Finance & Investment

Headlines are not always what they seem. It always pays to analyse and question declarations made by the media. Lets examine a recent pronouncement on the Australian sharemarket - up just under 14% so far this year. Good you say? Well lets examine this result; take BHP out of the equation and the index (the ASX 200) is up just under 8% - 40% of the share market's performance.

Take out these resource stocks. Fortescue, Woodside & Newcrest and the market is only up 4.7%. In fact if we take out the top 20 point issues from the ASX and the market would have fallen 0.4% this year. But wait there is more, it can get worse, the 20 bottom performing issues have fallen on average of 36%.

Read Money, Money, Money Ain't it Funny to learn about framing and how we perceive financial figures and how ignorance of math effects out financial decisions.