Moomin Valley

I'm still waiting for one final piece of data for the October report, so in the meantime here is the much-delayed September report. This...

A couple of years ago, I stopped automatically reinvesting the distributions from my Colonial First State Managed Funds. It turns out it wa...

After yesterday's massive rally boosted the value of my account, today I had the buying power to buy back Berkshire Hathaway at a cheap...

An interesting paper on managed futures funds, otherwise known as "Commodity Trading Advisors": "Fooling Some of the People A...

They really like warning signs in Hong Kong. This one seemed kind of apt: They especially like warning signs inside taxis: We counted around...

Revanche asked for some food pictures from our trip to China, so here are some pictures of food and related things. These are freshwater cr...

That's all that is on my financial agenda at the moment. I just sold four stocks to meet another margin call. A couple at minor losses a...

We got back from China this morning. We left Australia on 1st October. Seems like much longer. We were in Tianjin, Beijing, and Hong Kong as...

As you can see, I removed all the goals from the sidebar. We are so far from them there is little point in tracking them. When I went into t...

During the U.S. Bailout debate Bernanke introduced the buzzphrase "hold to maturity value". The argument is that mortgage backed s...

As the U.S. seems to be reaching consensus on the next stage in addressing its financial crisis I thought about another financial crisis ten...

March of the Unemployed in Perth, Western Australia in 1931 The financial crisis and its possible solution have been very poorly explained t...

While no-one was paying attention the US Congress agreed to lend $25 billion to the three big US car manufacturers at 4% interest to help t...

Soros weighs in as does Kaletsky . Not surprisingly they have similar views. Kaletsky has very good contact with Soros. Letting Lehman coll...

I promised a follow-up to my post on Australian managed futures funds . Obviously , I'm not currently in the market for any new investme...

New York Post article . Stuff on the level of the Dow is spurious though it would have been bad. This is why the US government appeared to g...

The margin call and other actions has restructured the portfolio quite a bit: Now we're only only borrowing 23 cents for every dollar of...

The Everest Brown and Babcock listed fund of hedge funds, EBI, proposed today to delist from the ASX. This is the same fund whose downgradin...

This move might make some sense on the basis given that if short-selling of financial stocks is banned in the UK and the US there could be ...

That's what it feels like. Bears won't be happy. UK stock market is up 9.3% at this moment. In other news, I went to pick up my Mac ...

In the UK, Lloyd's TSB is taking over HBOS. My very first savings account when I was rather small was at TSB - Trustees' Savings Ban...

After a lot of rushing around faxing and phoning (I don't have a fax machine at home) it looks like we have a resolution to my margin ca...

Things continue to get worse. I am now in margin call territory with CommSec because they reduced the lending ratio on EBI and EBB to 0% as ...

Sold SHLD and CNY. Former because it's been strong recently and is very overvalued on a P/E and earnings forecasts basis. Figured that i...

I'm now halfway through the buffer on my CommSec margin loan. The Australian market is surprisingly down at the moment. I'm adding $...

I used to be a shareholder in this in my Roth IRA account. Luckily Ameritrade switched to their own money market funds instead. Money marke...

For $19.60 - a $740 capital gain. The stock is near all time highs and has a very high price/earnings ratio which is difficult to see being ...

The TFS Market Neutral Fund Annual Report arrived, allowing me to update my analysis of the market timing abilities of fund investors . The...

The first part of this post was revised on 17th September Here it is . The majority of the money is in bonds that apparently Citibank and Ba...

It's looking like Lehman brothers will be liquidated. The result could be worse or more worse depending on whether a systematic plan can...

For a change, someone is proposing a pretty sensible initiative in the housing market. The Australian Federal government will give tax break...

I've used the same format as I used for Snork Maiden's income statement . The main twist here is that I started off trying to treat ...

For anyone out there who still thinks the U.S. is not in recession this chart pretty clearly refutes that view. It's a view only held by...

Platinum Capital - a listed investment company or Australian closed-end fund - used to report the balance of "franking credits" o...

I've computed Snork Maiden's 2007-8 income for her Australian tax return (the tax year runs from July 1st to June 30th). I can...