This Is What Kiwi Investor Blog Is About.
Ten essential posts. The ideas that define this blog. A guide for new readers and a reminder for those who have been here before.
After five years away, this post reintroduces Kiwi Investor Blog: what it is, what it is trying to do, and where to start if you are new. Rather than simply listing posts, it curates ten of the blog’s most read and enduring pieces and explains, for each one, why the idea matters, what it challenges, and what a thoughtful investor should take away from it. If you have been here before, think of this as a reset. If you are new, think of it as a guided introduction to a set of ideas that most mainstream New Zealand financial commentary does not cover.
What Kiwi Investor Blog is — and what it is trying to do
Kiwi Investor Blog started from a simple observation: there is a gap between how the world’s best institutional investors think about building and managing investment portfolios, and what is available to most New Zealand investors in the way of independent commentary, research, and analysis.
The large global pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds and insurance companies that manage hundreds of billions of dollars collectively have access to world-class research, sophisticated portfolio construction frameworks, and decades of accumulated experience in areas that barely feature in mainstream New Zealand investment conversation.
This blog’s purpose is to close that gap. Not by dumbing ideas down, but by translating concepts, frameworks, and research that institutional investors use routinely and making them accessible, relevant, and practically useful for a wider New Zealand audience.
The topics that most NZ financial commentary doesn’t cover — and why they matter
Mainstream personal finance commentary in New Zealand is overwhelmingly focused on a narrow set of topics: KiwiSaver fund selection, property versus shares, mortgage strategy, and the basics of budgeting. These are all very worthwhile subjects and covered well. But they represent a small fraction of the investment landscape that a thoughtful investor needs to navigate.
Kiwi Investor Blog has, since its inception, focused on topics that are discussed in institutional investment circles but are largely absent from the broader NZ investment conversation:
- Behavioural finance — the systematic ways in which investor psychology undermines investment outcomes, and how to design against it.
- True diversification — what it actually means to hold a portfolio whose components behave differently from each other, and why most ‘diversified’ funds are less diversified than they appear.
- Alternative investments — the role of hedge funds, private equity, real assets, and liquid alternatives in building more robust portfolios, and why New Zealand investors have historically had limited access to them.
- Liability-driven investing — the framework used by insurance companies and some pension funds to match assets to income needs, applied to the challenges facing individual NZ investors approaching and in retirement.
- The limitations of the balanced fund — why the standard 60/40 portfolio carries more risk than investors fully appreciate, and what more robust alternatives look like.
- Fees and their compounding effect — why even small fee differences are large in the long run, and how to read an investment fee disclosure with clear eyes.
None of these topics is especially complex. But none of them gets the sustained, rigorous treatment in NZ financial media that they deserve. That is the gap this blog exists to fill.
Ten essential posts — a guided tour of the blog’s core ideas
The following posts are selected from the blog’s archive based on two criteria: enduring relevance (the ideas are as important today as when they were written) and distinctive value (the content covers ground that is not widely available elsewhere in the NZ investment commentary landscape). They are presented with a summary of the key argument and the single most important insight for a reader to take away.
Post 1 · BEHAVIOURAL FINANCE
1. The Benefits of Behavioural Finance in the Investment Planning Process
Why do smart, well-informed investors consistently make the same predictable mistakes? Behavioural finance is the field that answers that question by drawing on psychology and economics to explain why human beings are systematically poor at managing money, even when they know better. This post introduces the key concepts of loss aversion, overconfidence, herding, and recency bias and explains how awareness of these tendencies can be built into the investment planning process itself. It remains the most-read post in the blog’s history for good reason: the insights are universal, timeless, and directly actionable.
Key insight: Knowing that markets are irrational is useless if your own behaviour is equally irrational. The goal of behavioural finance is not just to understand markets but to also understand yourself as an investor.
→ Read: The Benefits of Behavioural Finance
Post 2 · PORTFOLIO CONSTRUCTION
2. A Short History of Portfolio Diversification
Diversification is the only free lunch in investing. That phrase is used so often it has lost its meaning. This post traces the intellectual history of diversification from Harry Markowitz’s 1952 mean-variance framework through to modern multi-asset portfolio construction, explaining not just what diversification means but why it works, when it doesn’t, and what institutional investors have learned about it over seven decades of practice. It is a foundational piece for any serious investor.
