Other Asset Classes topics

I'm in the process of splitting out the Other Asset Classes section into more meaningful topics.

So far, I have added the following topics to the "Finance, Accounting, Tax, Legal, Advice" section:

• Superannuation, SMSF & Personal Insurance - Superannuation, self-managed super funds, pensions, life insurance, disability insurance, income insurance, and more...
  
• Wills & Estate Planning - Wills, Probate, Testamentary trusts
  
• Financial Planning - Discussion about the financial planning process and about financial planners / advisors

... some of the threads are from the Other Asset Classes section, while others are from other sections where it made sense to move them.

I'm creating a new expanded section for discussion about equities investments - shares / managed funds / LICs / ETFs / LPTs, etc - but I'm not exactly sure of the best way to group these topics yet.

I'm currently thinking of a Strategies section for general discussion / comparison of product types, along with specific topics for discussion about individual stocks/funds/products.

Either way, the whole equities section is currently in a state of flux, so please be patient, there may be some mis-categorisation for a while.

Any suggestions for how to group the discussions is welcome.

Also - for those people who are "this is a property forum - we shouldn't be talking about shares" types - I do intend to build an "ignore" feature into the upcoming upgrade, so you'll be able to hide these discussions easily and focus on the property stuff that you love.

 

My current topics for the Equities section:

• Sharemarket Investment Strategies
• ASX Shares
• Managed Funds & Index Funds
• Exchange Traded Funds (ETF)
• Listed Investment Companies (LIC) & Trusts (LIT)
• Real Estate Investment Trusts (A-REIT / LPT)
• Forex & Cryptocurrencies
• Investment & Trading Platforms, Tools and Services
• Other Asset Classes

... with the intention that the Sharemarket Investment Strategies contains all the general discussion and comparisons, while the other topics are for specific discussions about individual shares / funds / ETFs / LICs / etc.

I'd really like to have one share, fund or product per thread to make it easier for people to find information.

I don't think restricting the topics to one thread per product is necessarily the best approach - but we could perhaps use forum "prefixes" (like the state based prefixes we use in the Where to Buy and the Meetup forums) to associate a thread with a specific fund or share.

I might experiment with this a bit and see how well it works.

Those extremely long generic "LICs" and "ETFs" threads will have to stop though - they become useless for anyone not actively engaged in them when it comes to finding useful information.

 

This is why I have put Super in the Finance/Accounting/Tax/Legal/Advice section.

Super is a structure, thus a legal issue; it also gets favourable tax treatment and can be used to minimise tax - hence an accounting/tax issue; is also has strict requirements for financial advice - hence a financial planning issue.

The fact that shares/funds/property/etc can be purchased through super is largely incidental and other than specific rules or processes which may apply to a super fund - the questions about what to buy or investment strategies relating to super funds are largely the same as those held outside of super.

Which is why I'm not treating it as an asset class, but as an "adviser" topic.

I don't think there's a need to split the topic further into retail/industry/self managed - they are all just platform choices which achieve largely the same outcome.

 

Actually, that was supposed to be covered by the Real Estate Investment Trusts topic - I've changed it to be "A-REIT / LPT / UPT".

 

Yes, I think financial planning would be a suitable place for such discussions.

 

Yes, originally I had "Shares" or "Direct Shares" but changing that to "ASX Shares" like I have at the moment, implies that we should have an "International Shares" topic as well.

 

That's exactly what I'm planning to add as part of the coming upgrade.

My vision is that it will be simple for you to ignore any section of the site you don't want appearing in new posts searches (eg, ignore all "Off topic" discussions, or ignore all "Shares" discussions - or in your case, ignore all "Property" discussions).

I'm thinking it would be useful to have that work at a thread level as well - if there is a specific thread you aren't interested in, you can just ignore it and it will no longer appear in new posts searches either.

 

There's still quite a bit of work to do before I merge those sites in - but eventually, yes.

For now, I'm only dealing with threads that have already been posted on PropertyChat!

 

No - this is kind of an issue, there's no way to look at what's new from a "category" point of view.

Part of what I was planning to do when I migrated the InvestChat stuff across was to basically run it as two separate sub-sites and duplicate the search functionality for the equities stuff to allow you to do exactly what you're asking. But we're a little way off being able to do that yet - sorry!