Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Trading Update and Travel Finance

Fifteen minutes is a tricky thing. It caused me to miss Apple's spectacular post earnings rise yesterday. But I still captured some of the effect by being long QLD (levered NASDAQ 100 ETF). I'm now beginning to regularly update both NDX and SPX models. This provides more information and makes it easier to make decisions when just looking at one index leaves one rather uncertain about what to do. Amazon earnings have pushed the market down after hours. The model is long though. After a large positive gap opening up on Tuesday a negative gap for Wednesday is likely. A good trade idea is playing the gap closing.

I'm now going to resort to a withdrawal from my Australian margin loan as the quickest way to get the money for the car and then juggling things around afterwards. I am supposing these various cards have limits on foreign transaction size which is what is causing them to be rejected. Snork Maiden's cards were now rejected by the bank for making a cash advance too. Beware if you are planning on travelling overseas and using credit cards for big bills. Or get some super-platinum card that you know won't have a problem. Just make sure it is widely accepted (i.e. not Discover or something, even American Express is less widely accepted than Visa and Mastercard). Maybe travellers cheques still have a role to play?

P.S. Australian margin loan money is on its way to us - we should have it Friday and the car soon after.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Moom,

what I did for the first bigger purchases when I went from Europe to the US is to simply get the Money from an ATM. You don't pay fees at
ATMs from the Global ATM alliance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_ATM_Alliance

If you have a checking account with Bank of America you could just go to Westpac bank in Australia and get money without a fee. Yes, there are limits on daily/weekly withdrawals, but if you have enough time this is the cheapest way to transfer money, IMHO.

The exchange rates were very good in my case too...

-Karl