And the winner of the Gold Fogey Award is ...

WELCOME to the Fogey Awards for 2016 — the annual awards celebrating the characters who’ve managed to put a bit of showbiz into the all-too-sensible world of investing. writes Barefoot Investor.

The 2016 Fogey Awards.

GOOD evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Fogey Awards for 2016 — the twelfth edition of the annual awards celebrating the characters who’ve managed to put a bit of showbiz into the all-too-sensible world of investing.

(Wait a minute! Have I really been writing this column for that long? OK then, tell me why my picture hasn’t changed in the newspaper in all these years?).

For the uninitiated, the Fogeys were born partly out of television’s night of nights, the Logies, and partly out of superannuation, which looks after old fogeys (and us financial types) to the tune of $80 million a day. Yet before we hand out the eagerly awaited awards, we need to cover some formalities.

Tonight we’ll be serving you some fine single-malt whiskies from the award-winning Nant Distillery in Tasmania. Actually, it comes from barrels owned by mum and dad investors who have almost certainly lost their life savings investing in Nant, which offered a “9.5 per cent compound return, guaranteed”.

Sticking with Tasmanian delicacies, the white powder in the toilets this year has been kindly provided by Bellamy’s baby milk formula. They have plenty of stock left over. So sniffy sniff away.

Our after-dinner presentation is a must see for all serious investors.

We’ve assembled some of the most famous, most experienced, most highly paid investment gurus on the planet to tell us what will happen to the sharemarket next year.

Leading the panel will be the Royal Bank of Scotland, who warned investors in January to “brace for a cataclysmic year”.

They predicted that markets could fall by 20 per cent (it’s up 25 per cent), and that oil could drop to $US16 a barrel (it’s now $55). Hold the haggis!

Barclays bank will bring up the rear of the panel. They famously forecast that a Trump win would cause the US market to fall 13 per cent. Not 11 per cent. Not 14 per cent … but 13 per cent precisely. And what happened when Trump won?

The sharemarket is up 6 per cent since election day.

Chairing our panel is a very special guest, and one of the most famous forecasters in the world, demographer Harry Dent, who has (in his own words) “predicted nearly every major economic trend over the past 30 years”.

True. Though that’s possibly because Dent predicts the future like my three-year-old plays ‘how many fingers am I holding behind my back?’ By yelling out random numbers and giggling hysterically: “12!”, “4!”, “382!”

Or in Dent’s case, his finger game is about predicting where the Dow Jones will be in the future: “40,000!” (2004), “5600!” (2014), “3000!” (2018). All wrong.

The panel presentation will be entitled: “Seriously, Why Does Anyone Believe Anything We Say?”

And now let’s get on with the Fogeys.

FILM FINANCING AWARD

This Fogey goes to someone who’s done their best to get rich by exploiting government tax incentives and loopholes. And the winner is: Hillary Clinton (hey, she had to win something this year).

Did you know that over the past decade, Australia has been the single biggest foreign donor to the Clinton Foundation? It’s true.

Aussie taxpayers gave $88 million to her foundation, which has been described as “a slush fund”. Though strangely, the Federal Government abruptly ditched the partnership after November the 8th.

Coincidence?

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

This award is about using language to contort and confuse. The winners are Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull for bludgeoning the “simple super” message.

Let’s take an example. How much can you put into super after tax in 2017?

According to the tax office, “the bring forward amount and period also depends on your total super balance on 30 June of the year before the financial year in which the contributions that trigger the bring forward were made”.

Simple, eh?

THE VILLAIN AWARD

Once again corporate Australia served up a number of villains.

Former winner Stephen “Comrade” Conroy retired from public service this year. Yet he’s still devoted to serving the community — with his new gig as head of a lobby group called Responsible Wagering Australia. Yes, he’ll be using his political influence to help CrownBet, Sportsbet, Betfair, Unibet and Bet365 cause even more misery.

Wow.

Who could beat this guy?

Stand up CBA boss Ian Narev and hang your head in shame.

This year saw revelations that Commonwealth Bank’s insurance arm, CommInsure, had callously denied insurance claims of a terminally ill young father (among others) in the pursuit of profits. Despite these horrible practices, no insurance executive lost their job ... or their bonus. Especially not Narev, who pulled in $12.3 million last year.

THE HALL OF FAME

You only get this award when you’re past your prime, and this year it goes to the Australian $100 note. Our biggest note has become the monetary equivalent of Malcolm Turnbull: sure, we know they’re around, but we just never really see them.

And now (also like Turnbull), there’s a government inquiry into phasing them out. Really, it’s only a matter of time. Case in point, this year Citibank Australia became the first Aussie bank to go completely cashless — none of its branches handle notes or coins.

BEST ACTOR IN A REALITY SHOW

This goes to James Packer, who played a cameo in the wacky reality show Mariah’s World.

Packer played the love-struck billionaire down on his luck. Kenny Rogers said it best: you’ve got to know when to walk away, know when to run.

And James really should be sprinting: a bunch of his Crown employees are locked up in a Chinese slammer, his Las Vegas casino was pulled, and now he’s been forced to retreat from Macau.

Worse still, in a later episode, Mariah allegedly dumped him for one of her backup dancers. Ouch.

GOLD FOGEY

There can only be one winner of the Gold Fogey.

He’s outrageous, he’s orange, and he’s the new leader of the free world.

Well done to Donald Trump, who rose to power with penis jokes and tales of pussy grabbing. Of course, people say they like that Trump says what he thinks.

But then so does my three-year-old. It doesn’t mean I want to give him the code to the nuclear bomb.

Yet there’s one truth-bomb that may come back to trump, err, Trump.

During the election, he warned, “we’re in a bubble right now, and the only thing that looks good is the stockmarket.

“But if you raise interest rates even a little bit, that’s going to come crashing down. We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble. And we better be awfully careful.”

And with that I bid you goodbye, and hope that next year you’ll …

Tread Your Own Path!

Originally published as And the winner of the Gold Fogey Award is ...