Budget 2026: A better story, if you believe the assumptions

Article #459

For decades I have written about the Budget from the outside. This year, I was fortunate enough to be there in person – in the lockup, with the Treasury’s forecasts and supplementary documents in front of me before the Minister rose to speak. There is value in having the source material itself, rather than seeing headlines that come after. What follows is my read.

The Budget Economic and Fiscal Update released on 28 May tells a more reassuring story than the Half Year Update did back in December.¹ Deficits narrow earlier. The cyclically adjusted OBEGALx, the operating-balance measure favoured by Finance Minister Nicola Willis as it strips ACC’s volatile revenue and expenses out of the historical OBEGAL, returns to surplus in 2028/29; a full year sooner than previously forecast.² Tax revenue holds up better than feared. And on the Treasury’s fiscal-balance measure, which tracks the actual cash impact of government on the economy, policy keeps supporting demand through 2026/27 before tightening from 2027/28 onwards.³

On the surface it is a better-than-expected set of numbers. As always, the trouble is what sits underneath them.

The forecasts assume real GDP growth lifts from 1.2% this year to a peak of 3.2% by 2028. This would be a sharp acceleration after three years of contraction or near-zero growth.⁴ They assume unemployment peaks at 5.5% and then drifts back down to 4.3%, and that net migration recovers towards its long-run average having run at barely a quarter of that recently. Each assumption is plausible on its own. The sticking point is that the recovery needs most of them to arrive together, and roughly on schedule.

Inflation is the assumption that should give readers the most pause. In these forecasts, it takes a less-than-linear, lurching path: CPI surges to 4.0% this year, driven in part by higher fuel prices flowing from offshore conflict, before the forecast has it dropping abruptly to 1.6% in 2027, then settling around 2%.⁵ That near-halving in twelve months is a heroic call. It looks more heroic still when you separate out domestic, non-tradeable inflation, the prices generated here at home, in services, rates and rents – which Stats NZ measured at 3.5% in the year to March, with electricity up 12.5% and council rates up 8.8%.⁵

Ask any local who has just opened a new rates letter, renewed an insurance policy, or braced for yet another ramp-up in winter power prices. The cost-of-living squeeze people are actually feeling is not the tidy headline figure the forecast leans on. And a great deal does rest on that figure, because inflation feeds wage expectations, interest costs and the tax take all at once. If domestic prices prove stickier than assumed, the path back to surplus gets harder.

The forecasts also assume the Government will deliver on ambitious savings tracks at Health New Zealand, Kāinga Ora and the Ministry of Social Development – all organisations that have run material operating deficits.⁶ Every line of the recovery requires for something to land more or less perfectly. The Treasury’s own statement of specific fiscal risks runs to dozens of substantial items; a catalogue of expensive surprises waiting to happen.⁶

Meanwhile, the wave of cost coming our way is neither theoretical nor distant. It is here now.

Defence capability needs roughly $6 billion in new funding over the next two Budgets just to deliver the existing plan. The Health Infrastructure Plan identifies more than $20 billion over the next decade. The school property pipeline signals a significant uplift. Treaty relativity payments and pay equity settlements remain live cross-portfolio risks.⁶

Nowhere is the pressure clearer New Zealand Superannuation. NZ Super payments are forecast to climb from $24.7 billion in 2025/26 to $31.2 billion by 2029/30, an average increase of about $1.6 billion every year. This is the single largest driver of core Crown expense growth, with roughly half of that uplift simply more people turning 65.⁹ Against that backdrop, the decision to recommence contributions to the Super Fund is genuinely welcome – but light on detail for what is, on any honest reading, the largest looming fiscal pressure of the next two decades.

That’s the sobering side. There is a more encouraging side too, and parts of it land particularly well for our Hawke’s Bay region.

The tax package is sensibly targeted rather than flashy. Lifting the Foreign Investment Fund de minimis threshold from $50,000 to $100,000 of shareholdings is a solid, practical move. Combined with allowing the revenue account method for unlisted shares held by any New Zealand resident, it removes a barrier to migration for skilled people and cuts compliance costs for ordinary investors – who should never have been tangled in rules built for complex international structures.⁷ The accompanying changes to charities and not-for-profit settings, including a $100,000 annual cap on individuals’ rebate claims, tidy up a system that had drifted from its purpose.⁷

But, not everything in the package is so easily defended. One such outlier is the Emerging Managers’ Programme, a scheme backing first-time and emerging fund managers who invest in startup companies, with the aim of helping those funds build capacity, scale and a track record.⁸ No, you’re not reading that wrong: the Crown is effectively backing unproven managers who are backing unproven companies, stacking emerging-manager risk on top of early-stage venture risk. The mind boggles slightly.

There is somewhat of a rationale behind it – New Zealand’s venture ecosystem is thin, exits like Xero and Rocket Lab show what is possible, and the next generation of managers has to come from somewhere. But it sits oddly in a Budget otherwise sold on discipline and rebuilding buffers, and it will be worth watching closely how the guardrails are drawn.

Closer to home, the Budget delivers tangible benefits to Hawke’s Bay. Cash-strapped, debt-laden councils such as Hastings stand to benefit from changes giving them a share of consents value, a scaling mechanism that better matches revenue to the growth that creates the work. Funds have been earmarked for design and enabling works at Hawke’s Bay Hospital, alongside the wider Regional Hospital Redevelopment Programme.⁶ There’s also a $400 million reserve fund for state highway resilience projects aimed at keeping critical routes open during severe weather – something Hawke’s Bay residents understand the importance of more than most. Cyclone Gabrielle is not yet three and a half years behind us, and the Treasury itself rates comparable events as reasonably possible, at least once every four years, within the forecast period.⁶

The bottom line? This is a Budget Update that asks New Zealanders to take a fair amount on faith: that growth returns on cue, that inflation halves to target while domestic prices still bite, that savings targets are met, and that the events outside the Government’s control stay kind to us. The genuine wins for investors, charities, regional councils, hospital patients and motorists on vulnerable routes, deserve acknowledgement.

The risks deserve to be taken just as seriously.

The Treasury has done its job. It has shown us the figures and, in the supplementary information, told us plainly what could go wrong. The question is whether the rest of us are reading both halves of the document, so there aren’t surprises down the road if certain elements don’t stick the landing.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

REFERENCES

[1] The Treasury (2026). Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update 2025. Wellington: New Zealand Government, 16 December 2025.

[2] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026: Supplementary Information: Underlying Fiscal Performance (Cyclically-adjusted and Structural Balance Indicators), B.3, pp. 47–49. Wellington: New Zealand Government, 28 May 2026.

[3] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026: Supplementary Information: Fiscal Stance (Fiscal Balance and Total Fiscal Impulse Indicators), B.3, pp. 42–46.

[4] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026. Wellington: New Zealand Government, 28 May 2026; see also ‘Budget 2026: 10 things you need to know’, NZ Herald, 28 May 2026.

[5] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026: Supplementary Information: Detailed Economic Forecast Information, Table 2 (CPI) and Table 6 (Labour Market Indicators), B.3, pp. 33, 37; non-tradeable inflation of 3.5% from Stats NZ (2026), Consumers Price Index: March 2026 quarter, 21 April 2026.

[6] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026: Supplementary Information: Unchanged Specific Fiscal Risks and Contingent Liabilities, B.3, pp. 6–30.

[7] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026 — Supplementary Information: Tax Policy Changes, B.3, pp. 39–40; and Inland Revenue / The Treasury (2026), 2026 Tax Expenditure Statement, 28 May 2026.

[8] The Treasury (2026). Summary of Initiatives in Budget 2026, B.19, p. 9: Emerging Managers’ Programme. Wellington: New Zealand Government, 28 May 2026.

[9] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026, Fiscal Outlook — drivers of New Zealand Superannuation expense growth. Wellington: New Zealand Government, 28 May 2026.

Death and Taxes

Article #458

This Thursday, Nicola Willis will deliver Budget 2026. The headlines will be familiar: tight control of spending, focus on health, education, defence and law and order, a return to surplus.[1] To her credit, the Finance Minister has shown discipline.

On Tuesday, in her pre-Budget speech to Business North Harbour, she announced 8,700 public service job cuts over the next three years, $2.4 billion in savings, the merger of agencies, and AI as “a basic expectation” across government systems.[2] The public service had grown from roughly 48,000 in 2017 to over 63,000 by the end of 2024, a 33 percent expansion in six years against largely flat productivity growth. Trimming it back toward 1 percent of population is overdue.

The harder question is timing. The coalition has been in office for two and a half years. The electoral mandate was fresh in late 2023. Decisions of this magnitude, with this kind of political cost, are easier early in a term and almost impossible to deliver in election year without the optics looking opportunistic. The reforms should have been made then.

That delay matters because the bond market is a fickle lover when a country is carrying heavy debt and producing little productivity growth. Fitch has placed New Zealand’s AA+ rating on negative outlook, citing rising challenges in reducing debt after years of delayed fiscal consolidation; debt to GDP is projected to reach 56 percent by 2027.[3] The 10-year government bond yield is sitting near 4.7 percent. Every basis point on that yield translates into real money in interest costs. Markets are watching, and they are no longer giving New Zealand the benefit of the doubt.

This is the fiscal context in which the campaign begins.

Budget Day on the 28th is not really the main event. It is the starting gun for the election campaign that ends on 7 November. And the backdrop against which that campaign will be fought is grim.

The NZX 50 touched fresh lows this week. The Gross Index, which includes reinvested dividends, has delivered a total return of around 3 percent over the past five years.[4] That is less than 1 percent per year in nominal terms. Strip out dividends, and the price-only index is in negative territory. Once you factor in cumulative inflation of around 20 percent, New Zealand investors have gone backwards by close to 17 percent in real purchasing power. No other major Western bourse can claim that distinction. The S&P 500 has roughly doubled. The ASX 200 is up around a third. The FTSE, long the laggard of major markets, has still delivered around 30 percent. Even the Nikkei, dormant for two decades, has delivered roughly 70 percent.

