Moomin Valley

I wanted to understand why spending in the 2018 calendar year was up 28% on 2017. The first step was computing a spending breakdown for the...

Put my toes into the water by buying a small 0.5% position using the IAU ETF. I've posted about gold previously and it is in our long-t...

After a discussion with friends at lunch yesterday and some blogposts I read recently, I decided to try to find out what we are spending o...

Bought my first US corporate bond - a Santander UK bond maturing on 14 March. This supposedly gives a yield per annum of about 2.85%, whi...

Here is the paper . Yes, they think that we were in a bubble in 2017 and much of 2018 and the last quarter of 2018 was the beginning of the ...

A couple of days ago I posted a list o f all 12 of Labor's proposed tax increases. How likely is it that these will actually be enacted?...

Just following up on Financial Independence 's comment on my post linking David Svensen's 2008 lecture . How has Yale done since Sve...

I regressed the excess (above risk free rate) monthly returns of the HFRI fund-weighted hedge fund index on the excess returns of the MSCI ...

The Labor party is at the moment likely to win the next federal election in Australia in May. Labor has become increasingly left wing in r...

Svensen is the manager of Yale's endowment. He also gives occasional lectures at Yale. My investment strategy is strongly influence...

That's what the bank in Falafelland says... So, I will look today at applying for one for him. I think they should just give them out wh...

Portfolio Charts is a really interesting website where you can do simulations of safe and permanent withdrawal rates and many other things ...

Investment Returns In Australian Dollar terms we gained 2 . 3% for the year while the MSCI gained 0.9% and the ASX200 lost 1.1% (all pre-ta...

Interactive Brokers currently pays 1.7% interest on U.S. Dollars. But U.S. government bonds pay more than that and are supposedly risk free,...

My brother is opening the trust accounts . They will be invested in local mutual funds. Unlike Australian or US managed or mutual funds the...

In AUD terms the target portfolio lost 1.85% in December, gaining 0.3% for 2018 as a whole. The MSCI gained 0.9% for the year and I gained 2...

A relatively new investment concept is crowdfunding real estate investments. The idea is that an individual could directly invest small a...

As a place to park Australian Dollars cash until I can move it out of Interactive Brokers, I bought some PERLS XI hybrid bank securities...

Moves this big never happen in currencies. It's like one month's worth of moves in 5 minutes. Yen did the same thing in the other...

You'll probably have heard that this was the worst December for US stocks since 1931. December is seasonally a positive month for stock...

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...