Ann: DuluxGroup recommends acquisition proposal by Nippon Paint, page-31

This from Phil king of regal who admitted is selling a listed vehicle at present...

I think it’s worth being prepared for both a melt down and a melt up at present (if that’s possible). Clearly the bubbly area of the market is around tech and I think one of the best yard sticks is looking for silly deals. Dulux at 25x is expensive but not exactly silly imo - it’s a quality company. Same with tme and even hso. I’ve not yet seen stupid deals (have you or others?) but am keeping an eye out and will use that as a prompt to move a bit into cash.

Phil king:
There are a number of consensus trades and we like to question them. I think one of the biggest consensus trades at the moment is that the market is tired and needs a correction. What happened in February last year and December last year, the market tried to go down, but just the power of buying pushed it higher. I certainly think that it's too early to get too negative on the market. I think with bond yields where they are in Australia, it makes the equity market look very, very cheap.On our analysis, the last two times there's been such a disparity between earnings yields and bond yields have been very good times to buy the market, those being 2012 and 2009. I think that's one area where we are a little bit different. We're not getting too negative on the market at the moment.Two other consensus trades now are: interest rates have got to go higher, and volatility has got to go higher.Interest rates in our view may go higher, but I don't think that's a "lay down misere". I think debt levels in China and the U.S. are very similar to Japan 25 years ago. And over the last 25 years, debt levels in Japan have risen a lot and interest rates have continued to fall. I think we easily could see a similar situation in the U.S. and China where interest rates stay low or fall over the next five or 10 years, and debt levels continue to rise, which is a natural response to lower interest rates. The other area is volatility. I think there's always going to be macro factors driving volatility. As a humble bottom-up stock picker, I look at the profit and loss statement, and there's less leverage in the profit and loss statement than there has been for a while. There’s less operating leverage and there's less financial leverage. That would suggest from a bottom-up perspective, low volatility is here to stay.