 And our guest host who joins me in studio this morning, Mark Bailey from FIG Securities. Mark, your thoughts, I mean, sort of broadly in terms of what we're seeing at the moment in terms of valuations. We are gonna bring up a chart in just a moment sort of showing valuations, but in particular US markets because we know they're trading at these all-time highs at the moment. Do you think it is overvalued at this stage? Talk us through, you know, what you're making of these things. Yeah, I mean, just to take a step back, if you look at equities, yeah, as you say, hitting all-time highs, especially in the US. And again, that's against the backdrop in terms of, you know, flat top-line revenues, sales growth. And in terms of profit growth, you only see marginal profit growth coming through there, a bit of cost-cutting. You see natural corporate profitability falling. And this quarter's results will probably be the fifth quarter in a row where you've seen a fall in corporate profitability in the States. And then if you look at the bond market and what that's telling you about global growth, US 10-year treasuries hit 136 at the start of July, which is a record low from 1962. And if you look at the Australian corporate bond market, that 10-year there is at 186. I think it closed yesterday at 187. And that's nearly record lows in that situation as well. So in terms of the chart, the price earnings ratio, if you're looking at in the US, it's pretty much the highs that we haven't seen since the dot-com boom and bust going back to 2002, 2003. So again, that's another indicator that the valuations in the equity markets are looking decidedly toppy. And I think I read this morning that Goldman's has actually just moved to an underweight on the equity side of things for the next three months, overweight cash. So again, that Goldman's has gone in terms of defensive mode as well. And I think that's right. And one of the key focuses that we have at fixed securities is trying to make sure people's asset allocations are correct for the environment that we're operating in. And if I gave you three countries, Australia, Poland, and Korea, all those three countries have in common less than 10% of their pension, their superfund allocations are in bonds. And the next one is Finland at 30%. So if you believe that the equities are overvalued, what's your defensive asset that you should be holding in your portfolio, cash and bonds? And in Australia, that's certainly not the case. So we're a huge advocate and I've just been out presenting to investors and clients saying, look, you need to get your asset allocation correct. Are you able to sustain the volatility that's likely to come up ahead? Are you positioned defensively? And it's really important that you get your asset allocation correct first. And that's the most key important driver for performance of people's portfolios going forward is getting the asset allocation correct. All bubbles burst. And I think that the equity market is very susceptible to a correction. And what would be the ideal allocation if you look at it all together in a portfolio? Look, I think kind of a 60% equities, 40% bonds and fixed income portfolio mix, and you can slice and dice properties out of that. Probably keep the retail hybrids, if you want to hold those, in the equity portion of that. But in Australia, kind of a balanced super fund typically has 70% to 80% inequities and the rest is split up in bonds, cash and property. My personal view, and if you look on a global basis, that is way too skewed towards the equity side of things, which has historically performed very well for Australians, but in terms of going forward and given the charts that we've seen in terms of where the equity valuations are, I think they should be paring that down and moving into more defensive classes that will hopefully protect them on the downswing. I guess everyone's sort of trying to work out whether they're willing to keep moving prices high from here, as you say with these high valuations. I suppose it then becomes a question as to when you get back into equity markets. I mean, at what point we see that pullback and then you start allocating that cash back into equities? Yeah, I think that's right. But equally, once you've got a kind of a portfolio you're happy with in terms of the returns that are generated in your risk-adjusted environment, then I think in terms of when you move back into equities, it's just kind of tweaking around the edges. But it's really important that you get the asset allocation correct. And it's important that you do that in terms of where you are in your life cycle as you age the natural tendencies that you should hold more stable fixed income cash-like assets in your portfolios. And that will protect you from the downswing once you move into that income drawing phase on your super fund. And at the moment, a lot of people are using the equities, the dividend stocks in the equity markets, which are continually to be driven higher as yield plays in income-generating assets. And almost forgetting that these can have quite severe capital losses when the market does turn. And you should actually be using the income-generating assets to be more on the fixed income side as they're generally more stable. Why do you think there is that disconnect with it? I mean, you mentioned Australian investors don't seem to have their allocation quite right yet. Why do you think that is the case? Is it because we're continuing to seek out high yield and therefore we go to the equity market? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a really interesting chart in the Wall Street Journal. So in 1995, investors could generate a 7.5% return on their portfolios by holding 100% in government bonds. And that would be nice to do that today, but that's not the case. In 2005, that was 50-50 equities and government bonds. And now it's only around about 10% bonds, 40% equities. And you have to have private equity, fortune capital funds to generate the 7.5% return. Each way through the process, your risk-adjusted returns are going down because your risk is higher on those underlying assets. And I think there is a chase for yield, but I think people are always forgetting to adjust for the risks associated with those. And they're chasing yield in the credit universe by going down into the sub-investment grade on rated spectrum and also down the maturity curve trying to pick up additional yield by going from 2 to 5 years and then to 10 down the maturity spectrum to try and get that yield. And it's a similar situation in the equity market where, again, they're chasing yield. They've been forced into some of the yield-bearing stocks, the infrastructure types, assets, the banks. And again, if you believe that the rates will back up, then some of the risk-free rates that have been used to generate those valuations will obviously be raised, and those valuations will subsequently fall. So you can protect yourself from higher rates by moving into equities, but again, I think that's probably going to be impacted to some extent in certain sectors of that market. So we certainly believe that a more balanced portfolio and access to fixed income is difficult in Australia. That's certainly true, so you can either go through managed or you can go through direct bond service such as fixed securities has to offer and various different portfolios within the business. But again, I just don't think that the Australians have a balanced portfolio, and we saw this during the GFC in terms of the superfund performances, the balanced superfund performances in the GFC when the equity market did come off. You did see Australians perform very poorly compared to the rest of the world because of high allocation to equities. Interesting, I guess it comes back to your analysis that you've recently been doing around all bubbles bursting, right? I guess having that core there in place to protect yourself. That's right, yeah. Yeah, very interesting. Whilst we are talking on the...