This matters because when the stock market is not creating wealth, politicians look for ways to redistribute existing wealth. That is the genuine political logic of the moment, and it is amplified by the mechanics of MMP. Labour cannot govern alone. To form a government, it will need the Greens and almost certainly Te Pāti Māori. Whatever Labour campaigns on, the coalition partners will demand more.

Labour has confirmed it will campaign on a capital gains tax targeted at residential and commercial property, with revenue ringfenced for free GP visits.[5] The Greens have gone further, proposing a 2.5 percent annual wealth tax on net assets above $2 million, and a 33 percent inheritance tax on lifetime gifts and estates above a $1 million threshold.[6] Te Pāti Māori has signalled wealth taxes as a coalition bottom line.[7] Fitch has reportedly been briefed on tax measures beyond what Labour has publicly disclosed.[8]

The Greens’ inheritance tax proposal is the one to pay closest attention to. It is, in everything but name, the return of estate duty. And it is worth remembering, on the eve of a Budget that opens an election year, why New Zealand abandoned that tax in 1992.

Estate duty was sold as a tool of equity. In practice, it became a destroyer of family legacies. By the early 1970s, rates had climbed as high as 40 percent, with thresholds catching far more than just the wealthy.[9] For families whose wealth was tied up in illiquid assets, the death of a patriarch or matriarch triggered financial catastrophe.

The Hawke’s Bay orcharding sector provides stark examples. Local orchardists who had spent decades developing pipfruit operations found their estates assessed at development values rather than agricultural income values. Families faced duty bills exceeding several years of profit. The choice was bleak: sell blocks to developers, or take on crippling loans.[10] Many spent thirty years or more servicing that debt, an entire generation lost to a single tax assessment. A block of land that had taken a grandfather forty years to develop into productive orchard could be lost to an unexpected death and an Inland Revenue assessment within eighteen months.

The Waikato dairy sector tells the same story. Multi-generational farms were forced to sell down herds and land to meet duty bills. The remaining operations often lacked the scale needed to remain viable, and some families saw their children leave farming altogether.[11] It was not incompetence that ended these legacies. It was a tax code that demanded immediate liquidity from operations that simply do not generate it.

Rural service businesses, the stock and station agents, transport firms, processing contractors, faced the same pressure. Many took on outside investors to meet duty bills, and those investors eventually engineered buyouts. The consolidation of New Zealand’s agricultural service sector during the 1980s owed much to estate duty’s destabilising effect.[12]

Defenders argued at the time, and will argue again, that proper planning could avoid these outcomes. Two things are worth saying about that. First, the planning itself was a deadweight cost. Families spent thousands on lawyers and accountants navigating frequently changing rules rather than reinvesting in their enterprises.[13] Second, deaths do not arrive on schedule.

What does prudence look like in practice? It looks like reviewing trust structures that may have been set up two decades ago under different rules. It looks like understanding which assets sit where, who owns what, and what the liquidity profile of an estate actually is on any given day. It looks like considering whether life insurance has a role to play in funding potential tax liabilities. It looks like beginning the conversations between generations that families instinctively defer.

The lesson from estate duty is not that all tax is bad. It is that taxes on illiquid family assets transfer productive wealth from those who built it to whoever has the ready cash to buy at distress prices. That is not redistribution. It is destruction. And it is being proposed at a moment when fewer families have the financial cushion to weather it, against a stock market that has produced no real wealth for half a decade.

Thursday’s Budget will not settle this debate. It opens it. Families with farm, orchard, or business assets ought to be reviewing their structures now, seeking wise counsel from advisers who understand both the tax architecture and the fiduciary weight of decisions made under pressure. None of this argues for selling out of New Zealand equities at the lows: capitulation at the bottom is the parallel mistake, the same wealth destruction by another route. The answer is diversification and counsel, not retreat. The families who recovered from estate duty were almost always those who took advice early. The ones who lost everything were those who waited until the tax was already in force.

History rhymes. It does not, thankfully, repeat. But only if we are paying attention.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

REFERENCES

[1] The Treasury, Budget 2026, 28 May 2026, treasury.govt.nz/publications/budgets/budget-2026

[2] NZ Herald, Nicola Willis’ public service cuts to save $2.4b, 8700 jobs to go, 19 May 2026; 1News, Thousands of public service jobs to go, major Govt shake-up announced, 19 May 2026

[3] Fitch Ratings, New Zealand AA+ outlook revised to negative, March 2026; Trading Economics, New Zealand 10-Year Government Bond Yield

[4] S&P/NZX 50 Gross Index, 5-year return data to 20 May 2026, NZX and Yahoo Finance

[5] NZ Herald, Labour’s capital gains tax: Chris Hipkins celebrates ‘progressive’ policy, 28 October 2025

[6] Become Wealth, Wealth Tax NZ: What It Means and Who Would Pay, April 2026; Green Party Alternative Budget 2025

[7] RNZ, Te Pāti Māori proposes suite of changes in new tax policies

[8] Scoop News, Fitch Report Exposes Labour’s Secret Tax Agenda, 29 April 2026

[9] Inland Revenue Department, Annual Report 1975 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1976), 23-25

[10] P.J. Skellerup, “Estate Duty and the New Zealand Horticultural Sector,” NZ Journal of Agricultural Economics 3, no. 2 (1979): 45-52

[11] Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Agricultural Statistics 1980 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1981), 67-89

[12] R.M. Sandrey and S.R. Reynolds, “Structural Change in New Zealand Agriculture 1972-1987,” Review of Marketing and Agricultural Economics 58, no. 1 (1990): 15-28

[13] NZ Law Society, Submission on Estate and Gift Duties Amendment Bill (Wellington: NZLS, 1983), 8-12

The GDP Trap: Why Technology Sceptics Keep Getting It Wrong

Article #457 - A Canny View on Capital, Productivity and the AI Moment

I was in Wellington last month, watching my son play rugby. Between the lineouts, the bagpipes, and the cheering crowds, I found myself deep in conversation with some of the opposing team's parents (as you do). One of them, it turned out, reads this column. She'd been listening to a podcast during the week and wanted to pick my brain on something that had been bothering her: the idea that technology, the internet, and now AI doesn't move the needle on GDP. Was I convinced? Did I think AI would go the same way?

I told her I'd think about it properly and write it up. So here we are.

The argument is that the internet failed to shift GDP. Productivity growth stayed stubbornly flat through the digital revolution, and AI will likely disappoint in the same way.

Tidy. Plausible. But - wrong.

Start with the measure itself. GDP is the bluntest instrument in the economist's toolkit. It counts what gets transacted, not what gets created. It captures the volume of economic activity, but not the quality of the decisions that drive it. It has no mechanism for measuring time saved, stress reduced, options expanded or freedom gained. Judging technological progress through GDP alone guarantees you miss the point entirely.

Economist Robert Solow noticed this as far back as 1987, when he observed that the computer age appeared everywhere except in the productivity statistics – a phenomenon that became known as the Solow Productivity Paradox.¹ History eventually proved him right, just on a longer lag than the critics expected. Technology hadn’t failed. GDP was simply a poor timekeeper.

Technology is an enabler, not a product

Take the motor vehicle. The combustion engine restructured how people moved, how goods flowed, and how entire societies organised themselves. The GDP figures didn't move immediately in response to this technological feat. Infrastructure had to be built. Habits had to change. Supply chains had to be reimagined, and entirely new industries – fuel, insurance, hospitality, suburban housing – had to emerge. But once those conditions were in place, the uplift was extraordinary. We produced and shipped volumes of goods that would have been incomprehensible to the previous generation. The technology compressed time, distance and cost simultaneously, and returned something more valuable than efficiency: freedom. Freedom of movement, of choice, of attention. We enjoy freedoms our grandparents couldn't have imagined, and GDP only partially accounts for why.² The full value of what technology returns to human life has always been larger than what the national accounts can see.

The internet followed the same pattern: in its infancy, productivity statistics disappointed. Critics pointed to flat lines - exactly the lines we hear cited about AI today. Sceptics declared the revolution oversold. Then, suddenly, everything changed.

Amazon didn't just create a retail channel. It rewrote the rules of commerce, warehousing, logistics and consumer expectation. Google didn't just organise information, it fundamentally altered how knowledge was accessed and shared. The internet became the incubation platform for industries that couldn't previously exist: the gig economy, streaming, fintech, e-commerce, social media, and the vast ecosystem of software-as-a-service that now underpins nearly every business on the planet.³

GDP followed. It always does, eventually - the error is expecting it to lead.

Which brings us to AI, and the real question…

Transformation, or novelty?

The evidence points firmly to the former. AI is not an application. It is infrastructure. Just as the internet built a platform beneath entire industries, AI is now embedding itself beneath every workflow, every decision, every process across every sector simultaneously. Its speed of adoption is faster than any previous general-purpose technology, reaching 100 million users in months rather than the decades it took electricity or the telephone to achieve comparable penetration. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates AI could add between $13 and $22 trillion to the global economy annually by 2030, with generative AI alone contributing $2.6 to $4.4 trillion across industries each year.⁴

Businesses dismissing it as a "nice to have" remind me of Spencer Johnson's parable, “Who Moved My Cheese?”⁵ It describes how those who refuse to adapt are left behind not through any single dramatic moment, but through the slow, steady movement of the world around them. The cheese has moved. It is moving right now. Yet, some are still debating whether it will move at all.

For those of us who allocate capital on behalf of clients, this is not an abstract debate. It is a practical and urgent one, and it cuts to the heart of how we should think about investment discipline in a period of structural change.

History will likely repeat… eventually.

