Quote Originally Posted by kiora View Post
Easy, drawing down mortgage,using their equity , an investor is able to benefit from rise in house value and share value.At a cost of 4-5% interest/year turns a good return into supernova
Actually it's not that simple. In times of kaos and financial market crisis, you get sky rocketing interest rates while plummeting share prices (and you can say good bye to the dividends as most companies would be under water). The prudent reliable method in NZ has always been... to invest in another house than to buy shares because housing prices have a predictable outcome regardless of the economic times. The same can not be said with shares, especially NZ ones.

It seems people have already forgot about 2008... Bad enough to leverage against against... even worse to leverage and buy shares for the long term. If you're going to margin, all the traders I speak to only do so for a short term because the daily rates are way too high.