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Australia's superannuation scheme is popularly known as "super" and it has nothing to do with Reggie Perrin although, given the frequent problems with it, it might be the successor to Sunshine Des serts. Now an auditor of self-managed schemes has been banned after it was determined that he had "breached fundamental independence and audit requirements."

This is such a massive topic that we can, today, do little more than make a placeholder article. How, one has to ask, does anyone "miss" tens of thousands of errors? We think it's probably not too difficult and banks, etc. should take note.

Binary options are a simple concept: they pay a fixed return, or nothing. It's a bit like a KickStarter campaign: if you hit the target, you get your money, if you miss it, you don't. But with binary options, the risks are different: fail and you lose your investment. So, there's another way of looking at it: it's a bet and if you lose, you lose your stake, so it's not like an ordinary option where you might still get back some of your original investment. For sophisticated investors and financial adrenalin junkies, they are fine. For everyone else, they are very high risk. Aussie regulator ASIC says that risk is rarely properly explained, and often it is not explained at all.

ASIC has commenced proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia to wind up a land banking scheme known as the VKK Investments Unit Trust (VKK scheme), as well as the trustee and operator of the scheme, Gem Management Group Pty Ltd (Gem).