Moomin Valley

Personal Finance, Investing, and Economics

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Moominmama January 2009 Performance

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Moominmama lost 1.39% in January. That's not bad considering the MSCI World Index lost 8.51% for the month. This is the portfolio breakd...

When You Have $60 billion, Losing $4 Bllion isn't so Bad!

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The Future Fund reported its results for the last quarter of 2008
Friday, January 30, 2009

Levitt on Credit Cards

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Following up on my post about EFTPOS policies Steven Levitt is commenting on credit cards . Nothing much new there, but one of the commente...
1 comment:
Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Saving

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Now that I am going to have a job I'm setting up a regular savings plan of $A500 a month from my salary to match the plan we already ha...
4 comments:

Bank Santander Compensates Clients Hit by Madoff

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Any chance Man Financial will do this for its clients who suffered losses (if relatively small) in RMF ?
Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Happy Year of the Buffalo

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Buffalo sounds better than Ox :) We should celebrate with mozzarella cheese :P
2 comments:
Friday, January 23, 2009

Second Round Interview

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This morning I met my colleague who helped me with the grant application and began to work out the details. It'll take a little while to...
3 comments:
Thursday, January 22, 2009

Interview

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At least I was dressed smarter than my interviewers. I had my shirt tucked in :) Not sure how well it went, I should hear early next week if...

Rear View Mirror Retirement Allocation Advice

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Christopher Joye in an article in the Business Spectator today performs a retirement portfolio optimization using historical Australian dat...
Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Research Proposal Approved

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I just heard that my research proposal was approved. We haven't got any details yet but we proposed that I work on the project for one ...
5 comments:

EFTPOS Miminum Payments: A Silly Policy

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On our way back from the Ford dealer where we put in an order for the missing bit of silver trim , we stopped off in the suburb of Dickson ...
2 comments:
Monday, January 19, 2009

Car Repairs: $550 or $1250

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The back of our car got run into a stone wall - like most car accidents it happened close to home - in the driveway of our apartment buildi...
2 comments:
Sunday, January 18, 2009

Janus US Short-Term Bond Fund

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This is the other bond fund in my Mom's portfolio. It has done very well in recent years, though it didn't do much just after we bou...
Saturday, January 17, 2009

Buy High, Sell Low

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Investors in TFS Capital's Market Neutral Fund continued to buy high and sell low as a group in the four months ended October 31st, as I...
Friday, January 16, 2009

HFRI vs. HFRX

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Here are the HFRI hedge fund indices for December and 2008 which differ quite a bit from the HFRX results I posted before. HFRI tracks arou...
Thursday, January 15, 2009

Invesco Sterling Bond Fund

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This is my Mom's largest single investment at 12.6% of the portfolio. It wasn't planned this way. I instructed Citibank to buy a giv...
2 comments:

Man to Sue over Madoff

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Man Investments will sue over its Madoff related losses . Don't know if it will do any good but that's better than nothing .
Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Wordle

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This is a graphic of this blog created using Wordle . I posted a couple of these created by Paul Kedrosky earlier .

Breaking the Buck was the Problem

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A discussion of Bernanke's speech yesterday argues that it was the impact of the Lehman collapse on the Reserve Money Market Fund and...

Social Class and Choice

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A comment I posted on " Graceful Retirement " as part of the ongoing discussion about Meg's blogposts : "I'm not too ...
3 comments:
Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Endowment Style Portfolios for December 2008

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When I tried to optimize the performance of the asset mix used for the portfolios in my post about endowment style portfolios by maximizing...
2 comments:

Preliminary Credit Suisse Indices for December 2008

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Yesterday I reported on HFRI's indices for December 2008 . Today Credit Suisse/Tremont released preliminary results for the month. Credi...
Monday, January 12, 2009

Hedge Fund Indices for December

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By comparison the MSCI All Country World Index rose 3.67% in December but lost 41.85% for 2008. Macro - the strategy made famous by the like...
Sunday, January 11, 2009

SuperAlphaFund

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Superfund is now offering a fund in Australia. This company, which originated in Austria, offers managed futures products to retail investo...
Thursday, January 08, 2009

CALPERS Allocation

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CALPERS (the California state retirement fund) provides detailed information on their asset allocation. CALPERS has much more of a traditio...
Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Duration and Stock-Bond Allocation

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Interesting discussion from John Hussman about changes in "duration" and the optimal allocation between stocks and bonds in a por...

Moominmama December 2008 Performance

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Moominmama gained 0.73% in USD terms for the month but individual investment results were all over the place partly due to big movements in ...
Tuesday, January 06, 2009

SIPC Testimony on Madoff and Lehman Brothers

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SIPC actions and testimony look like good news for small investors with Madoff. The SIPC sent out claim forms to 8000 Madoff investors. So ...