The data clearly tells us that active managers – those who believe they can outthink the market, pick winners and time the turns – have a consistently poor record of doing so. The SPIVA Scorecard, published by S&P Dow Jones Indices, shows that over a 15-year period, nearly 90% of active fund managers underperform their benchmark index.⁶

Across global markets, including Australia and New Zealand, the findings are consistent. The crystal ball is no clearer in professional hands than in the layman's. The complexity of markets, the speed of information and the weight of costs conspire to make consistent outperformance not merely difficult but statistically improbable.

A robust, evidence-based framework protects clients from the most persistent and costly mistakes in investing: reacting to noise, chasing narratives, and confusing confidence with competence.

Understanding AI and its long-term implications is not about picking technology stocks or timing a wave – that’s where you can get into trouble, à la NFTs and other failed hype stocks.

It is instead about recognising when the world is changing structurally, and ensuring that clients are positioned to participate in the full arc of that change over time – through diversified, low-cost and disciplined portfolios. The opportunity is not in predicting which companies win, but in making sure clients are in the game when the GDP finally catches up – because eventually, it will.

The woman I spoke with in Wellington already sensed this. She wasn't asking whether AI was real. She was asking whether the people managing her money understood it well enough to make sound decisions on her behalf – which is exactly the right question to be asking.

Technology enables. Capital follows. The data has never told us otherwise. The sceptics may be right on timing, but history suggests they are wrong on direction.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

REFERENCES

1. Solow, R. (1987). We'd better watch out. New York Times Book Review. The observation, "you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics", gave rise to what economists termed the Solow Productivity Paradox.

2. Crafts, N. (2004). Steam as a General Purpose Technology: A Growth Accounting Perspective. Economic Journal. Documents the long lag between transformative technology adoption and measurable economic uplift, a pattern repeated across industrial revolutions.

3. Brynjolfsson, E. & McAfee, A. (2014). The Second Machine Age. W.W. Norton & Company. Argues that digital technology's economic impact was systematically underestimated because GDP fails to capture consumer surplus and free digital goods.

4. McKinsey Global Institute (2023). The Economic Potential of Generative AI. McKinsey & Company. Estimates generative AI could add $2.6 to $4.4 trillion annually across industries, with broader AI contributing $13–$22 trillion by 2030.

5. Johnson, S. (1998). Who Moved the Cheese? G.P. Putnam's Sons. A business parable on adaptability and the cost of resisting inevitable change.

6. S&P Dow Jones Indices (2026). SPIVA U.S. Scorecard, Year-End 2025. Over a 15-year horizon, 90% of large-cap active managers underperformed the S&P 500. Consistent findings are reported across global markets including Australia and New Zealand.

Air New Zealand: The Worst of Both Worlds

Article #452

Fifty percent government-owned, operating like a budget carrier, charging premium prices, Air New Zealand occupies the most uncomfortable position in aviation. It’s neither fish nor fowl: not quite private, not quite public, delivering neither the efficiency of true competition nor the service standards of genuine public ownership.¹

Welcome to the warm embrace of collectivism. It’s getting warmer, and not in a good way.

The Flightless National Carrier

The symbolism writes itself. Air New Zealand, like the kiwi, has become a flightless bird, grounded by contradictions, unable to soar because it refuses to commit. Government ownership was supposed to protect the national interest. Instead, it has created an airline that enjoys privileges without facing consequences: government contracts, preferential treatment, implicit bailout guarantees, all without the full discipline of the market or the scrutiny of complete public accountability.¹

When things go wrong, taxpayers are on the hook. When things go right, shareholders collect the dividends.

New Zealanders know this intimately: the airline received NZ$2.3 billion in Crown support during COVID-19.² The structural trap was set long before the current crisis.

The World is on Fire. Air NZ has a Newsletter.

On 8 April 2026, CEO Nikhil Ravishankar sent customers a carefully worded email. “Kia ora Nick,” it began warmly. He wanted to update customers on jet fuel prices. Fuel had surged from around US$85–90 a barrel to above US$200, effectively doubling Air New Zealand’s daily fuel bill from NZ$4 million to NZ$8.5 million. Schedule cuts for May and June were confirmed. More were promised to be “deliberate and carefully considered.”³

Warm. Reassuring. Human, even, which is ironic, given what you encounter when you actually try to contact the airline.

This crisis is not Air New Zealand’s alone. Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which over 20% of global seaborne jet fuel normally flows, has sent shockwaves through the entire industry.⁴ More than 14,000 flights globally have been cancelled since late February 2026.⁵

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary has predicted summer cancellations of 5–10% across Europe.⁶ United Airlines’ CEO Scott Kirby has warned his carrier’s fuel bill could double to US$20 billion.⁷ Lufthansa’s CEO has assigned teams to contingency planning.⁸ SAS has cancelled over 1,000 flights in April alone.⁹ Energy analysts at Kpler warn that even if the Strait reopened tomorrow, prices would not fall quickly: production has been taken offline, and the market hangover could last well into 2027.¹⁰

The difference between Air New Zealand and those carriers is structural. Most are pure private enterprises; they face consequences. Air New Zealand faces a shareholder with a printing press.

The Numbers are Brutal

Forsyth Barr’s March 2026 report is stark: Air New Zealand could book a net loss of $226 million in FY2026, and $148 million in FY2027 if fuel costs remain elevated.¹¹ Macquarie analysts warn that capacity cuts will fall primarily on domestic and Tasman routes.¹² The share price has reflected the outlook, trading near its 52-week low at $0.48, down sharply from $0.64.¹³

The airline has already trimmed near-term capacity by 5%, with more reductions almost certain.

Watch for the Capital Raise

Here is what the CEO’s warm email does not say: if losses of this magnitude materialise over two financial years, Air New Zealand will need to raise capital. When it does, the New Zealand government, as 50.1% shareholder, faces an unavoidable choice. Participate, and write another substantial cheque from the public purse to protect its stake. Or decline, dilute, and begin the slow retreat from an ownership position it has held for decades.

Either outcome implicates taxpayers. Either outcome exposes the central absurdity of the current arrangement. Budget 2026… hold your breath.

Chatbots and Contempt

Try contacting Air New Zealand’s customer service, and you will discover the true face of modern collectivist enterprise: woeful service, declining standards, and a corporate structure that treats human interaction as an inconvenience to be automated away.

You are more likely to engage with a chatbot than a human, and the human, when you eventually find one, operates like a chatbot anyway—scripted, bounded, unable to resolve anything of substance. The airline’s answer to its service failures is not better people or better training, but better systems for apologising for the absence of both.

The Hospital Pass

That’s what recommending Air New Zealand has become, and nowhere is the gap between price and product more vivid than in business class, where Air New Zealand’s structural contradictions are most expensive to observe firsthand.

The airline’s new Business Premier cabin, rolling out across its Boeing 787 fleet through 2026, retains a herringbone configuration. Passengers sit angled toward the aisle rather than toward the window, the opposite of the reverse herringbone suites now standard on Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific.¹⁴ Standard Business Premier seats come equipped with a sliding privacy screen. Not a door: a screen.

A door costs extra. Specifically, NZ$820 (approximately US$487) extra on long-haul.¹⁵ There are four of them on the entire retrofitted aircraft.¹⁶ Aviation analysts reviewing the product have described the standard offering as “fairly underwhelming” compared to what the competition offers.¹⁷

You’d book Qantas if you could, but with Emirates disrupted by Iranian airspace closures, rerouting flights away from Gulf hubs, alternatives from New Zealand are thinner than they have been in years.¹⁸

Choose

New Zealand deserves better than this muddled middle ground. Our national carrier should be either a source of genuine pride (fully public, properly accountable, serving citizens) or a true competitor, privately owned and driven to excel.

Full public ownership means genuine accountability: real service obligations, routes chosen for public benefit, consequences for failure. Full privatisation means real competition, no bailouts, market discipline for a product that currently charges a premium for the privilege of facing a stranger across a narrow aisle.

What we have instead is the comfortable middle ground that serves nobody.

Make a choice. Commit to something. Because right now, our national carrier charges like Singapore Airlines, seats you in a layout from 2005, asks NZ$820 extra for a door, deploys a chatbot when you complain, and may shortly be asking the government for more money.

That’s not the warm embrace of collectivism. That’s the slow squeeze.

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

$3 at the Pump — Crisis, Panic, or a Lesson We Refused to Learn?

Article #449

The average price of unleaded 91 jumped 14 NZD cents over a single weekend — and suddenly, commentators are reaching for the kind of language we last heard during COVID. Back then, we fought over toilet paper. Today, the panic commodity is petrol.

Let us first take a breath and assess.

The cause: Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz (which handles about a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade). This of course follows retaliatory strikes after a US and Israeli attack on Iran in late February. [1]

The effect: Global oil prices have surged past US $100 per barrel, with Brent and WTI hitting around US$110 to US$114 at the height of the crisis. That pain is not contained to the petrol forecourt. It is flowing into every corner of our economy simultaneously, because energy is embedded in the cost of producing virtually everything. [1]

The most visible casualty so far is Air New Zealand, another unfortunately familiar occurrence. Our majority state-owned carrier has cancelled approximately 1,100 flights through early May, impacting around 44,000 passengers. In USD, jet fuel spiked from around $85 per barrel before the conflict to between $150 and $200, with the refinery crack spread (the margin between crude oil and refined jet fuel) blowing out from $22 to as high as $115 per barrel. That’s a structural blow to an airline already recording losses, and it has suspended its full-year earnings guidance entirely because the numbers no longer make sense. [2–5]

Finance Minister Nicola Willis has cited New Zealand's 50 days of fuel supply as a form of reassurance, but the public must read the fine print carefully. That figure includes fuel still sitting on tankers at sea, in transit from the very region in crisis. The fuel physically on New Zealand soil is closer to 28–33 days, depending on the product. [6]

More concerning still, that onshore storage is heavily concentrated around the former Marsden Point site in the north. That means regional centres and the entire South Island operate effectively on just-in-time supply and sit at the end of an extra coastal-shipping leg that adds its own layer of vulnerability. If supply were completely cut off today, New Zealand could sustain itself for roughly a month. [6,7]

That is not 50 days — and it should reframe the conversation entirely.

