Bulls, bears and the 200 day moving average

A search online for the 200 day moving average or simple moving average (200 dma or 200 sma) will reveal many hits and a lot of different opinions. Firstly what is the 200 dma? In its simplest form it is the average of a markets closing price over a 200 day period. To construct the average you add the last 200 days closing prices and divide by 200. Another form is the 200 day exponential moving average (200 ema) which is a little more complex and provides more weight to young price data and less weight to old price data.

The numbers just roll so easily off the tongue

Ten billion here, a trillion there. It all rolls so easily off the tongue as governments continue to both spend more than they “earn” and bail out banks & other institutions. How often though do you think about what these sums actually represent? That’s something I did today which I thought I would share. Firstly let’s try and appreciate what a billion dollars, that’s $1,000,000,000, is by looking at three images courtesy of pagetutor.com. The first sets the scene with a $100 note, then the second image piles these $100 bills into a million dollars and finally the last image piles these $100 bills into 10 pallets of money to give one billion dollars. Impressive isn’t it. Now let’s look at just two news items from Thursday.

Buying gold

Yesterday I made another purchase of gold despite me detailing here that it is still well above its historical average real (after inflation) price and real trend line price in US Dollars (GBP). The same also holds true for gold when priced in British Pounds (GBP). I made this decision after the monthly analysis of my retirement investing low charge portfolio detailed that I was still 0.8% short of my desired asset allocation.

Australian Property Market – May 2010 Update

I intend to keep a close eye on Australian house prices as I build my retirement investing today portfolio. This is because Australia is a very likely retirement possibility (if not sooner) for me. I do this by watching the quarterly releases from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) which is what the content of today’s post is however on a more regular basis I watch the data coming from RPData with my latest post here.

My Current Low Charge Portfolio – May 2010

Edited 06 June 2010: I have found more exact data allowing me to determine benchmark returns to the day. I have therefore updated the data in this post to reflect this.
Apologies for the confusion but I'm learning here too.
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Buying (New money): Since my last post I have struggled with my savings a little and managed to save only 53% of my after tax earnings and pension salary sacrifices. While I’m unhappy with the month’s savings rate I still believe it is well above the average punter on the street. Total new money entering my retirement investing Low Charge Portfolio was around 0.7% of my total portfolio. This were allocated as follows: 37.6% to cash, 9.4% to UK equities, 13.1% to international equities, 2.5% to index linked gilts and 37.4% to UK commercial property. This money was invested both outside of tax wrappers and also within a pension.