Key insight: True diversification is not about holding many assets. It is about holding assets whose returns are driven by genuinely different economic forces. A portfolio of 20 funds all exposed to the same equity risk premium is not diversified.
→ Read: A Short History of Portfolio Diversification
Post 3 · PORTFOLIO CONSTRUCTION
3. Disaggregation of Investment Returns
One of the most practically useful posts on the blog — and one of the most underappreciated. Most investors think of their portfolio return as a single number. This post explains how that return can be decomposed into its component parts: the market beta, the factor exposures, the manager skill (alpha), and the fees extracted at each layer. Understanding which part of your return is coming from where is the foundation of intelligent portfolio evaluation. It is a concept that institutional investors use routinely and that is almost entirely absent from retail investment commentary in New Zealand.
Key insight: Before you can assess whether your investment manager is adding value, you need to understand what portion of their return you are already paying for through passive exposure and what, if anything, is left over after fees.
→ Read: Disaggregation of Investment Returns
Post 4 · PORTFOLIO CONSTRUCTION
4. The Traditional Diversified Fund Is Outdated — Greater Customisation Is Required
The one-size-fits-all balanced fund has been the default vehicle for New Zealand investors for decades. In most cases this suits investors well. This post makes the case for greater portfolio customisation to reflect the investor’s specific risk tolerances, time horizons, liability profiles, and income objectives. The argument draws on how large institutional investors such as pension funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds think about portfolio construction, and asks why individual investors are routinely offered something less sophisticated.
Key insight: The institution managing a $10 billion pension fund does not use a balanced fund. It builds a portfolio around the specific liabilities it needs to meet. Sophisticated individual investors have specific financial goals too, and their portfolios should reflect them.
→ Read: The Traditional Diversified Fund Is Outdated
Post 5 · BEHAVIOURAL FINANCE
5. The Psychology of Portfolio Diversification
A companion piece to the behavioural finance post, focused specifically on how psychological biases affect the way investors think about and implement diversification. Home bias, the tendency to overweight familiar domestic assets, familiarity bias, mental accounting, and the illusion of diversification (holding many funds that are all highly correlated) are explored in detail. The post bridges theory and practice in a way that is immediately useful for investors reviewing their own portfolios.
Key insight: New Zealand represents less than 0.2% of global equity market capitalisation. A portfolio that over-invested in NZ assets is not diversified; it is a concentrated bet on a single small economy.
→ Read: The Psychology of Portfolio Diversification
Post 6 · FEES & COSTS
6. Five Myths About Investment Management Fees — Broadening the Fee Debate
Fees are the single most controllable variable in long-term investment outcomes, yet they are consistently misunderstood, underestimated, and obscured by the investment industry. This post takes on five of the most persistent myths about investment management fees, including the idea that higher fees reflect higher quality, that fee differences of less than 1% are immaterial, and that all fees are disclosed in a way that allows meaningful comparison. It is a post that will save most readers money simply by changing how they read a fund disclosure document.
Key insight: A fee difference of 0.5% per annum appears small. Over 30 years of compounding on a $200,000 portfolio, it is worth approximately $85,000 in foregone wealth. Fees compound in exactly the same way as returns, but in reverse.
→ Read: Five Myths About Investment Management Fees
Post 7 · RISK & PORTFOLIO THEORY
7. Understanding the Impact of Volatility on Your Portfolio
Volatility is the most widely cited measure of investment risk and one of the most widely misunderstood. This post explains not just what volatility means statistically, but why the path of returns matters as much as their average level, a concept with profound implications for retirement investors in particular. The mathematics of volatility drag, the asymmetry between gains and losses, and the practical consequences for portfolio construction are all covered in a way that builds genuine intuition rather than just presenting formulas.
Key insight: A portfolio that falls 50% needs to rise 100% to recover. This asymmetry, not widely appreciated by investors, is why managing downside risk is not the same as being conservative. It is the foundation of intelligent risk management.
