe these creatures striving, spinning, preening, misrepresenting and incrementally, I learned to stop and ask, “What’s really going on there?” The real story lay beneath, and how lucky am I that I twigged?
Rear Window’s style evolved (and its rigour improved), but my primary motivation never really changed, and that was to entertain. It was simply the most riotous fun exposing the rampant spin over substance in Australian business and politics, and demonstrating just how thin that veneer is.
There was a public service aspect to it, no doubt, but let’s not get too deep here – that’s just a collateral effect. It’s a “nice to have.” The real reward was the belly laughs I got to share with AFR readers as, again and again, we denuded the most fantastic pretenders in the nation.

My prize was colluding with the readers, asking “Do you see what I see?” as together we waded through the daily barrage of hopeless, ridiculous, turgid, untrue spin in a money-go-round system where everyone else is enfranchised to play along.
Almost all the participants in this circus – in this ticket-clipping extravaganza – are incentivised to applaud, but I was never incentivised in the same way. I was paid to be on the reader’s side, and ours were the best seats in the house.

The beauty of a daily column is that in its innate incessancy, it invites the pursuit of a theme, the chipping away at a charade. It looms over its subjects like Paul Keating’s immortal promise that “I wanna do you slowly.”
It wasn’t always about personal motivational discrepancies, either. The daily format also afforded me the luxury to return to policy themes. It was the perfect place to unpick implausible policy positions, freestanding – paradoxically – of the daily news cycle; to unpick the substance of them, not just the personal foibles, like the epic waste in the JobKeeper program or, more recently, Australia’s scandalous aviation policy settings.
And frankly, who wouldn’t want to laugh at Alan Joyce, the man with the enchanted spectacles? Or barking mad Andrew Forrest hanging on by a thread, or that cartoonish, self-declared “miserable bastard” Gerry Harvey. It’s a target-rich environment!

Advertisement
Ironically, it’s the social regulation that helps these people rise to the top that abandons them when they get there. The higher they rise, the less tethered they are and when the self-delusion takes over, along come the wild flights of fantasy.
I’ve seen it again and again. It’s always the lies they tell themselves. Human beings are endlessly fascinating and our capacity to delude ourselves is limitless, especially if we’re being rewarded at every step of the way.
.
All of us inherently have reward bias. Why would you change something that’s worked so well to date? The reward bias is mirrored by their acolytes who will never risk their epic sinecures by speaking up.
Who gives them the sense check? Who’s in the room saying, “Twiggy, you are speaking complete nonsense.” Absolutely nobody. When you’re running on the treadmill of high corporate life, people only say, “Great idea Hamish Douglass, that’s a ripper!” Nobody says, “Hammer, buddy, you’re being a gigantic fool.”
The spoils of power and status – the material wealth, the silly Order of Australia pins and the unbroken deference – cons our Australian business legends into thinking a) that they deserve it and b) that people might be interested in what they have to say about the world. There’s this bizarre idea that the mercantile businessman proficient at selling widgets for quadruple what they’re worth has any meaningful contribution to make to public policy.

Placebo salesman Marcus Blackmore acknowledged he’s only voting “No” in the Voice referendum because Jacinta Price told him to. There is almost no fashionable cause Mike Cannon-Brookes won’t hold forth on. When he’s proposing energy market policy that would fit on a fridge magnet, no tech bro in his inner circle is saying, “Dude, we’re just coders.” They’re saying, “Yes, Double Bay Jesus! Save my soul! I bow down before you and your employee stock scheme.”
Nobody at Sportsbet is saying to CEO Barni Evans, patron saint of problem gamblers, “Boss, we’re up to our noses in **** so for heaven’s sake just shut your mouth.”
Nobody said that to Tom Seymour at PwC. How easy it was to deconstruct his tortured logic. He had nothing. He fell apart. Lies depend on plausibility and his had none.
I got to be that person they don’t have, saying “Yeah, nah, but good try. That’s a stupid idea, pal. Call me anytime.”

That’s what you can do in a format like Rear Window. You can analyse their inventions and half-truths – because the best lies are lies of omission – and you can say “This man is talking pure crap, dear reader.” That’s difficult or even impossible to do as a reporter, when you’re relying on their voice, not your own, to tell the story.

