Moomin Valley

Platinum Capital is a closed end international hedge fund listed on the ASX, which I have invested in for a very long time. In the past, I g...

  The chart shows Bitcoin (blue) and the MSCI World Index (red) on two different scales. Major cycles in Bitcoin appear quite closely relate...

Following on from yesterday's post, I did some research on Australian Bank Hybrids. Essentially, a hybrid is a convertible bond. At a ce...

I just bought 1,000 shares of the Putnam BDC Income ETF . This is an actively managed ETF that invests in US business development companies....

I really messed up with bitcoin futures positions and lost a bunch of money. The triangle didn't work out. I really shouldn't trade...

I am following this dude closely on Youtube:

I'm not big on this sort of technical analysis and especially Elliott Wave but it is amazing how the CME Bitcoin Futures just touched th...

In January, I switched about half my CREF Social Choice (a 60/40 balanced fund) holding in my US 403b account into TIAA Real Estate. It was ...

To reflect my changing priorities I am raising the benchmark's futures allocation to 15% and reducing the hedge fund allocation to 15% o...

I invested in the APSEC hedge fund back in 2020 just after they outperformed strongly in the COVID19 crash. They have managed to about matc...

Gold just overtook Unisuper to become our most profitable (in absolute dollar terms) investment ever. Chart shows price of gold in Australia...

Also sold out of The China Fund (CHN) at a huge loss for this account (SMSF) though we only lost a little (USD -1.7k) in the long-term as we...

I sold my 100 shares of BRK/B. The last earnings report raised questions about the performance of several major Berkshire businesses. My t...

This was a very good month investment-wise. Not all numbers are in, we still might get updates from more illiquid investments. But based on ...

As Ramit's Conscious Spending Plan says that we aren't doing enough "guilt-free spending", I booked a trip to Queensland ...

Today I received three cheques in the mail from the Reserve Bank. Here is one: They are my payout from the collapse of HIH back in 2001 . It...

After a couple of failed attempts at merging the Diversified Property Fund with other funds, Australian Unity has decided to rid itself of...

So, as soon as I had increased the cash buffer i n our offset account, I got AUD 40k of capital calls, so back to square one again. The capi...

I am expecting my rate of return over the last 20 years to look bad this year because 2004 was such a good year. In 2004 I gained 42.4% comp...

In February, the Australian Dollar fell from USD 0.6595 to USD 0. 6504 . Stock indices and benchmarks performed as follows (total returns in...

This post follows up on EnoughWealth's comments on my previous post on Ramit's Conscious Spending Plan. In that post, I commented ...

I like to watch Ramit Sethi's podcasts where he has an in depth discussion with a couple about their finances. These sessions usually ...

Expected that some or even many companies will go bust in this space. This is the first individual venture investment of ours that went bust...

 We have now been running an SMSF for almost three years. How is it doing? The obvious benchmarks are our employer superannuation funds - Un...

I sold our holding in WAM Leaders (WLE.AX). It was down to only 0.1% of the portfolio. Once we held a lot more but gradually sold it off ove...

My aunt died in 2020. She was single all her life. My father and her did not get on well. They fought each other in court over their mother...

EnoughWealth wonders if our investment strategy only adds value under certain market conditions. As a first step let's look at when the ...

Got an email from Commonwealth Bank that mentions their "Benefits Finder" button in the CommBank App. This can help you find missi...

If we create a portfolio invested 50% in VDBA and 50% in VDGR we can simulate a 60/40 passive benchmark: This requires monthly rebalancing...

Following up on my comparison of our portfolio to VDBA , here is a comparison to VDGR . VDGR is a 70/30 mix, while VDBA is 50/50 and our por...

EnoughWealth commented on my recent post on our target allocation : "Have you tried benchmarking your actual and target asset allocati...

Monthly reports are back! In January, The MSCI World Index (USD gross) rose 0.61% while the S&P 500 rose 1.68%, and the HFRI hedge fund ...

  Not sure when I last posted about our target asset allocation, as I have tweaked it since this 2021 post . I am tweaking it again to refle...

  This year's home contents insurance bill is 70% higher than last year's! How does that make sense? The number I am comparing to is...

We have now re-invested Big Moomin's portfolio in the two suggested managed funds . At this point, Little Moomin has just over 8% more ...

  To better understand our investment underperformance in 2023 let's dive into the returns on each individual investment. If we'd ma...

In the second half of 2023 I stopped writing monthly reports on this blog because each month's accounts had large errors.* But now I hav...

If we retired today, how much would our retirement income be? To answer the question, I updated an analysis I did a few years ago and came u...

  This chart compares the fitted investment income curve from my previous post about the "boiling point" with the monthly loss of...