→ Read: Understanding the Impact of Volatility on Your Portfolio
Post 8 · PORTFOLIO CONSTRUCTION
8. Time to Move Away from the Balanced Portfolio — They Are Riskier Than You Think
Written before the events of 2022 made its argument unavoidable, this post explains why the traditional 60/40 balanced fund carries more risk than investors typically appreciate. The equity risk dominance of the balanced portfolio and the fact that in almost any significant market downturn, the balanced fund falls alongside equities is laid out clearly. The conditions under which bonds genuinely diversify equity risk are examined, along with the circumstances in which that diversification fails. Events since 2022 have provided a live demonstration of precisely the argument this post made.
Key insight: In 49 of the last 50 years, when the US equity market fell, a 60/40 balanced portfolio also fell. The 40% in bonds has provided partial cushioning, but it has never been a genuine alternative to equity risk management.
→ Read: Time to Move Away from the Balanced Portfolio
Post 9 · BEHAVIOURAL FINANCE
One of the most distinctive posts on the blog and one that addresses a dimension of investing that almost no one in the industry discusses seriously. Regret is a powerful emotion in investment decision-making: the regret of having sold before a rally, of having stayed in a falling market, of having chosen the wrong fund. This post proposes a framework for thinking about portfolio construction that accounts for the investor’s own emotional responses not to indulge them, but to design a portfolio the investor can actually stick with through market cycles. A portfolio that is technically optimal but behaviourally unsustainable is not actually optimal.
Key insight: The best investment strategy is not the one with the highest expected return. It is the one you will actually implement, hold through downturns, and not abandon at the worst possible moment. Regret minimisation is a legitimate and underused design principle.
→ Read: The Regret-Proof Portfolio
Post 10 · RETIREMENT INCOME
10. More on Liability Driven Investing (LDI) for Beginners
Liability-driven investing is the framework that the world’s largest insurance companies and pension funds use to manage the challenge of converting an asset pool into a reliable income stream. In New Zealand, it is almost entirely absent from the mainstream conversation about retirement planning. LDI is directly applicable to the situation facing every KiwiSaver member approaching retirement. This post introduces the core concept in plain English: rather than asking ‘how do I maximise returns?’, LDI asks ‘what income do I need, when do I need it, and how do I build a portfolio that reliably delivers it?’ It is the intellectual foundation for this blog’s approach to retirement income, and remains as relevant today as when it was written.
Key insight: Every investor approaching retirement has liabilities: the income they will need each year to fund their lifestyle. LDI matches assets to those liabilities explicitly. It is not exotic or complex. It is simply asking the right question first.
→ Read: More on Liability Driven Investing for Beginners
Further posts are planned across the blog’s core topics of behavioural finance, portfolio construction, alternatives, and retirement income.
A note to returning readers
If you subscribed to this blog before 2021 and found your way back: thank you. A lot has happened in markets over the past five years that this blog warned about, and a lot has changed that is worth examining together. The core thesis of this blog has not changed: that institutional-quality thinking, made accessible and applied honestly to the NZ investment landscape, is genuinely valuable to all investors. If anything, the events of 2022–2026 have reinforced rather than undermined that view.
If you are new: welcome. Start anywhere on the list above. The posts are independent of each other and do not require prior knowledge of the blog. What they do require is a willingness to engage with investment ideas, to question conventional wisdom, to think in frameworks rather than rules of thumb, and to accept that good investment thinking is demanding but not inaccessible.
The gap between how institutional investors think about this and what most New Zealanders have access to is real. This blog’s aim is to narrow it, one post at a time.
Kiwi Investor Blog covers portfolio construction, behavioural finance, alternative investments, retirement income, and KiwiSaver from an independent, institutional perspective. It does not constitute financial advice.
Please read the Disclosure Statement on the blog before relying on any content. The views expressed are those of the author personally and do not represent the views of their employer or any organisation with which the author is affiliated.
Disclosure
Please read the Kiwi Investor Blog Disclosure Statement before relying on any information in this post. This blog is written for information and discussion purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. All investment strategies involve risk, including the loss of principal. Readers should seek independent financial advice tailored to their individual circumstances. The views expressed are those of the author personally and do not represent the views of their employer or any organisation with which the author is affiliated.
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