Welcome to the Mclowd Community Newsletter.
“The pace of change in Australia’s energy sector has never been greater and new competitors such as solar power are starting to make it clear that the rest of the industry has a simple choice: adapt or perish.”
Australia’s Energy Future, Australian Financial Review, June 10th 2015
Introduction
Every hour of every day enough solar energy hits the Earth’s surface to power the entire global economy for months on end (and all for free).
Reflecting this thermodynamic reality the Victorian town of Yackendandah recently announced that it is aiming to fulfil all its electricity needs from renewable sources by 2022. (Imagine never again having to pay an electricity or gas bill, or paying to fill your car up with petrol).
At about the same time as this goal was being set Tesla announced it was extending its product range to include residential and commercial electricity storage systems.
And even before the first batteries roll off the Tesla ‘gigafactory’ in the Nevada desert, coal consumption in China is expected to peak (many years earlier than originally forecast), and the price (and volume) of one of Australia’s largest export commodities will begin an inexorable decline.
While it will take some time for this Third Industrial Revolution story to play out, the obituary of the fossil fuel industry has already been written by the collective will of consumers, entrepreneurs and investors around the world.
While regulatory context played a part in triggering this renewable energy revolution, as I explain in this recent blog post, in the future the investment will be driven primarily by the fact that:
THE MARGINAL COST OF ALL THAT ENERGY IS ZERO
Accounting Platform Update
With the key year end period upon us, a raft of new features are being added to the accounting software. Support for consolidations / subdivisions, as well as manual import of bank data are already live. (Scrip for scrip rollover will be available next week).
The following additional items are in development:
- Corporate actions:
- Bonus issues
- In-specie contributions
- The ability to dispose of multiple parcels of shares in a single transaction:
- LIFO
- FIFO
- Tax-efficient
- Integration with Macquarie CMA
- Online SMSF set up
- Support for transition from accumulation to pension
While there is still much work to be done, the efforts of the development team in recent months have laid a much stronger foundation for the migration of SMSF assets during FY16, and I would like to publicly acknowledge their contribution, as well as the engagement of the numerous practitioners who have offered their feedback and support.
Channel Migration
Earlier this month a practitioner posted a task in the marketplace requesting support for their migration from SimpleFund 360 to Mclowd.
It is becoming clear that a proportion of the industry understands that displacing the balance sheets of incumbent software vendors is in the best interests of their clients (the alternative being to continue to rent that intellectual property on terms that reflect historical – not replacement – cost).
Postscript
Like the electricity industry the asset management industry is littered with the micro-economic equivalent of large coal-fired power stations.These ‘installations’ are capital-intensive and operate under governance models which will never support pricing at – or even near – marginal cost.
The Mclowd Community was established to improve net returns for investors by effectively disconnecting those assets from what has become a very expensive ‘grid’. Through what has been a collaborative effort over more than three years we have created the SMSF-equivalent of a solar power plant, all with just $364,000 in equity capital.
That power plant is now ready to scale up to support $600 billion of SMSF assets.
All at near zero marginal cost.
Kind Regards,
Ashley Porter
Managing Director
Mclowd Pty Ltdhttp://mclowd.com/mclowd-newsletter-june-2015/http://mclowd.com/mclowd-newsletter-june-2015/http://mclowd.com/mclowd-newsletter-june-2015/