Wednesday, February 25, 2015

GMOM vs. GTAA

A few months ago Cambria Investment Management stopped advising the GTAA ETF and launched their own in house GMOM ETF to implement their their global tactical asset allocation strategy. How well has the new ETF performed? So far, so good:


GMOM has risen by about 2% since being launched and GTAA has fallen by about 1%. GTAA had had a fairly disappointing performance up till then. I was an investor in GTAA and switched to GMOM (I have 1000 shares). So, that was a good move so far.

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

ASX at Post-GFC High

Broke out of the trading range of the last year and a half. I had been thinking to rebalance away from large cap Australian stocks at the beginning of the week as US indices were looking like they could be topping out. But various evidence including the behaviour of the DAX index in Germany - which had recently broken out - made me eventually not do it.

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Moominvalley Monthly Report: January 2015

The Australian Dollar fell by another 4.1 US cents this month to 77.61 US cents. The MSCI World Index fell 1.54% and the S&P 500 3.00%, but the ASX200 rose 3.28%. In Australian Dollar terms we gained 2.99% and in US Dollar terms lost 2.18%. So we underperformed both the Australian and international markets. All asset classes in our portfolio apart from small cap Australian stocks gained with commodities being the best performer. Colonial First State Geared Share Fund gained the most dollars ($14.5k) followed by the PSSAP ($5.6k) and Unisuper ($2.8k) superannuation funds and then the Winton Global Alpha fund ($2k). I can't be bothered to work out rates of return for individual funds :)

But net worth fell $A13k to $1.321 million not counting housing equity and fell $US65k to $US1.025 million. Including housing equity net worth rose to $A1.360 million but still fell in US Dollars to $1.055 million. The monthly accounts (in AUD) follow:


This month's accounts get more complex as we introduce the changes in housing equity and their implications for current and retirement accounts. And this is the much simplified approach. I decided to give up on a full economic accounting.

Current non-investment income (salary etc.) was $16.5k and retirement contributions were $3.2k.  Investment returns were $A42k in total.

Spending was at a record high of $32.5k because we paid $A27.8k in stamp duty tax to the government, which I decided to count as consumption spending. Income tax us treated as negative income in my accounting system but GST is an expenditure. So, logically stamp duty should be too.  Without that we only spent $A4.7k, which is low.

Then there was a $A37k transfer to the housing acccounting representing our 5% deposit with the seller's agent. This means we dissaved $53k from current non-investment income but made $37k in housing saving for a net dissaving (including retirement accounts) of $A13k. Next month will have the second and much larger transfer to housing of the 15% second installment in the downpayment of $A111k.

I just went to do a final inspection on the house. Settlement should be tomorrow.