Proud member of the Yakezie Challenge

When I first started this blog 6 short months ago I did so for a couple of reasons. The first was to hold myself accountable. I set myself an investment strategy based on strategic asset allocation with a tactical asset allocation mixed in to try and squeeze some extra performance and I thought that by publishing the strategy along with regular updates that I would stick to the plan. Well so far it seems to be working however only time with tell if my retirement investing strategy was successful.

The Bank of England continues with their unpublished strategy – UK Bank Rate held at 0.5%

The Bank of England today held interest rates at 0.5% for the fifteenth month in a row and decided to do no more quantitative easing (QE) for now. Meanwhile in the real world the retail prices index (RPI) has risen from 3.7% to 4.4% and the measure supposedly followed by the Bank of England, the consumer prices index (CPI), has risen from 3.0% to 3.4%. The banks must be enjoying every minute of this. It gives them the chance to rebuild their balance sheets by borrowing short term at what are effectively negative interest rates. They also don’t seem to need savers so give us two fingers through low interest rates on our savings.

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.