Muldoon-era carless days, last deployed between July 1979 and May 1980, are being discussed as a last resort. The mere fact we’re having this conversation in 2026 should give everyone pause. [8]

This is where a Canny View requires plain speaking.

Energy is not a lifestyle choice. It is the oxygen of economic activity. Every business—whether moving freight, running a dairy farm, manufacturing product, or providing professional services—consumes energy somewhere in its cost structure. When that cost surges sharply and suddenly, the business faces exactly three options:

1. Pass the increase to the customer.

2. Absorb it through productivity gains and efficiency.

3. Close their doors.

There is no fourth option. This is precisely why energy price shocks are so broadly inflationary. They don’t strike one sector. They strike all sectors at once.

For shareholders and business owners, the message is clear. A viable business must pay its bills, pay its staff, and generate sufficient return to keep capital engaged. When a major uncontrollable cost input (like energy) doubles overnight, that margin compresses fast.

The businesses weathering this shock best are those that made deliberate investments in energy resilience during the quieter years. Fleet operators who transitioned to hybrid or electric vehicles, alongside conventional petrol and diesel workhorses, are finding their total fuel bill meaningfully lower today. Those with suitable rooftops or landholdings who installed solar are generating their own daytime electricity, reducing grid dependency when traditional energy costs are most volatile.

Neither investment requires ideological conviction, only the basic financial discipline of stress-testing a cost structure and acting before the stress arrives.

Resilience is built in calm weather, not in a storm.

Now to the harder conversation — one that goes well beyond oil.

New Zealand's coal reserves exceed 15 billion tonnes, spread across Waikato, Taranaki, the West Coast, Otago and Southland. Our West Coast bituminous coal is internationally prized for its exceptionally low sulphur, low ash, and low phosphorus content — a premium quality product valued by the global steel industry. Yet Genesis Energy's Huntly Power Station sources most of its coal from Indonesia, with imports surging 311% in 2024 as domestic gas supply fell faster than expected. [9–11]

We export quality. We import what we need to keep the lights on. It’s a paradox, not a viable strategy.

The same logic applies offshore. Geological surveys estimate a 90% probability that New Zealand holds undiscovered oil reserves of at least 1.9 billion barrels, with a 50%  probability that the figure reaches 6.5 billion barrels. We are not a Saudi Arabia. But we are far from a barren rock. [12]

Which brings us to the captain's calls demanding accountability — plural, because there were more than one.

In 2018, then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern unilaterally banned all new offshore oil and gas exploration permits—no parliamentary vote, no Select Committee process, no national conversation. One announcement. Then, under the same Ardern government, New Zealand's only oil refinery at Marsden Point was closed and permanently decommissioned in 2022. The owner has since confirmed there is no prospect of restarting it; it would take billions of dollars and years of work to rebuild what took decades to establish. Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones described the closure as having fatally wounded New Zealand's fuel security. It’s difficult to argue otherwise this week. [13,14]

An uncomfortable but instructive parallel comes to mind. During Stalin's forced collectivisation in Ukraine in the early 1930s, a nation sitting atop some of the world's most productive agricultural land experienced a devastating famine while grain continued to be exported across its borders. The resources existed, and the policy choices negated them.

New Zealand is not Ukraine, and this is not the Holodomor, but the underlying dynamic—voluntarily denying access to domestic resources while importing vulnerability from abroad—is a pattern worth acknowledging.

A nation surrounded by grain, starving. A nation surrounded by hydrocarbons, panicking at the pump.

Muldoon would be baffled. His Think Big programme in the early 1980s was explicitly designed to convert New Zealand's own natural gas into synthetic fuels, fertiliser and methanol, and reduce oil import dependency following the 1973 energy shock. Think Big was expensive and its outcomes were mixed. But the underlying instinct — that a small, geographically isolated nation at the bottom of the world needs to take energy sovereignty seriously — wasn’t wrong. [15]

Domestic production does not fully insulate a small open economy from global prices. But it reduces the foreign exchange drain of pure import dependency, supports local employment, generates royalties and tax revenue for the Crown, and critically – reduces exposure to the shipping disruptions and geopolitical shocks we are living through right now. In times of crisis, a country with some domestic production and refining capacity is materially more resilient than one with neither.

The toilet paper panic of 2020 passed, and we learned almost nothing from it. Let us use this one differently: we need to have the serious, unsentimental conversation about energy sovereignty that we should have started long before Ardern's captain's call made it more urgent than it ever needed to be. We’ve missed the boat on energy resilience, and the storm has arrived; all we can do now is fortify ourselves to better weather the next one.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

References

1. NZ Herald, Petrol prices expected to hit at least $3 a litre in some places, March 2026

2. Flight Global, Fuel price volatility prompts Air New Zealand to suspend earnings guidance, March 2026

3. Global Banking & Finance Review, Air New Zealand cut flights, fuel price surge wreaks havoc, March 2026

4. AeroTime, Air NZ to cut 1,100 flights amid soaring fuel prices, March 2026

5. NZX Announcement, Air New Zealand suspends FY2026 guidance, March 2026

6. RNZ, How much fuel does NZ have — and what happens if we run out?, March 2026

7. Infonews, NZ Fuel Situation — South Island Vulnerabilities, March 2026

8. NZ Herald, Carless days are no solution to an oil shock (Liam Dann), March 2026

9. Wikipedia, Coal in New Zealand, citing USGS and MBIE data

10. USGS Fact Sheet 2004-3089, New Zealand Coal Resources

11. Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment, Energy in New Zealand 2025 — Coal

12. New Zealand Parliament, The Next Oil Shock?, citing Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences 2009

13. NZ Herald, First look: Inside Northland's Marsden Point oil refinery post-shutdown, November 2024

14. NZ Herald, Inquiry into reopening New Zealand's only oil refinery, March 2024

15. Wikipedia, Think Big, New Zealand Third National Government economic strategy

Iran, Oil, and Your Retirement Savings: Separating the Signal from the Noise

Article # 447

The New Zealand media has had a busy week connecting the US and Israeli strikes on Iran to your wallet. Some of it is legitimate. Some of it is noise dressed up as financial guidance. Knowing which is which - now that’s useful.

Let's start with what’s real.

The Strait of Hormuz: A known pressure point

The Strait of Hormuz is a roughly 33km-wide chokepoint between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Around 20% of the world's daily oil supply and a similar share of global liquefied natural gas trade passes through it every single day, mostly bound for China, India, Japan, and South Korea.¹

This waterway has been a pressure point for decades. Iran mined it during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, prompting direct US military intervention in what became known as the Tanker War (during which more than 500 vessels were damaged or destroyed).² In December 2011, Iran threatened closure in response to Western sanctions, triggering the deployment of a US-British-French naval flotilla. In 2019, tanker seizures and attacks on shipping spiked tensions again. In June 2025, Israel's strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities prompted Iran's parliament to pass a motion recommending closure, though that did not materialise into a full blockade.³

The point is this: the Strait of Hormuz has been a geopolitical instrument for Iran for more than 40 years. Successive US administrations, allies, and global energy markets have navigated those threats repeatedly. Every episode generated alarming coverage. Yet every episode passed. That does not make the current situation trivial, but it does provide context that breathless headlines rarely bother to include.

New Zealand's real exposure

Importantly, New Zealand has direct and specific economic exposure to this conflict.

According to the Meat Industry Association (MIA), nearly all of New Zealand's red meat exports to the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) travel through the Strait of Hormuz. In 2025, that trade was valued at $298 million, including $166 million in chilled exports, which are the most time-sensitive.⁴

Supply chain firm Kotahi, which handles freight on behalf of Fonterra and Silver Fern Farms, has confirmed that all major shipping lines have suspended services through the strait, with some 4,000 containers of New Zealand export cargo currently in transit.⁴

Fuel prices are also a legitimate concern. New Zealand no longer imports crude directly from the Middle East, but petrol is priced in a global market. Brent crude spiked more than 8% when trading opened after the weekend strikes.⁵ Analysts at JPMorgan and Citigroup have warned that sustained disruption could embed a significant geopolitical premium for weeks.

The New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has noted that rising fuel costs do not just show up at the pump. They pervade the economy through transport, logistics, and consumer prices – and may force the Reserve Bank to respond with always-dreaded interest rate adjustments.⁶

One lesser-discussed exposure: approximately one-third of the world's fertiliser trade also passes through the Strait of Hormuz, meaning prolonged disruption could eventually flow through to agricultural input costs. This is directly relevant to a primary-export economy like New Zealand's. ⁷

So yes, there are real and specific things worth monitoring here. Beyond fearmongering, we must consider geography and economic forces decades in the making.

Now for the noise...

Here’s where some of the coverage starts to serve the headline more than the reader.

At 7:56 am on Monday, 2 March, before Wall Street had even opened for the day, 1News published a piece headlined "Iran attack sparks warning for KiwiSaver, fuel, inflation."

Readers were told to brace for volatility, expect red ink in their KiwiSaver, and anticipate a flight to safer assets.⁸ By the time New Zealand investors had read that article over their morning coffee, absorbed the alarm, and perhaps reached for their phones to switch funds... Wall Street had opened, dipped 1.2%, and was already recovering. The S&P 500 closed that Monday virtually unchanged, finishing the session up just 0.04%.⁹

The warning had outrun the facts by an entire trading day.

Alarming coverage is produced in real time, often ahead of the facts. By the time reality arrives, in this case, a market that largely shrugged off the initial shock and bought the dip, most people have already absorbed the panic as truth and may have acted on it.

