Australia, UK, US and the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) government 10 year bond yields – May 2010 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. In addition with all the excitement that is occurring with the PIGS I have decided to also dedicate a monthly chart to ‘Club Med’ (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) also.

UK Mortgage Rates and Mortgage Approvals – May 2010 Update

Today I present two regular charts that as with last month continue to give me little information on what could be occurring in the housing market. The first shows the monthly interest rate of UK resident banks and building societies sterling standard variable rate mortgage to households (not seasonally adjusted) and highlights that for this data set rates remain at near record lows at 4.04% for April 2010 (actual low was 3.82% in April 2009). Compare this with the retail price index (RPI) of 4.4% and the average mortgage is better than free money with a negative real interest rate.

Investing mistakes I’ve made – shorting the stock market

As I’ve travelled down my chosen road of taking full responsibility for my retirement investing strategy I’ve made plenty of mistakes that have cost me money (and I’m sure I’ll make plenty more). I’d therefore like to share some of these with you over the coming months. Previously I covered contango & exchange traded commodities (ETC’s) and today I’m going to cover shorting the stock market.

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The Bank of England continues with their unpublished strategy – UK Bank Rate held at 0.5%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