Buying Gilts, Property, International Equities and UK Equities

As an employee of a company I have the option to contribute to a pension scheme. I have made the choice as part of my retirement investing strategy to contribute to the pension scheme for the reasons laid out here.

Australia, UK and US government bond yields – March update

I continue to monitor the 10 year government bond yields of three countries (Australia, United Kingdom and the United States) to try and understand when interest rates on savings and mortgages may start to rise with my datasets shown in today’s chart.

Australian Stock Market – March 2010 Update

To try and squeeze some more performance out of a retirement investing strategy that is heavily focused on asset allocation I am using a cyclically adjusted PE ratio (known as the PE10 or CAPE) for the ASX 200 to attempt to value the Australian Stock Market. The method used is based on that developed by Yale Professor Robert Shiller for the S&P 500. I will call it the ASX 200 PE10 and it is the ratio of Real (ie after inflation) Monthly Prices and the 10 Year Real (ie after inflation) Average Earnings. For my Australian Equities I will use a nominal ASX 200 PE10 value of 16 to equate to when I hold 21% Australian Equities. On a linear scale I will target 30% less stocks when the ASX 200 PE10 = 26 and will own 30% more stocks when the ASX 200 PE10 = 6.

Can the British pound fall any further?

At the time of writing sterling today had risen by 0.6% to be 1.5344 against the US dollar. Part of the contributor to this was a fall in UK unemployment of 33,000 for the 3 months to January 2010 putting unemployment at 2.45 million or 7.8% today. Now I don’t watch this indicator regularly however if you read into the figures a little deeper it doesn’t look all rosy to me.

Gold Priced in GBP – March 2010 Update

In absolute terms gold continues to reach new levels of expensiveness in GBP terms when looking back over historic average monthly data since 1979. However there has been a lot of inflation over this period and so as always I will look at the real (inflation) adjusted price of gold over this period which is my first chart today. The inflation dataset that I will use is the UK retail prices index (RPI).