One of the great parts of my role as State manager at Shaw and Partners is that occasionally, I get to impart a bit of hard-earned financial wisdom to Year 10 Economics students.

Sure, their teachers can give them knowledge from textbooks, but I like to tell them what to do with that knowledge and how to use it.

These students have the good fortune of attending a school that is working hard to introduce them to different employers and careers and it gives me a chance to get back to basics – to remember the many reasons why I first entered the financial markets industry in the first place.

For me, this experience is an opportunity to break down what we do as “wealth managers” and how critical it is to actually keep it simple. All the fancy programs, industry jargon, graphs and spaghetti maps seem to miss the point when you’re talking to a young audience about how they might want to spend the majority of the rest of their lives.

I remember starting life as a young futures broker and listening to a passionate sermon from a seasoned investor who was “long” on gold and fervently trying to convince me that a rally for the precious yellow metal was imminent.

Gold was circa just US$300 (AU$453) per ounce at the time.

Fast forward close to 25 years and I find myself on the other end of the phone preaching the same thematic to anyone who will listen – even though the US dollar gold price is now hauling in more than US$2319 an ounce and the Australian gold price is reaching for the stratosphere at a mark still exceeding $AU3500.

This is partially due to a weak Aussie dollar, but also because of a slow and steady rise in the underlying metal price itself. In the past few months alone, gold in Australia has rallied about 30 per cent from a low of $2861 an ounce in October and that has finally started to awaken gold stock investors who have seen few, if any, big jumps in their share portfolios.

Shaw and Partners has been reeling in financial advisers from WA’s tightly-knitted talent pool at pace, and the hiring spree doesn’t look to be stopping there.

“If good quality advisers are out there, we’re very keen to talk to them,” Shaw and Partners WA state manager Davide Bosio told The West Australian.

The national broking firm’s local division has just wrapped up a spate of recruitment, which has seen at least 20 new additions to its St Georges Terrace office since November who are expected to help bring in $2b of new assets to the business.

Among the new additions is Stuart Beattie, a veteran financial adviser around town who shifted his entire team over to Shaw and Partners from a rival wealth management team at Morgan Stanley late last year. It’s been a particular talking point among the sector in WA, where any moves between firms are watched closely.

As we enter a new year, a sense of optimism and promise generally pervades for the year ahead with a genuine expectation that the market will be kind and the calendar year, with all the ups and downs, will be a profitable one!

Needless to say, profits don’t just materialize out of thin air, decisions don’t make themselves and markets inevitably run their own course, good, bad or otherwise based on any number of events and factors that are completely outside of the control of any investor.

As the eternal optimist however, I somehow manage to always find a reason to be bullish – maybe reminding myself of the fact that good companies tend to grow over time, mirroring the long-term performance of the stock market that generally shows that gently sloping chart from bottom left to top right where prices rise over time.

For punters looking to form a view of where we are at right now and what the market has in store for 2024 I offer my strong view that it will be a good year and there are some good key macro themes that support my view.

Some age-old adages invariably keep ringing true in financial markets.

Anniversaries of stock market crashes spring to mind, as does the “sell in May’ phenomenon. But the one that has always intrigued Bookbuilds and Banter the most is the annual, end-of-year “Santa rally”.

Ultimately, it is the herd mentality that moves markets. We’ve seen the meme stock movement in the speculative sectors that occurs when the “herd” – in this instance, online, faceless, cashed-up traders – rush into the next big runner with the hope that some under-the-radar stock might muster up a magical rally. But the real question remains – why should a market behave in the same way and at the same time each year in the lead up to Christmas?

For investors, the Santa rally represents the final run into the end of the calendar year and although it is not a guarantee, markets, or at the very least certain individual stocks, seem to have an enormous rally going into the end of the year.

Throughout my years in the market, particularly working on a range of capital market transactions, the lesson that I have perhaps learnt the hardest is that time kills deals – and when ignored, it often ends in disaster.

The mere thought of execution risk is enough to send a chill down the spine of even the hardest dealmaker. And the real concern and fear lies in the uncertainty of what happens after the deal is announced and it becomes subject to market forces … and time.

When trying to control things that are entirely out of one’s control, dealmakers will try to minimise uncertainty and the most critical factor to manage is TIME. Hence, the longer a deal remains “live”, the more potential there is for things to go south.

Markets can plunge, sentiment can turn, rival bidders can appear and … well, you get the picture.

DJ Carmichael boss Davide Bosio says the sale of the historic WA broking house to Shaw and Partners highlights the shifting sands of the financial services sector post the banking royal commission.

It is the second Perth stockbroking firm to be swallowed up by a bigger rival this month, after fast-growing Canadian financial services group Canaccord Genuity paid $25 million for Patersons Securities last week.

DJs, as it is affectionately known, is owned by UK-based non-executive chairman Rupert Lowe, executive director Matthew Blake and Mr Bosio.

No party would reveal the value of the cash transaction.

Mr Bosio said the sale had been driven in part by the big banks and financial institutions abandoning the retail financial advice market in light of the findings of the banking royal commission, which was highly critical of their behaviour.