As you can see in the righthand column, I've achieved one of my five annual goals - that of reaching breakeven on my U.S. investment/trading accounts - trading accounts at Ameritrade and Interactive Brokers, my Roth IRA and my holding in the TFS capital mutual fund. I first began investing in the US back in 1997 and have kept a record of how much money has gone into those accounts - until now I have mostly been in deficit - i.e. I've suffered a net loss. Finally, I've recouped my investment - kind of like my tuition fees for learning about trading etc. Of course when compared with inflation or the returns on an index fund I'm still losing. To match the NASDAQ 100 index since August 1997 I'd need to show an 80% gain. Luckily, I've more than made up for this poor performance in retirement accounts and Australian trading accounts. Performance in the last 1 1/2 years has been pretty good (alpha = 25%):
The challenge now is to hold on to these gains in the next few months. My very short-term trading is still not going well. I had another bad loss on May 1st - though not as bad as the one on April 1st. Maybe I should just keep away from trading on the first day of the month!
On Friday we also made progress on Snork Maiden's immigration process. We need to get a police check from the FBI in the US and to do this we need to send them her fingerprints. Seems that the only people who can do that here are the police, but there is a two month waiting list in Canberra! Nearby locations in New South Wales refuse to do this for ACT residents. We finally got the Goulburn, NSW police to agree to do it and headed up there (about 85km away) on Friday afternoon to successfully accomplish the mission. Goulburn is also the home of the "Big Merino" (one of Australia's many "big things"), shown above while moving to its current location. There's a "wool museum" inside and a gift shop alongside of course.
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