Aussies are very much like the Canadians. Many junior explorers in energy and mining. This is a resource country, reliant on exporting raw materials and energy to Asia. Miners located in Australia focus on export materials for China. That could lead to trouble in the near term as China has slowed imports of just about everything and may slow infrastructure buildout.
Aussie companies tend to issue huge numbers of shares and many juniors have hundreds of millions or billions of shares outstanding. This leads to cheap stock prices for fairly big companies. Of course, market cap is the end result and that's how you have to compare Aussies to Canadians to US companies.
Their reporting is a little different. They have reporting thru the ASX and have qtrly reports that are different. More emphasis on cashflow than profits, since so many of their industries are tied to depletion industries like mining and energy.
Mgmt quality varies just like US companies. Some good, some bad some great.
In addition to their focus on exporting to China, Aussies are great explorers all over the world. They are a major presence in Africa and several of the Aussie stocks I hold are exploring for energy in the US.
My current Aussie holdings by value are SDCJF, BCGYF, AEK.ax and PMNXF. Perseus is my latest add and is a gold miner. SDCJF and BCGYF are oil producers in the US and AEK.ax is a uranium junior.
Until China's slowdown hit the Aussie $, I was thinking it would be a hedge against a falling dollar but that situation seems to have changed dramatically recently so that should be part of your decision as well. I expect Australia may go into a recession that it avoided in 2008-9 because of it's exports to China.
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