Advising the average investor to urgently check their KiwiSaver balance and consider switching funds is, for most people, bad advice dressed up as financial concern. This applies equally to any well-constructed investment portfolio underpinned by a comprehensive financial plan.

The latest data from the Retirement Commission puts the average KiwiSaver balance at $37,079 and the average member age at approximately 44.¹⁰ That means the typical New Zealand investor has roughly 20 to 25 years of accumulation ahead before they reach 65. Long-term KiwiSaver growth funds have historically returned between 7% and 9% annually.¹¹ Across that kind of horizon, even a meaningful short-term market dip is a rounding error in the final outcome.

The pattern markets have seen repeatedly, last June's brief Israel-Iran exchange being a useful recent reference point, is as follows:

1. Equity markets sell off sharply on geopolitical shock.

2. They recover once it becomes clear the worst-case scenario has not materialised.

3. Investors who switched to conservative funds during that episode locked in losses they then missed recovering as markets rebounded.

The same logic applies whether you hold KiwiSaver,  managed funds, or a direct share portfolio.

A comprehensive financial plan is engineered to withstand volatility. Abandoning it because of a week of alarming headlines is not a financial decision; it is an emotional one.

Four genuine reasons to review your investments

The right time to review your asset allocation or contribution settings is when your circumstances change — not when the news cycle does.

1. Has your income shifted significantly?

2. Are you approaching 65 and still in an aggressive growth fund that no longer reflects your timeline?

3. Has your risk tolerance genuinely changed — not because of a week of coverage, but because of a considered, honest look at your financial position and goals?

4. Are there changes to your broader financial plan that warrant a portfolio rebalance? These are all valid triggers for a conversation with your financial adviser.

But if your goals, your timeline, your income, and your broader financial picture are the same today as they were a fortnight ago, and for most people they are, the rational position is to stay the course.

A well-built investment portfolio is designed to absorb decades of global volatility. Many such portfolios have weathered the Global Financial Crisis, the COVID-19 crash, the 2022 rate shock, and last June's regional conflict. Each of those episodes generated similar headlines. Each time, disciplined investors who stayed the course came out ahead of those who did not.

When others are running from the fire

Warren Buffett has made a career of running towards financial fires, not away from them. Writing in the depths of the Global Financial Crisis, his philosophy spoke to financial discipline over the furore of the day: "Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down."¹²

The irony of a market downturn? Precisely when assets go on sale is when most investors want nothing to do with them; it’s when they are expensive and rising that everyone wants in. Buffett's instruction has always been the opposite: be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. That’s not a comfortable stance when headlines are blaring an alarm. But discomfort and bad decision-making are not the same thing.

This is where a structured, disciplined rebalancing strategy earns its keep.

When equities fall, and fixed income or defensive assets hold their ground, a rebalancing framework triggers a deliberate, rules-based response: trim what has held up, add to what has fallen. Not because of a hunch. Not because of a headline. Because the plan said so before any of this happened.

That’s the discipline Buffett is describing. Not panic, not paralysis — but a pre-committed process that removes emotion from the equation and replaces it with structure. The investors who do best through periods like this are not the ones who predicted the conflict or called the bottom. They’re the ones who had a plan, stuck to it, and let systematic rebalancing do what it was designed to do.

Discipline pays off

The media's job is to make you read the next paragraph. Your financial plan's job is to compound quietly over decades. These two objectives are not aligned – and it’s worth remembering that when the very same article explaining why oil prices are rising pivots abruptly to urging you to check your KiwiSaver.

There is genuine news here worth following closely: shipping disruptions, petrol prices, fertiliser costs, red meat export disruptions, and what unfolds in the Strait of Hormuz over the coming weeks are all legitimately important to New Zealand households and businesses. Read those stories. Understand the exposure.

But when the coverage drifts into urging reactive investment decisions based on today's headlines, that is where you put the phone down, flick on the kettle, and make yourself a brew instead of making rash investment decisions.

Your future self will thank you.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

• Article no. 447

---

References

[1] US Energy Information Administration. (2024). Strait of Hormuz — World's Most Important Oil Chokepoint. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/special-topics/World_Oil_Transit_Chokepoints

[2] Ratner, M., Lawson, A., & Brock, J. (2025). Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Oil and Gas Market Impacts. Congressional Research Service. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45281

[3] Times of Israel. (2026, March 1). Strait of Hormuz: Key Oil Route in Middle of Iran Crisis. https://www.timesofisrael.com/strait-of-hormuz-key-oil-route-in-middle-of-iran-crisis/

[4] Meat Industry Association NZ / Kotahi NZ. (2026, March 1). Statements on Strait of Hormuz shipping disruption. Reported in NZ Herald. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/us-iran-conflict-threatens-nz-red-meat-exports-via-strait-of-hormuz

[5] Franck, T., & Imbert, F. (2026, February 28). Markets Brace for Impact After US Strikes Iran. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/28/markets-brace-for-impact-following-us-military-strikes-against-iran.html

[6] New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. (2025, July). NZ Economy Not Immune to Conflict in the Middle East. https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/mfat-market-reports/nz-economy-not-immune-to-conflict-in-the-middle-east-july-2025

[7] Stojanovic, U., & Bradshaw, T. (2026, March 1). Strait of Hormuz: If the Iran Conflict Shuts the World's Most Important Oil Chokepoint, Global Economic Chaos Could Follow. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/strait-of-hormuz-if-the-iran-conflict-shuts-worlds-most-important-oil-chokepoint-global-economic-chaos-could-follow-277199

[8] Edmunds, S. (2026, March 2). Iran Attack Sparks Warning for KiwiSaver, Fuel, Inflation. RNZ / 1News. Published 7:56am. https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/03/02/iran-attack-sparks-warning-for-kiwisaver-fuel-inflation/

[9] CNBC Markets Desk. (2026, March 2). Stock Market Today: S&P 500 Ends Monday Just Above the Flatline, Rebounding from Sharp Declines. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/01/stock-market-today-live-update.html

[10] Reyers, M. (2025, March). KiwiSaver Member Data — December 2024. Te Ara Ahunga Ora Retirement Commission / Melville Jessup Weaver. Reported in: Edmunds, S. What Average KiwiSavers' Balances Are at Your Age. RNZ News. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/545015/what-average-kiwisavers-balances-are-at-your-age

[11] MoneyHub NZ. (2024). Average KiwiSaver Balance by Age. https://www.moneyhub.co.nz/average-kiwisaver-balance-by-age.html

[12] Buffett, W. (2008). Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman's Letter to Shareholders. Berkshire Hathaway. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2008ltr.pdf

28 Investment Principles That Actually Work When Markets Don't Cooperate

Article # 442

I've watched families navigate decades of volatility: crashes, recoveries, euphoria, panic. The ones who preserve wealth across generations don't have secret information or perfect timing. They follow simple rules, consistently.

February has 28 days. To ring it in, here are 28 guiding principles that have stood the test of time regardless of market activity.

1.       The market rewards patience, not prediction.

Most noise isn't information. The constant stream of commentary, analysis, and breaking news creates the illusion that staying informed means staying ahead. It doesn't. The market moves on fundamentals that reveal themselves slowly, not on headlines that change hourly.

2.       Focus on what you can control: Costs, discipline, diversification, behaviour.

You cannot control returns. You cannot control when recessions arrive or when bull markets end. But you can control how much you pay in fees, how consistently you invest, how broadly you spread your risk, and how you respond when fear or greed takes hold.

3.       You don't need to beat the market. You just need to capture it.

The obsession with outperformance drives investors towards complexity, higher costs, and ultimately, disappointment. Capturing market returns through low-cost, diversified portfolios has built more wealth over time than the pursuit of alpha ever has.

4.       The simplest portfolio is often the smartest.

Complexity rarely adds value. It adds cost, confusion, and opportunity for error. A straightforward allocation across global equities and bonds, rebalanced systematically, has outperformed the vast majority of elaborate strategies.

5.       Volatility is the price of admission.

Don't demand returns without accepting the ride. Equities deliver premium returns over time, because of fluctuations in the short term. If you cannot stomach the volatility, you don't deserve the returns.

6.       Time in the market matters more than timing the market. Always.

Missing just the 10 best days over a 20-year period can cut your returns nearly in half. Funnily enough, the best days often follow the worst ones – so it’s hard to capture them after getting cold feet on the downswing. Staying invested through the chaos is what separates wealth-builders from market-timers.

7.       Diversification is a dark horse.

Its power is revealed over decades, not days. When one asset class stumbles, another steadies the ship. The benefit isn't dramatic in any one year, but over a lifetime of investing, it's the difference between weathering storms and being swept away by them.

8.       Your plan should be built on evidence, not emotion.

Especially when emotions run high. When markets crash, fear whispers that this time is different and worse than any before. When markets soar, greed tells you that you're missing out. Evidence and decades of market history tell a different story – a much more trustworthy one.

9.       Chasing performance is a tax on impatience.

Last year's winners become this year's laggards with predictable regularity. By the time a fund or strategy appears on a "best performer" list, the opportunity has usually passed. Avoid getting swept up in the furore.

10.  The market has already priced in what everyone knows.

You don't need to outguess it. If information is public, it's already reflected in prices. Your edge as an investor isn't superior information, it's superior behaviour.

11.  A disciplined strategy beats a brilliant prediction. Every time.

Predictions fail. Discipline endures. The investor who follows a consistent plan through all market conditions will outperform the ‘strategist’ who tries to predict turning points.

12.  Your behaviour matters more than your products.

Panic is more expensive than fees: selling in a downturn locks in losses, while buying at market peaks locks in mediocre returns. Managing your behaviour by staying calm, and staying invested, matters far more than optimising your expense ratio by a few measley basis points.