These people are often just the highest-paid person in the building. I mean, if Twiggy wants to be crazy, at least he’s got his name on the door. The ones who are completely deluded are the ones who’ve just commando-crawled to the top of the steaming pile and then expect us to adore them. You haven’t taken any risk pal, you’ve just lucked in! That’s the other inopportune truth about this caper: luck plays a huge role in business, though you’d never know it from the heroic self-narratives of chief executives.
It’s never enough, either, to be recognised for your commercial acumen. That’s the soulless part of the capitalist endeavour. You also need to be loved for your charity patronage and your (highly selective) corporate social responsibility. You can’t just be Mr Profit, you’ve got to be Mr Altruism, Mr Community. The desire to be feted is all a part of the rarefied delusion state.
I got to stand at the watchtower and say “Sorry, not doing that champion. The money will have to be enough.” I got to turn to the reader and remind them, “Hey, their **** smells the same as ours.”
We all wrap ourselves in soothing stories, to dilute our insecurity and feel legitimate and worthwhile in the world. That’s how I recognise the patterns of delusion in corporate egomaniacs because I’m accustomed to seeing them in myself.

It was ultimately my choice not to be the good guy, and so yeah, I’m often met with hostility when I walk into a room. Whatever. The social favour of these people is mostly worthless.

You can’t be a good journalist if you need to be loved, at least in an interpersonal sense. All you’ve got in the end is your family and your health, and I’m now blessed with both. I’m reminded of the words of distinguished philosopher Miley Cyrus, who said, “I can buy myself flowers. I can love me better than you can.”
I’m so glad I graduated from corporate star spotting. Phoning it in from Global HQ at 5pm while another Super Tuscan decants, having the cosy relationship with the Prime Minister’s Office, being on the Qantas gravy train, haunting the BCA salon – that’s the jammy life.
This version of Rear Window is vastly more rewarding. Mining the source material, pulling apart the logical incoherences, doing the work, landing the belly laughs.
I was privileged enough to learn at the feet of some of the smartest people in the Australian market, all of whom are AFR readers. I learned from my terrific colleagues in the newsroom, subject matter experts like Neil Chenoweth and Matthew Stevens, my contemporaries Anthony Macdonald, James Thomson, Jonathan Shapiro, Vesna Poljak and Ed Tadros, and many others.
One of the real delights of this job was working alongside Myriam Robin, my co-columnist of the past six years, whose gimlet eye I leave you with.

Of course, there’s no way this column works without a staunch and unflappable editor, and in that regard, AFR editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury really stands alone. I was also very lucky to have the backing and encouragement of Fairfax Media CEO Greg Hywood until 2018.
Every journalist and media organisation says it operates with independence, but it is so often a chimera. I was granted genuine, often excruciating independence. I remember towelling up Domino’s Pizza over its fanciful growth targets, which the company is now busy falling short of, among other things, while the largest shareholder in Domino’s, Jack Cowin, was a member of the Fairfax Media board. I gave just as much hell to another Fairfax director, Todd Sampson.
My long-time nemesis, Gerry Harvey, was one of Fairfax’s (and now Nine Entertainment’s) largest advertisers. To his and Katie Page’s enormous credit, they didn’t chuck Alan Joyce-style tantrums; they pretty much copped it sweet. Plus, Gerry gave as good as he got!
All of these stories would have hit the cutting room floor of any other Australian media company.
I’ve also been supported by an honourable network of people out there who have provided me with the information needed to do this job. They believed, sometimes at personal risk or cost to themselves, that these things needed to be said. I salute them.
But above anything else, it’s always been about the readers.
My column only ever succeeded because there is a critical mass of Australians who want this job to be done, who want the craven opportunism, greed, hubris, hypocrisy and plain absurdity of Australian business and politics exposed.
Please stay hungry for that, and continue to support journalism that uncovers it.
Just xxxxxxxxx brilliant. Real journalism.
Thanks Dona for posting it in full. Well worth it and hopefully widely read.

Hopefully Joe Aston finds a good place to continue his forensic work.

My column only ever succeeded because there is a critical mass of Australians who want this job to be done, who want the craven opportunism, greed, hubris, hypocrisy and plain absurdity of Australian business and politics exposed.
Please stay hungry for that, and continue to support journalism that uncovers it.
 
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