Moomin Valley

Today has helped me more than recoup my losses from the last big blow up . I closed out an overnight trade in NQ like 20 points ago so my IB...

Suze Orman was interviewed today in the New York Times Magazine. I've read before about her extreme risk aversion. In the article she co...

Looks like I will be doing Snork Maiden's taxes. The software she used last year won't let her file as a non-resident alien this yea...

The big problem with my trading model has been that when the stochastic in the chart below is over 80 as it is today or under 20, I can'...

Now I know why I kept all my old telephone bills :) The standard credit for a single filer for the Federal Telephone Excise Tax Refund is $...

Since Millionaire Artist wrote that Loral Langemeier's "Wealth Cycle Investing" was a very foreign in approach to her, I wa...

Henry Karstens recently posted a primer on testing strategies. A key indicator is what he calls "optimal f" which is related to t...

Things were going very well this year until today. My trading was awful today and I've probably lost the profits I made this month so fa...

My results since I made this post about money management strategy have largely confirmed what I wrote there. My system mainly produces winn...

Today was the first day on which U.S. exchange traded options (ETOs) in QQQQ the NASDAQ 100 ETF can be traded in penny increments. Up till n...

Believe it or not, this is the first "carnival" I've ever participated in: The first edition of 30s and 40s Personal Finances:...

Income and Expenditure Expenditure was $US2,515 - 76% of take home pay ($3,299). Expenditure is up this month because of paying for flights ...

Posts by Cliff and Nirav about frugality and buying luxury on the cheap got me inspired to write something about "frugality" mys...

In order to keep on track for my 2007 goal of reaching a net worth of $470,000 I needed to reach $374,000 this month. It looks like I am nor...

A good article about whether to pay for a graduate degree. My usual advice is if you aren't going to do a degree in a lucrative and/or ...

I don't think this article is as novel as the author and the blogger are making out. All it really says is build a balanced portfolio o...

Two of my stocks are now in merger talks: Powertel - a small Aussie telecom firm - and Symbion Health - an Aussie healthcare firm (what el...

New research attempts to do a better job at assessing whether indexing or active management performs better for long-only mutual funds. The...

The NY Times discusses something I have commented on from time to time. Most people in the US end up saving enough for retirement. Poverty ...

I'd credit a signficant portion of the rising profits I blogged about in yesterday's post to adoption of the overnight trading tac...

The chart shows the cumulative profit in my Interactive Brokers account since I opened it in late October 2006 trade by trade. All closed tr...

I've managed to build my Interactive Brokers account which I use for trading futures up to $12,000. I originally put $10k into the accou...

Following up from the discussion about mutual fund costs , Friday's WSJ had an article about top performing small cap funds (pointed out...

I finally got tagged by Clifford with this so-called "meme" that is all over the blogosphere. So here goes: 1. I was born on the ...

My insula must be very active!

I'm fed up with hearing how people should look at the expense ratios of mutual funds when deciding which to invest in as if that was the...

It now looks like Croesus mining shares will again be traded on the Australian Stock Exchange. A reverse split of 1 for 15 and a new capita...

Beginning (and more experienced traders too) are often confused by the conflicting advice they get from different sources. Some argue that b...

I promised that yesterday's post would be the last in this series, but then I came up with a new idea: the contribution of each security...

This is the final part of the annual report where I review my current investment allocation and strategy: This is a screen shot of part of t...

John Mauldin forwarded his subscribers (subscription is free) an interesting article by Hoisington and Hunt today. They point to low inflat...

The following table compares my rates of return on investment to the MSCI World Index and the S&P 500 Total Return Index: Both those ind...

I sold all my shares in Telecom NZ . I've owned this stock since 2000 when they took over AAPT - an Australian telecom start-up which I ...

A focus of many who seek financial independence is building passive income. Payments that come without you having to do any work for them. M...

This is my first annual report. I covered some basics a few days ago . Here are the more or less final numbers for income, expenditure, and ...

I've decided to stop reinvesting the distributions from my non-retirement Australian mutual funds managed by Colonial First State and re...

Got back Friday from a long trip to Vermont and am getting up to speed - the coming week will be spent mainly on preparations for teaching t...

As I am tidying up my accounting spreadsheets for the end of 2006 I am also fixing some issues from the last several years. The major issue ...

My missing retirement contribution is now showing up on TIAA-CREF's website. But it's been parked in a money market fund despite my ...

So far I am very happy with my investment in TFS Capital's Market Neutral Fund . The fund distribution for 2006 has just been announced:...

It will take quite a while it seems till I have final figures for December and 2006. One reason is that my supplemental 403b plan isn't ...

Another new idea. Seem to be a lot of these as I struggle to find a method that fits my psychology well and uses the model signals. Trade 1 ...

NDX stock futures ran up a lot overnight but are now retreating. NDX needs to be about +5 from the close to trigger a crossing of the moving...

Just checking how the "pair trade" is working out. The concept was fine but if I think of just NCT and IYR in isolation I shorted...

A possible Elliott-Wave interpretation of the market action of the last month (using the NQ futures chart) ... we would be currently in wave...

I just realized that in fact we are now in "oversold" conditions - the stochastic oscillator is below 20. This hasn't happened...

2006's results (to be reported in detail after January 1) were helped by foreign exchange gain and a small ($6-7k) inheritance amount. ...

Though we haven't yet completed 2006 I have added my 2007 net worth goal to the sidebar. $470,000. At this point I look like reaching $3...

I'm struggling to develop a trading strategy which won't involve me staring at the market all day. The idea behind developing the ...

The market has been going up since July so maybe it is rather late in the day to talk about the "traditional" year-end "Santa...

Brett Steenbarger writes in his blog to take some profits when a trade works out. This seems to run counter to the idea of letting winners...

This morning there was snow on the ground here in Burlington, VT and there were occasionally snow showers throughout the day. The markets op...

As the model has now switched to sell, I closed out the Australian positions I opened to increase my portfolio's beta. The results are ...