We have been back home all this month and spending modestly by recent standards. This month's accounts in US Dollars, as usual:
Retirement contributions were higher than normal at $3,630 (AUD 4079) because Snork Maiden got an extra retirement contributions in after last month's three paychecks. Hmmm... I must be missing a contribution somewhere. But there is in fact little line between three paycheck months and three retirement contribution months as retirement contributions don't seem to be sent to the fund on as precise a timing as employees get their cash payment. Snork Maiden's pay was also a bit higher than expected. I haven't checked why.
The Australian Dollar fell a little more this month to exactly 89 US cents. Investment returns in US Dollar terms were 0.68% but in Australian Dollar terms they were 1.34%. For a change, we did much better than global markets due to our focus on Australia. The MSCI lost 2.04% (USD terms) and the S&P 500 2.90%.
Net worth rose in US Dollars by $17k to $873k. In Australian Dollar terms it rose by $A25k to $A981k. Unless there is a sharp fall in the markets we would clear 1 million Australian Dollars this month or next. But this time of year is often volatile :) September has been the second worst month since I started investing (May is worst), while October has been the best. That's surprising given its reputation for stock market crashes. In this timeframe (since 1996) the worst month for both the international indices I track has actually been August and the best April.
Retirement contributions were higher than normal at $3,630 (AUD 4079) because Snork Maiden got an extra retirement contributions in after last month's three paychecks. Hmmm... I must be missing a contribution somewhere. But there is in fact little line between three paycheck months and three retirement contribution months as retirement contributions don't seem to be sent to the fund on as precise a timing as employees get their cash payment. Snork Maiden's pay was also a bit higher than expected. I haven't checked why.
The Australian Dollar fell a little more this month to exactly 89 US cents. Investment returns in US Dollar terms were 0.68% but in Australian Dollar terms they were 1.34%. For a change, we did much better than global markets due to our focus on Australia. The MSCI lost 2.04% (USD terms) and the S&P 500 2.90%.
Net worth rose in US Dollars by $17k to $873k. In Australian Dollar terms it rose by $A25k to $A981k. Unless there is a sharp fall in the markets we would clear 1 million Australian Dollars this month or next. But this time of year is often volatile :) September has been the second worst month since I started investing (May is worst), while October has been the best. That's surprising given its reputation for stock market crashes. In this timeframe (since 1996) the worst month for both the international indices I track has actually been August and the best April.
7 comments:
Do you track against price indices or accumulation indices? If accumulation indices, where do you get your data from?
Accumulation indices. For the MSCI, I get the data here:
http://www.mscibarra.com/webapp/indexperf/pages/IEIPerformanceRegional.jsf
I select All Country, USD, Gross, Standard. If I was starting now I would also include small caps but that wasn't an option previously.
For S&P 500 it is a bit trickier and recently they have made it harder to access the data. If you miss the final day of the month you can't get it later:
http://au.spindices.com/
Choose US Indices and then S&P 500 and then daily fact sheet and it has the total return (TR) for the month on that.
Thanks, hadn't seen those sources for accumulation indices before. I'd tended to just use the ASX200 accumulation index numbers from the RBA's monthly statistics.
On a different note, have the changes at IB in the last couple of days impacted you much? They have frozen new margin in Australian accounts, and have dropped the margin to zero on a number of stocks. Net impact for me was that I needed to move some stocks around between accounts by US market open tonight, or face a margin call.
I didn't know where to find free data on the ASX200 accumulation index. Do you have a link for that?
I haven't been affected by the IB thing except I can't make any new stock trades for the moment. I have borrowed money but am very far from a margin call. But I hadn't thought that also the marginability might have changed. I haven't bought any Australian stocks. Was it Australian stocks? I should check that everything is OK. I plan to add more money to the account I guess to pay off the margin loans (in total less than $10k).
http://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/tables/pdf/f07.pdf?accessed=2013-09-09-16-01-55
By going through back issues I've reconstructed monthly data back to Dec-87, and annual to 1980 if you want it (it's in an excel sheet).
The IB margin changes are for non-US stocks that don't meet some liquidity tests. This affected about half my holdings with them. Combined with the inability to withdraw cash, it has been somewhat challenging.
Chris - that would be fantastic - you can send to moominoid@yahoo.com. Happy to share the data I have on MSCI and S&P 500.
But the ASX 200 indices are fairly new. Is it continued by a different index when you go that far back?
Oh I see this page shows that the index goes back to 1979!
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