Moomin Valley

Lakonishok J., I. Lee, N. D. Pearson, and A. M. Poteshman (2007) Option market activity, The Review of Financial Studies 20(3): 813-857. I...

Sold a couple of May covered call options on BWLD . From a realised gain perspective it's a certain win - I bought the stock at less tha...

A much simpler to understand study about the profitability of selling put options. I've sold options in the past - several years ago - ...

I was reading this interesting paper on returns to option strategies (heavy econ paper) and was thinking about how good a trader needs to b...

Contrast this with a boomer Australian friend that told me not to ask people what suburb (neighborhood) they live in, because that will tel...

The market is very strong. Prices are going up while stochastics are falling: The market is achieving this by pushing ahead to new highs int...

Don't pass go and don't collect £200. That was a phrase on one of the cards in the Monopoly Game we played when I was growing up. A...

I realised that about 8% of our net worth is invested in one company: BHP Billiton . This is because we have 35% of net worth in the Colonia...

Interesting article in Freakonomics on "pay as you drive insurance". In the case of health insurance, those people who most need ...

The ">best market-timers are bullish on average and the worst are bearish on average currently. Yes, some market-timing gurus do be...

Great Article on the British Housing Market: . Click on the links. It's nuts that the average two bedroom apartment in inner Canberra co...

Since November 2004 when the GLD gold ETF was introduced gold has had a beta of 0.92 to the Australian Dollar (not including interest) and a...

Of course, an excess return simply means that you are beating the market on a risk-adjusted basis and if the market is down badly and your ...

If you can estimate your portfolio beta it is pretty simple to compute your excess return: In the equation, e(t) is the percentage excess re...

A recent discussion on Roger Nusbaum's blog typified the diametrically opposed positions of those who think it is easy to beat the mark...

The market started to rise tonight a day or two ahead of what my model was projecting. This recent correction was pretty shallow. So after r...

I put in an order to switch the remaining amount of CREF Bond Fund that I wanted to switch to CREF Global Equities. The order will execute a...

I'm beginning to focus on trading the Australian Share Price Index (SPI) futures and seem to be improving. This morning is pretty typica...

Following yesterday's post about what alpha really means I've been thinking to revise a couple of our annual goals . Specifically, ...

In my recent posts analysing Madame X's portfolio I used various indicators to assess the performance of mutual funds. One, alpha , is ...

I've looked through the Colonial First State (CFS) First Choice prospectus and come up with this tentative allocation of funds. The pla...

Barrons reminded me today of the Permanent Portfolio Fund . I first read about the permanent portfolio concept in Mark Tier's excellent ...

OIl might be tracing out a triangle formation as shown above. Triangles are common as 4th wave formations according to Elliott Wave Theory. ...

I've mentioned that I wanted to reduce the allocation to bonds in my Mom's portfolio. I targeted the ACM Global Bond Fund in her po...

We had a structured note product - managed futures with a capital guarantee. It has now matured and it is time to reinvest some of the mone...

The crisis in the financial markets seems to be abating and so does our own personal mini financial crisis. Though we made a net loss this m...

Snork Maiden had a lot of cash in a U.S. checking account. We've decided to invest $8000 of that. As you know, I am bullish on the US Do...

Here are all the posts I've written on this topic: Miscellaneous Funds U.S. Large Cap U.S. Mid Cap U.S. Small Cap Funds International St...

I just switched the another 35% of my super fund from the CFS Conservative Fund to the CFS Geared Share Fund. I am maintaining 15% in the CF...

As Enough Wealth pointed out, I lost $107 per month from trading during the period I posted data for this morning . But that sample is biase...

And to the final three funds: There's not a lot invested in these three funds which are all pretty decent. FFFEX is a 2030 target fund a...

Full report to come shortly. But here are the realised gains results for the last several months: After losing in January, I didn't do a...

Here we have one index fund (FUSEX) and four actively managed funds: FDGRX (Fidelity Growth Company) appears to be an excellent fund. It has...

Hopefully this series isn't too much like water-torture :) I just don't feel like looking up more than 3 or 4 funds at a time and an...

1. Choosing high probability entry points to trades (and executing them well). 2. Getting out of losing trades fast. 3. Hanging on to winnin...

I took more profits (in XLF and in HCBK which was downgraded) and opened small short positions in GLD and SPY. I'm expecting a lot more ...

I noticed yesterday that Babcock and Brown had set up a new prime broking arrangement with Deutsche Bank . I didn't look into the detail...

Roger Nusbaum often talks about "smoothing the ride" - trying to get stock like returns (or better) in the long run with a little...

This project is becoming bigger than I expected :) I want to keep things down to writing about 3 or 4 funds a day and so I'm going to ha...

On to Madame X's international stock funds and a hopefully interesting lesson in passive vs. active management: (something seems to be s...