Moomin Valley

My brother asked me what my forecast for the stock market was. Here is what I wrote to him: "Well, I’ve been surprised how weak it ha...

My brother and I have between us more than USD 2 million in cash in an account at UBS – most of the money we inherited – that we have been ...

As you probably know if you live in Australia, Labor plans to abolish the refundability of franking credits - the tax credits attached to di...

Back in 2009 when I started with my current employer, I carried out a cost-benefit analysis to see whether it made sense to stay in the ...

The target portfolio gained 0.22% in AUD terms. Offsetting losses in Ausrtalian shares, gold, and unhedged foreign shares there were gains i...

I just read what was a controversial blogpost at Financial Samurai:" Why $5 Million Is Barely Enough To Retire Early With A Family ...

Volatility in financial markets continued this month but I hardly traded at all and for us it was a fairly quiet month financially with mo...

ERN recently posted again about his put writing strategy. Despite the market falls in October he ended up for the month. This seems to be ...

As I mentioned before , my mother's will leaves money for each of her grandchildren – currently six of them including Moomin. They ca...

I am exploring setting up a self managed superannuation fund (SMSF). I want to do this so that I can implement our target portfolio investm...

Regal Funds Management plans to float a hedge fund LIC (closed end fund) on the ASX in March or April next year. Regal was on my future pot...

I couldn't get online access to my account at Keybank because they required a US phone number as a security measure. This meant I also c...

I commented that I didn't have a good proxy for private equity and venture capital. So, I went and found one and came up with these ind...

In October the target portfolio lost 2.83% in Australian Dollar terms. In USD terms the model portfolio lost 3.43%. This model portfolio d...

Since I decided to temporarily stop trading the model has performed badly losing about 9% while the NASDAQ 100 index is down about 4%. It s...

As I'm sure you know, this month was very volatile, which is good for trading but not for the performance of investments generally. Thi...

I just got an email with my allocation of shares in this IPO . It's 82% of what I requested and the settlement dates and first trading ...

When I started trying to backtest the model with my new program the performance was bad, worse than I expected and worse than backtests I...

Another Australian IPO of a listed investment company (closed end fund). This one has a twist – there are no management fees and the direct...

These are the results of the year to date for the S&P 500 model, again without stops. As volatility is lower than the NASDAQ index, re...

Now this is a nice equity curve! This was produced by the computer making daily decisions for each day this year so far, using the full ...

I looked at the prospectus but decided not to invest . Apparently they got more than the minimum funds raised but claim that there aren'...

This is the equity curve trading NQ futures since the beginning of the trading experiment. It starts at about USD 4k because that was the...

After a couple of hours of coding and debugging I got the first little bit of the model decision tree to work and spit out buy and sell d...

Market went up strongly. Model is still long for Monday. But I'm still not in. I needed to take a break from trading. This is why I need...

I stayed up and closed at 7119.75 the bad trade where I went long at NQ = 7145. So in the end I only lost USD 500 on that trade and am still...

I'm great at analysis and no good at trading. Just like this guy . This is why I need a computer to trade for me. That will now be the t...

The Australian government has lowered the rate of corporation tax on small businesses and planned to lower the rate on larger businesses t...

Maybe today will finally knock my tendency to not follow the model out of me, but I kind of doubt it. I am getting better though. Today, ...

I made a small (1% of net assets) investment in Pershing Square Holdings (PSH.L). This is a closed end fund trading on the London Stock ...

It turns out that the Generation Global Share Fund is closed to new investors and so I couldn't do the fund switch I tried to do yesterd...

Following up from yesterday's post on delevering in my retail superannuation (retirement) account, here is the desired allocation compar...

I just made a big switch in my Colonial First State superannuation account to reduce risk. Stock markets still look bullish but the Fed sho...

The Australian Dollar rose from USD  0.7201 to USD 0.7228. The MSCI World Index rose 0.48% and the S&P 500 rose 0.57%. The ASX 200 fell...

Private equity funds like to report the returns on their investment using the internal rate of return metric. The IRR is the discount rate ...

Another hedge fund IPO in the coming month. This one is also managed by Commonwealth Securities and so I could participate via the broker f...

Here are my taxes for another year: A lot of items are down on last year. Foreign source income and unfranked distributions are up becaus...

I was rejected for the two jobs I recent applied for. One in Australia after interview and one in the UK pre-interview. So, it looks like we...