Alternative View of December 2008 Performance

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Turns out that it's pretty easy to compute the table above from my existing spreadsheets. Maybe this is a better way of presenting the c...
Monday, January 05, 2009

EBB, EBI, and EAIT

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Received the documentation and forms for the revised version of the planned EBI delisting today. I'm going to withdraw 6000 of my 8707 ...

What is the Fed Up To?

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Paul Kedrovsky's blog pointed to this blog by Woodward and Hall which has a very interesting post about the changes in the Fed's b...
Sunday, January 04, 2009

December 2008 Report

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Finally an up month, and a market beating one at that, in US Dollar terms at least. However, due to the rise in the Australian Dollar this m...
Saturday, January 03, 2009

Economics Text Analysis

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Interesting word clouds generated by Paul Kedrosky based on session and paper titles from the American Economic Association meeting. I'...

Goals for 2009

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Unlike previous years I'm not going to set any quantitative financial goals for this year as there is too much uncertainty. On the inves...
1 comment:
Thursday, January 01, 2009

2008 Summary

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I will be doing a report for December, but after such a financially disastrous year, I'm not in the mood for a detailed analysis of the ...
2 comments:
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Career Progress Report

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The academic job I applied for (there are 3-4 positions available) got more than 250 applicants from around the world. They are now narrowin...
2 comments:
Tuesday, December 30, 2008

U.S. Cheque Funds Available

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We were told that there would be a 21 day hold on the proceeds of the U.S. cheque we deposited. But today (the first time I checked) the Co...
7 comments:
Monday, December 22, 2008

Depositing a U.S. Check in Australia?

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We received a check for just over $US3,000 for Snork Maiden's costs getting to and attending the conference in China in October. I'd...
3 comments:

Net Asset Values of Infrastructure Funds are not Exaggerated

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Often I read in the media that the values of real estate and infrastructure assets owned by listed and superannuation funds are exaggerated....
Sunday, December 21, 2008

Markopolos and Madoff

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The report which Harry Markopolos submitted to the SEC in 2005 with his suspicions about Madoff is pretty amazing. This is how the SEC resp...
Saturday, December 20, 2008

Australian vs. Foreign Shares

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The chart shows the MSCI All Country World Index converted into Australian Dollars and EWA including dividends converted to AUD. From an Au...
Friday, December 19, 2008

Australian Managed Fund Distributions Fall Dramatically

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This isn't a surprise at all but I just checked our distributions from Colonial First State which were paid on 14th December. Snork Maid...
Thursday, December 18, 2008

Record Low Returns for U.S. Large Cap Stocks

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According to this chart, at the end of September the ten year return on U.S. large cap stocks was as low as it had been only four times befo...
Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Man Investments Exposure to Madoff

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A lot of visitors to this blog have been searching for various combinations of Madoff and Man Investments and its products. It turns out the...
2 comments:

EBI's Performance

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As I've reported, Everest Brown and Babcock Alternative Investment Trust (EBI.AX) has been in a lot of strife with investors . The main ...
Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Blog Traffic

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I'm getting a near record daily number of hits (and we're only halfway through 16th December at the moment) due to my first post abo...

Madoff vs. Equity Market Neutral Funds

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The table shows the average monthly returns, standard deviation and Sharpe Ratio for the Fairfield Sentry fund that was "invested"...

Effect of Madoff on the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Index

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Credit Suisse/Tremont Equity Market Neutral Index loses 40.45% in November: Up to the end of October the index was pretty much flat for the ...
Monday, December 15, 2008

Madoff

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A lot of people in the blogosphere are talking about how they knew that Madoff's scheme was obviously a scam. I got the returns data fro...
2 comments:

Gold and the Australian Dollar

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It's commonly believed that there is a strong relationship between the Australian Dollar and gold. But is this true? I computed the mont...
2 comments:
Friday, December 12, 2008

Everest Babcock and Brown Alternative Investment Trust Changes Course Again

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Everest Babcock and Brown Alternative Investment Trust (EBI.AX) changed course again, rendering my post from just a couple of days ago out ...

Performance of Endowment Style Portfolios

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In the final post of this series I look at the performance of an endowment type portfolio over the last 12 years. 10% is invested in the CR...
Thursday, December 11, 2008

Hedge Funds vs. Managed Futures

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In recent posts I have looked at the optimal allocation between stocks and managed futures and between stocks and a composite hedge fund in...
Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Savings Policy

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From now on we'll split all savings 50:50 between paying off debt (margin loans and credit card) and making new investments (in Snork Ma...

Australian Fund Updates

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Allco Equity Partners (AEP.AX): The Liberman family got a margin call and now ANZ owns the 25% of the company that they used to own and whi...
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mOOm
I'm an economist and an active investor and currently live in Australia. I'm a global investor though I focus on investments in the Anglophone world and particularly in Australia. This blog tracks investment performance and discusses personal finance, investing, and trading from an economic perspective. In the picture, Moomin is looking for treasure.
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