13.  You don't need the perfect moment.

The moment you start is perfect enough. Markets climb over time. Waiting for a correction before investing often means waiting forever. Start now. Adjust as you go.

14.  Rebalancing is the quiet hero of long-term returns.

It forces buy-low, sell-high. When equities surge, rebalancing trims them back. When they crash, rebalancing buys more. It's counter-intuitive, uncomfortable… and extraordinarily effective over time.

15.  The best portfolios feel boring.

Boredom is not a bug, it's a feature. If your portfolio keeps you up at night with excitement, you’re probably taking on unnecessary risk. Wealth is built slowly, quietly, and without drama.

16.  Markets recover more often than they collapse.

History is your friend. Every bear market in history has eventually given way to a new bull market. Crashes feel permanent in the moment. They never are – as the adage goes, “this too shall pass.”

17.  Ignore headlines.

They're written to sell attention, not build wealth. Financial media thrives on urgency and alarm. Your portfolio should thrive on patience and perspective.

18.  Compounding works best when you don't interrupt it.

Let time do the heavy lifting. Albert Einstein allegedly called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world. But, it only works if you leave it alone – every time you exit the market, you reset the clock.

19.  Costs compound too.

Costs compound just like returns. Pay for advice that adds value, not for products that don't. The difference between value and waste always reveals itself in the fullness of time.

20.  Bad days don't destroy portfolios. Bad decisions do.

Markets fall. That's normal, and things will swing back the other way. Selling during the fall, abandoning your plan, or fleeing to cash – those are the decisions that inflict permanent damage.

21.  Not every risk deserves a reward.

Factor premiums do. Stocks are riskier than bonds, so they should deliver higher returns. Small-cap and value stocks have historically outperformed over long periods. These are risks worth taking. Concentrated bets on individual stocks or sectors? Not so much.

22.  Your portfolio should be built around you, not around the news cycle.

Your goals, your time horizon, and your risk tolerance should dictate your allocation. Not the latest economic forecast or geopolitical crisis.

23.  You don't need to predict the future.

…But you do need a strategy that survives it. Robust portfolios aren't built on forecasts. They're built on diversification, discipline, and the recognition that uncertainty is permanent.

24.  Stay invested, stay diversified, stay disciplined.

The rest is commentary. If you do these three things consistently, you will be fine. Better than fine, in fact. You'll be wealthier than the vast majority of investors who spend their lives chasing the next opportunity.

25.  Wealth isn't created in moments of excitement.

It's created in years of consistency. The investors who succeed aren't the ones who make brilliant trades or perfectly time the market. They're the ones who show up, year after year, regardless of conditions. Consistency compounds.

26.  Your worst investing day feels catastrophic. Your best investing decade feels inevitable.

Perspective matters. In the moment, a 20% drawdown feels like the end. Twenty years later, it's a footnote. Keep the long view. Stay the course.

27.  Successful investors are more patient than ‘smart’.

Intelligence helps, but temperament wins out every time. The ability to sit still, to do nothing when everyone else is panicking or euphoric, is worth more than any financial qualification.

28.  Markets don't care about your timeline. Build a plan that doesn't care about the markets.

You might need money in five years for a house deposit or in thirty years for retirement. The market will do what it does regardless. Structure your portfolio around your needs, not market predictions, and you'll sleep better through every cycle.

Remember: Markets will always be chaotic. Your response doesn't have to be.

Follow the rules (and seek professional advice)

These principles work. But they work best when you have someone in your corner who isn't conflicted by commissions, product sales, or institutional agendas.

Seek independent, impartial advice that puts you first and foremost. You are the sun, not the moon: your financial plan should orbit around you, your goals, your circumstances. Not around what someone else needs to sell.

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe, Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

• Article no. 442

---

Reflecting on 2025: A Final Canny View for the Year

As we close the books on another eventful year, I want to share some final reflections before I put away my pen and keyboard for a well-earned break.

The Year That Was

2025 has been a masterclass in the unpredictable nature of markets.

We began the year with President Trump's inauguration and the subsequent tariff theatre that sent shockwaves through global markets in March and April. Despite a sharp -19% drawdown that tested even the most seasoned investors' resolve, global equity markets have delivered another year of above-average returns.

It's a powerful reminder that short-term turbulence is simply the price we pay for long-term prosperity.

The Dog in the Kennel

While many global markets have been out having fun (celebrating AI breakthroughs, peace deals, and strong returns) our New Zealand market has been in the kennel, watching the party from afar. It's been a challenging period for local investors who've seen the disparity between domestic and international performance grow increasingly stark.

Yet – every dog has its day. Recent economic data suggests our dog might be stirring. The balance of trade is looking favourable, and commodity markets for our protein exports remain strong.

These are the foundations that future returns are built upon. Markets move in cycles, and what seems forgotten can suddenly become fashionable again. The New Zealand market won't stay in the kennel forever. Patient investors who maintain diversified portfolios will be positioned to benefit when our local market eventually has its turn in the sun.

Three Lessons Worth Keeping

First, overvalued markets can still grow. The commentators warning about stretched valuations at the start of the year weren't wrong about the numbers; they were just wrong about what those numbers meant for forward returns. Valuation tells us little about timing, and waiting for the "perfect" entry point often means missing out entirely.

Second, knowing what will happen doesn't tell you how markets will react. The tariff announcements in April proved this brilliantly. Everyone knew they were coming, yet the market's bottom came not when clarity arrived, but when uncertainty was at its absolute peak. This is why we plan rather than predict.

Third, long-term planning beats short-term prediction every time. We're living through an AI revolution that will reshape everything, yet we cannot know exactly how or when. The solution isn't better predictions, it's better preparation. A solid financial plan with appropriate asset allocation, a margin of safety, and the discipline to stay invested remains your best defence against an unknowable future.

The Permanent Condition

Uncertainty isn't new, it's the permanent condition of investing. The headlines change, the crises evolve, but the fundamental truth remains: we cannot predict, but we can prepare.

Those who stayed invested through April's anxiety have been rewarded. Those who will stay invested through next year's inevitable turbulence will likely say the same thing in December 2026.

A Time for Gratitude

As I reflect on another year of writing, research, and market commentary, I'm grateful for the readers who engage thoughtfully with these ideas. Whether you're a long-time follower or stumbled across this column recently, thank you for your time and attention.

My aim has always been to cut through the noise and shine a light on the principles that actually matter when it comes to building and protecting wealth. If these weekly reflections have helped you think more clearly about your financial future, make smarter decisions with your capital, or simply feel more confident staying the course during turbulent times, then the effort has been worthwhile.

Safe Travels!

To those of you travelling nationally or abroad over the holiday period, safe travels. To those staying home, enjoy the slower pace and time with loved ones. Whatever your plans, I hope you find moments of rest and renewal.

As for me, I'll be stepping away from the keyboard for two weeks to recharge. Our first article of 2026 will land on 10 January as we look forward to the year ahead. Until then, this will be my last dispatch for 2025.

Whatever 2026 has in store, we'll navigate it together.

See you in the new year.

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe, Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

• Article no. 438

---

When Ideology Replaces Analysis: The Sparrow Lesson for Investors

It's fairly well known that Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) ended in one of history's deadliest famines: tens of millions died, villages emptied by hunger, fields stripped bare. What's less well known is how a war on sparrows helped set the catastrophe in motion.  [1]

‘Ed Brown’ by Michael Parekowhai, 2000 - A favourite of Nick’s that hangs on the wall at home.

In 1958, Mao launched the Four Pests Campaign, targeting rats, flies, mosquitoes… and sparrows. The tiny birds, he decreed, were "enemies of the people" for daring to eat the people's grain.  [2]

And so, an entire civilisation mobilised against the feathered menace. Schoolchildren banged pots and pans in the streets, peasants drummed on washbasins, and factory sirens screamed for hours to keep the birds in flight until they fell dead from exhaustion. Nests were torn down, eggs smashed, and chicks stomped into the earth.

The results were biblical. In Beijing alone, more than a million sparrows were killed in a matter of weeks. Rural communes competed to see who could pile the highest mountain of avian corpses, a kind of grotesque festival of progress.

But victory, when it came, was short-lived. The sparrows, it turned out, had been eating more insects than grain. Within a year, the skies were empty, and the earth was crawling. Locusts rose like living clouds, devouring fields from horizon to horizon. Peasants watched in horror as the crops disappeared into the mandibles of an unstoppable plague of their own making.

Rather than admit his mistake, Mao doubled down on absurdities. He replaced the sparrows with imported Soviet "science" – the theories of Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist who believed that crops could be re-educated through hard labour. Genetics was bourgeois nonsense, Lysenko said; what mattered was enthusiasm. If you ploughed deeper, planted closer, and shouted revolutionary slogans loudly enough, the harvest would multiply.

So, fields were churned to depths that eviscerated the biome, seedlings were planted shoulder to shoulder until none could breathe, and bureaucrats inflated yields to impossible heights. Mountains of fake grain were reported; much of the real grain was exported to show socialist success.

By 1960, China was starving. Whole provinces were dying in silence. Still, the propaganda blared: "The people's communes are good!"

A survivor later put it simply: "We killed the birds, and then the insects ate everything else."

New Zealand's Sacred Cow

We have our own version of Lysenko's ideology. You've heard it at every barbecue, every family gathering, every pub conversation about money:

• "You can't go wrong with bricks and mortar."

• "Buy land – God's not making any more of it."

• "Rent money is dead money."

• "Safe as houses."

• "Property always goes up."

For two decades, these mantras proved prophetic. House prices in Auckland rose 500% between 2000 and 2021. Kiwi households saw their home become their retirement plan, their children's inheritance, their ticket to prosperity. Property investment became a religion, complete with its own prophets (real estate agents), its own evangelists (property coaches), and its own scripture (Rich Dad Poor Dad).

