Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Aletheia

This is not good news. My Mom has money invested with this firm via a local broker where she lives. The losing trades don't seem to affect separately managed accounts, but it can't be good news if the management firm is declaring backruptcy. I haven't been able to access the account for a while as the broker moved firms and is using a new platform which we haven't been able to get the passwords to work for properly. So I don't even know how much is in the account. I estimate $US180k. I asked my brother to follow up urgently on this.

Sunday, December 09, 2012

Adjusting Savings Plan

We pretty much achieved our goal of accumulating $A150k in cash to buy a house:
Now it's time to adjust savings plans again. For the moment I'll use savings to pay down the margin loan of $A35k that we took to start the fund off. I also just withdrew Snork Maiden's investment in the Acadian Long Short Fund as it has been an underperformer and a quick evaluation of returns shows that despite owning seven different funds in her account there only seem to be three main sources of return: Australian stocks, international stocks, property. I'll submit a new regular savings plan for her managed funds (mutual funds) account soon to replace the current one.

Monday, December 03, 2012

Moominvalley November 2012 Report

This was the 5th month of positive investment returns. We hit new net worth highs in both Australian and US Dollar terms of $A716k (+$A15k) and $US747k (+20k). The Australian Dollar was fairly stable.

Our rate of return was 1.18% in USD terms versus 1.33% for the MSCI and 0.58% for the S&P500. In Australian Dollar terms we made 0.64%. This is mostly due to strong gains in large cap Australian shares, hedge funds, and private equity in that order. Private equity had the largest percentage gain due to the distribution from IPE. Looking at longer term performance we have about matched the market year to date - 14.54% vs. 14.16% for the MSCI. Over 1-5 years we have lagged the world stock markets. Over 10 years though we are doing very well. This chart shows the averaeg annual rate of return over a decade:


The monthly accounts (in US Dollars) look like this:


Spending was around recent averages - $5,466 ($A5,242). The monthly accounts show that we earned $13.6k in salaries etc. Retirement contributions were $3.3k. Total investment returns were $8.6k with about equal amounts from exchange rate moves and core investment returns. The house-buying fund reached $A144k. The goal of $A150k should be reached at the end of next month.

Sunday, December 02, 2012

Million Dollars

No, we haven't reached millionaire status yet but gross underlying assets do now exceed a million US Dollars:




This is gross assets before deducting loans counting both loans we owe and those owed by leveraged funds we own. I use this total asset data as the best way of tracking the composition of our portfolio.