The scriptures were simple: leverage to the hilt, buy multiple rentals, negative gear against your income, and watch the capital gains roll in. Interest rates were at historic lows (and surely they'd stay there forever). The government needed house prices to keep rising; from pensioners to banks, the entire economy seemed to float on residential property values.

Alas - ideology, no matter how many believers it has, eventually meets mathematical reality.

When the Locusts Arrived

When the Reserve Bank lifted the Official Cash Rate from 0.25% to 5.5% between 2021 and 2023, the proverbial locusts began to swarm and feast.  [3]

Investors who'd stretched to buy rental properties on interest-only loans at 2.5% suddenly faced repayments double what they'd planned for. Those who'd bought at the peak in 2021, with the assumption that prices would continue relentlessly marching upward, now watched their equity disappear into the maw of change.

The median house price in New Zealand has fallen 18% from its 2021 peak according to CoreLogic, with steeper declines in some regions. In Wellington, prices dropped over 20%.  [5], [4]

Investors who bought at the top, banking on endless capital gains to compensate for negative cash flow, are now holding properties worth less than their mortgages. Negative equity isn't just an American problem from the 2008 crisis anymore; it's arrived in Epsom and Island Bay, in Christchurch and Hamilton. [5]

Mortgage stress has become a daily reality for thousands of New Zealand families. What was affordable at 2.5% is crushing at 7%. Property gambles that made sense when you could lock in cheap debt for years, now bleed money every month.

The Property Value Fundamentals We Ignored

Like Mao's bureaucrats ignoring the ecology of pest control, New Zealand ignored the fundamentals that underpin property values:

1.     Debt serviceability

We convinced ourselves record-low interest rates were the new normal; a pleasantly permanent feature of the economic landscape.

They weren't. They were weather, not climate.

Anyone who'd stress-tested their mortgage at 7% rates had a good idea what this would look like, but most didn't bother. After all, the Reserve Bank had signalled rates would stay low until 2024, hadn't they? (They had. They were wrong.)

2.     Yield vs. cost

Rental properties returning 3% gross yield while mortgages cost 7% represents what economist Hyman Minsky termed "Ponzi finance"—where income flows cover neither principal nor interest charges, requiring continuous new debt or capital appreciation to survive [6]. When prices stopped rising, the mathematics became unavoidable. You can't lose money every month and call it investing just because you hope the asset will appreciate.

3.      Supply and demand

Yes, God's not making more land. But man is making more zoning laws, more construction, and more high-density housing. Auckland's recent upzoning has added the potential for tens of thousands of new dwellings. National's push for urban intensification is changing the supply equation.

Supply does respond to price eventually. The assumption that demand would endlessly outstrip supply was ideology, not analysis.

4.     Demographic and economic shifts

Net migration swings wildly:

• We saw massive outflows to Australia when its economy boomed.

• Birth rates are falling.

• Working from home changed where people want to live, making provincial cities more attractive.

How to Avoid Being the Sparrow Killer

No investment is exempt from fundamental analysis – not even the quarter-acre Kiwi dream. Here’s what you need to do:

Test your assumptions first

Before buying property (or any investment), ask the hard questions: Can I afford this if interest rates hit 8%? What if the property stays vacant for three months? What if it needs a $30,000 roof replacement? What if prices don't rise for a decade—can I still hold on? If your investment only works under best-case scenarios, you're not investing—you're gambling with borrowed money.

Recognise ideology masquerading as wisdom

When someone says "you can't go wrong with property”: ask them about Japan, where house prices fell for fifteen consecutive years after 1991 with Tokyo property losing 60% of its value. Or Ireland, where property crashed 50% in 2008-2012. Or Detroit, where homes now sell for less than second-hand cars. [6]

The phrase "you can't go wrong" is the most dangerous in investing. You absolutely can go wrong with property, shares, bonds, or any other asset – when you pay too much, borrow too heavily, or ignore the fundamentals.

Understand that all assets are priced relative to alternatives

When term deposits paid 0.5%, property's 3% gross yield looked attractive by comparison. At 5.5% risk-free rates from the bank, suddenly that leveraged rental property earning 3% gross (maybe 1% after rates, insurance, maintenance, and management) looks substantially less clever. Capital always flows to its best risk-adjusted return. When safe returns become attractive again, risky assets must reprice.

Seek Wise Counsel

Honest, professional financial advice isn’t just valuable in these situations; it’s essential.

Not the mate at the barbecue repeating what worked in 2015. Not the property spruiker selling $5,000 weekend seminars on wealth creation. Not the Instagram influencer with a Lamborghini, a course to sell, and a P.O. box in the Cayman Islands.

Find an adviser who'll tell you hard truths instead of comfortable lies. Someone who'll stress-test your assumptions, challenge your thinking, and ask the questions you don’t want to acknowledge:

• What if you're wrong?

• What if rates stay high for five years?

• What if prices don't recover for a decade?

• What does your portfolio look like if this happens?

 The best financial advice often sounds boring. That’s because it is boring: it involves diversification across asset classes, appropriate leverage you can service in bad times, understanding what you own and why, and planning for scenarios you hope won't happen.

It's not a catchy slogan you can repeat at a dinner party. It's certainly not exciting enough to build a social media following around.

Instead, it's mathematics, discipline, humility, and the wisdom to know that "everyone's doing it" has never – not once in the history of markets – been a sound investment strategy. Quite the opposite; when everyone's doing it, that’s usually a good moment to step back and ask why.

Mao surrounded himself with yes-men who told him what he wanted to hear. The sparrows paid the price. Then the insects thrived. Then the people paid the price. The echo chamber produced catastrophe because ideology replaced observation, and enthusiasm replaced analysis.

The Bottom Line for Kiwi Investors

Don't let your financial future be decided by mantras. Don't let social ‘proof’ substitute for due diligence. And crucially, don't assume what has worked for the past twenty years will work for the next twenty.

Instead, seek counsel that respects the complexity of markets, acknowledges uncertainty honestly, understands risk as well as reward, and helps you build wealth on foundations stronger than popular sentiment or revolutionary enthusiasm.

The fundamentals always win. Always. The only question is whether you'll be positioned to weather the fallout, or whether you’ll be left exposed in the fields.

The locusts are always waiting.

Nick Stewart
(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe, Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

• Article no. 432

---

References

[1] F. Dikötter, *Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–-1962*.. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010.

[2] J. Shapiro, *Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China*.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

[3] Reserve Bank of New Zealand, “Official Cash Rate decisions and historical data,”, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.rbnz.govt.nz

[4] Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ), “Historical house price data and market statistics,”, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.reinz.co.nz

[5] CoreLogic New Zealand, “House price indices and market analysis reports,”, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.corelogic.co.nz

[6] H. P. Minsky, “The Financial Instability Hypothesis,”, The Jerome Levy Economics Institute Working Paper No. 74, 1992.

The Magnificent 7: Why Yesterday’s Winners May Not Be Tomorrow’s Champions

Financial advisers are facing intense pressure from clients: should portfolios be loaded up on the Magnificent 7 stocks (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, NVIDIA, and Tesla)?

These tech giants have delivered spectacular returns and now dominate America’s largest companies. Clients’ friends are bragging about gains, financial media breathlessly covers every earnings report, and the fear of missing out is palpable.

But financial lessons tell us to look beyond the headlines and recent performance – and market history suggests this caution is warranted.

The Illusion of Permanence

When we look at today’s market leaders, it’s easy to assume they’ll remain on top indefinitely. These companies have massive cash reserves, dominant market positions, and appear to be shaping our technological future. But market history tells a different story.

Consider this statistic from Dimensional Fund Advisers’ analysis: of the 10 largest US companies in 1980, only three made it to the top 10 by 2000.[1] Even more striking, none of those 1980 giants appears in today’s top 10. Companies like IBM, AT&T, and Exxon – once considered unassailable titans – have been replaced by an entirely new generation of market leaders.

Source: Dimensional - Click for full information

This is more than trivia; it’s a fundamental lesson about impermanent market dynamics that should inform every portfolio decision.

Research from the Centre for Research in Security Prices demonstrates that market leadership is far more transient than most investors realise: In 1980, six of the 10 largest companies were energy firms.[1] Today, technology dominates. This wasn’t gradual. It was a wholesale transformation driven by innovation and shifting economic fundamentals.

This pattern should concern anyone betting that today’s technology concentration will last for decades. Seemingly unstoppable industries may face disruption from sources we cannot yet imagine.

Technological advancement doesn’t benefit only technology companies. Throughout history, firms across all industries have leveraged new technologies to innovate and grow. The internet didn’t just create wealth for internet companies; it transformed retail, finance, healthcare, and virtually every sector.

Similarly, McKinsey research suggests AI adoption could add trillions in value across all economic sectors, not just technology.[2] A pharmaceutical company using AI for drug discovery or a manufacturer deploying advanced robotics may deliver returns that rival pure-play tech stocks – anything is possible at this stage.

The Case for Diversification

Modern Portfolio Theory, developed by Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz, demonstrates that diversification is the only “free lunch” in investing – it reduces risk without necessarily sacrificing returns.[3]

Diversification doesn’t mean avoiding the Magnificent 7 per se. These companies earn their market positions through genuine competitive advantages. It does mean resisting the temptation to overweight them simply because they’ve performed well recently. A diversified portfolio allows participation in current market leaders while maintaining exposure to companies and sectors that may emerge as tomorrow’s giants.

Remember, many of today’s Magnificent 7 were relatively small or didn’t exist 25 years ago. The next generation of market leaders is likely being built right now.

Working with a financial adviser can help you recognise and combat recency bias – this is the tendency to assume recent trends will continue indefinitely. Behavioural finance research shows this cognitive bias often leads to poor investment decisions.[4] And as any adviser worth their salt will be able to tell you, the Magnificent 7’s impressive performance creates a psychological pull to buy more of these stocks – but this often means buying high and taking concentrated risk precisely when valuations are stretched.

Instead of chasing performance, you need to stay focused on your long-term goals. Maintaining discipline around portfolio construction through regular rebalancing forces you to trim any areas that have grown over-large, so you (or rather, your financial adviser) can redeploy capital to areas that may offer better prospective returns.[5]

The Path Forward

Market history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. While predicting which companies will lead markets in 2040 or 2050 is impossible, the leaders of the pack will certainly change. New technologies, business models, and companies will emerge, and the current leaders may become footnotes in global markets history.

A globally diversified portfolio positions you to benefit from these changes, rather than being hurt by them. They participate in today’s success stories while remaining open to tomorrow’s opportunities.

The Magnificent 7 have earned their place among America’s largest companies through innovation and execution. But despite how tempting they are, the best course of action isn’t to chase yesterday’s winners or follow the herd – it’s to build resilient portfolios that serve your unique needs.

Building a plan that can weather change (while capturing opportunity wherever it emerges) requires diversification, discipline, and a healthy respect for the lessons of market history. If that sounds daunting, try arranging a chat with your local, fiduciary financial adviser to discuss what your first steps might be – it’s a better use of your time than tracking Magnificent 7 performance, anyway.

Nick Stewart
(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe, Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

• Article no. 429

---

References

1. Dimensional Fund Advisers. (2024). “Will the Magnificent 7 Stay on Top?” *Dimensional Quick Take*, using data from the Centre for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) and Compustat, University of Chicago.

2. McKinsey Global Institute. (2023). “The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier.” McKinsey & Company.

3. Markowitz, H. (1952). “Portfolio Selection.” *The Journal of Finance*, 7(1), 77-91.

4. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” *Econometrica*, 47(2), 263-291.

5. Buetow, G. W., Sellers, R., Trotter, D., Hunt, E., & Whipple Jr, W. A. (2002). “The Benefits of Rebalancing.” *Journal of Portfolio Management*, 28(2), 23-32.

When Geniuses Get Burned: A Timely Lesson on Bubbles, Diversification, and the Perils of FOMO

On a crisp morning stroll through Edinburgh recently, whilst following my son’s rugby team in the UK, I found myself at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, where Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1989 statue of Sir Isaac Newton caught my eye. Cast in bronze with geometric fragments, Newton is depicted as the “Master of the Universe,” his head bowed intently over mathematical instruments. It’s a mesmerising tribute to one of history’s greatest intellects, immortalised in deep contemplation of the cosmos.

But statues don’t tell the full story. What Paolozzi’s work omits is Newton’s humiliating financial debacle during the South Sea Bubble of 1720-a cautionary tale that resonates profoundly in today’s volatile markets. Historical accounts reveal that Newton initially invested a modest sum in South Sea Company stock, cashed out with a respectable profit, then watched enviously as his friends amassed fortunes while prices skyrocketed. Succumbing to the fear of missing out (FOMO), he re-entered the market near its peak with a much larger stake [1]. When the bubble inevitably burst, Newton lost approximately £ 20,000, equivalent to about £6 million today (adjusted for inflation), or roughly $14 million in New Zealand dollars [2]. His wry reflection afterwards? “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people” [3].

This episode isn’t just an amusing footnote in the life of a scientific giant; it’s a stark reminder that even the sharpest minds are vulnerable to market mania. If Newton, the architect of calculus and gravity, couldn’t outsmart the crowd, what hope do everyday investors have in navigating today’s hype-driven landscapes, like the AI boom?

Unpacking the Bubble Phenomenon

Financial bubbles are seductive traps, identifiable only after they’ve popped. They thrive on compelling narratives that mask underlying risks. In 1720, the South Sea Company’s promise of exclusive trade rights with South America fuelled wild speculation, driving stock prices from around £100 to over £1,000 in months before collapsing [4]. Closer to home, New Zealand’s 1987 sharemarket crash serves as a vivid parallel: fuelled by deregulation and easy credit, the NZSE index surged, only to plummet 60% in weeks, wiping out leveraged fortunes in property and equities [5, 11]. The aftermath was brutal: bankruptcies, shattered families, and a lingering distrust of markets that scarred a generation.

More recently, Auckland’s property market exhibited bubble characteristics, with median house prices tripling between 2011 and 2021 amid low interest rates and high demand [6]. These episodes highlight a pattern: euphoria driven by “this time it’s different” optimism, followed by inevitable reversion to fundamentals.

Enter today’s hottest debate: artificial intelligence. Is AI the next fire, wheel, or microchip-a paradigm shift revolutionising healthcare, agriculture, and beyond? Or is it overhyped, with valuations echoing the dotcom bubble, where slapping “.com” on a business sent stocks soaring regardless of viability [7]? Companies like Nvidia have seen shares rocket over 100% in the past year on AI enthusiasm, but sceptics warn of irrational exuberance. The truth? No one knows for sure. AI could deliver transformative value, or it might follow the path of past tech fads, leaving late entrants holding the bag.

Why Diversification is Your Best Defence

In the face of such uncertainty, diversification emerges not as a conservative cop-out, but as a strategic imperative. When predicting individual winners is near-impossible, the smart play is to spread your bets across the market. Own a broad index fund, and let capitalism’s machinery-competition, innovation, and resource allocation-work its magic over the long haul.

Strolling Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, I paused at the statue of Adam Smith, the Scottish economist whose 1776 masterpiece, The Wealth of Nations, introduced the “invisible hand” [8]. Smith argued that self-interested individuals, through free markets, inadvertently create societal benefits by directing capital to its most productive uses. No top-down planning required-just the aggregate wisdom of millions of decisions fostering efficiency and growth.

This evolutionary aspect of capitalism is key: viable companies flourish, while hype-driven ones wither. Yet spotting them in advance is a fool’s errand. Studies show that even seasoned fund managers underperform broad market indices over time, with survivorship bias and fees eroding returns [9]. For individual investors chasing the next Amazon or dodging the next Enron, the odds are stacked even higher against success.

New Zealanders have ample tools for diversification: local or global index funds covering thousands of companies, often accessible via platforms like KiwiSaver. These vehicles ensure you participate in growth sectors like AI without overexposure. Miss the ground-floor entry on Nvidia? No problem-a diversified portfolio still captures the upside while shielding you from sector-specific crashes.

The Psychology of Smart People Making Dumb Moves

Newton’s misadventure underscores a timeless truth: raw intelligence offers no immunity to behavioural biases. As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, our brains are wired for quick, intuitive decisions that often lead us astray in complex environments [10]. Newton fell victim to a classic cycle: initial caution (fear of loss), sidelined envy (FOMO), and impulsive greed fuelled by social proof from his peers.

This dynamic played out vividly in New Zealand’s 1987 crash. Professionals-doctors, lawyers, accountants-piled into “can’t-lose” investments with borrowed money, convinced by the herd that prices would rise forever. When reality hit, the rapid 60% drop erased wealth overnight, triggering a cascade of personal and economic fallout [11].

Human nature hasn’t evolved since Newton’s day. Greed, fear, and herd mentality persist, amplified by social media and 24/7 news cycles. In the AI era, viral success stories can lure even savvy investors into concentrated bets, ignoring the risks.

Building Resilience Through Diversification

While diversification won’t eliminate downturns (markets are volatile by nature), it mitigates ruinous losses. Imagine holding only South Sea stock: total devastation. But a basket of British equities? Painful, but survivable, with recovery potential. The MSCI World Index’s ~8% average annual gross return over 30 years, weathering multiple crashes, exemplifies this resilience [9].

Apply this to AI: if it revolutionises society, diversified holders benefit via broad tech exposure. If it fizzles, your portfolio’s other sectors (healthcare, consumer goods, energy) provide ballast [12]. The key is discipline: resist the siren call of hot tips and maintain a balanced allocation.

Final Reflections: Wisdom from the Past

Gazing at Newton’s statue, the irony hit me: a monument to unparalleled genius, yet its subject was felled by the same primal instincts that plague us all. Bubbles will recur because human psychology is immutable. But we can arm ourselves with humility, acknowledging our limitations in outguessing markets.

Embrace diversification as your anchor, harnessing capitalism’s long-term compounding power. You don’t need Newton-level brilliance to thrive financially-often, recognising your non-genius status is the cleverest strategy.

And don’t go it alone. Newton might have avoided disaster with impartial advice. A trusted financial adviser won’t forecast the next bubble but will enforce discipline: reminding you that past performance doesn’t predict future results, crowds are often wrong, and capital preservation trumps speculative gains. They’ll tailor a diversified plan to your goals, helping you navigate emotional turbulence and emerge stronger.

In an unpredictable world, this approach turns potential pitfalls into opportunities. Review your portfolio today: is it diversified enough to withstand the next mania? If not, seek wise counsel-it could be the difference between exiting happy and exiting broke.

Nick Stewart
(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe, Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

• Article no. 428

---

References

1. Odlyzko, A. (2018). Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 73(1), 29-59.

2. UK Office for National Statistics Composite Price Index; Bank of England inflation calculator (1750-2025).

3. Levenson, T. (2009). Newton and the Counterfeiter. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

4. Dale, R., et al. (2005). The Economic History Review, 58(2), 233-271.

5. Easton, B. (1997). In Stormy Seas. Otago University Press.

6. Reserve Bank of New Zealand Housing Data Series (2011-2021).

7. Shiller, R. J. (2015). Irrational Exuberance (3rd ed.). Princeton University Press.

8. Smith, A. (1776). Wealth of Nations. W. Strahan and T. Cadell, London.

9. Malkiel, B. G. (2019). A Random Walk Down Wall Street (12th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

10. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

11. Steeman, M. (2017). Stuff.co.nz, 19 October 2017.

12. Bogle, J. C. (2017). The Little Book of Common Sense Investing (10th Anniversary ed.). John Wiley & Sons.