Money Weekend’s Technology FutureWatch 3rd August 2013
August 3, 2013 Comments Off
Not Having of a Trading Strategy Can be Fatal.
Of course once you have learnt the pitfalls of trading, usually by bitter experience you can then easily avoid them before they occur. Making small mistakes are a foregone conclusion, for instance entering the wrong stock symbol or incorrectly setting a buy level.
The mistakes that you will need most to avoid are the ones due more to bad judgment rather than just plain simple errors. These are the type of mistakes which can ruin your trading career instead of just one or two trades. To avoid these pitfalls, you will have to watch yourself very closely and stay alert.
Trading in the stock market will always involve a certain amount of risk .But you must never treat it as you would gambling in a casino or a race track. [Read more →]
August 2, 2013 Comments Off
Two Approaches to Investing…
August 2, 2013 Comments Off
10 World Changing Technologies That Could Change Your Life (Part I)
August 2, 2013 Comments Off
The News Gets Worse, So We’re Buying Resource Stocks…
August 1, 2013 Comments Off
That Squeeze You Feel is The Great Credit Contraction (Part 1).
August 1, 2013 Comments Off
Your Only Advantage In The Markets.
Whew!
We spent most of last week on airplanes. From Paris to Amsterdam…then to Vancouver…then to Beijing…and finally back to Paris.
The best flight was Air Canada from Vancouver to Beijing. The plane was almost empty. We got on…put the seat back…and went to sleep.
A few times in the night we woke up…opened the window blind…and tried to figure out where we were. There was a red glow off to the right side of the plane, which we took to be the Arctic.
The air hostesses on the plane were all Chinese. Very pleasant and professional.
Remarkably, all the flights were on time.
But then, returning to terra firma, things started to go wrong.
We hadn’t much time to keep up with the markets last week. But nothing much happened anyway.
It’s summer. Investors don’t seem to be paying attention. On Friday, US stocks went nowhere. Gold slipped a little. [Read more →]
August 1, 2013 Comments Off
The Absurdity of Australian Property.
Today’s absurdity involves Australian property prices. Weekend auction activity in the main cities of Sydney and Melbourne give the impression that the market is once again red hot. The prospect of lower interest rates, it seems, trumps concerns about a slowing China, a sharp drop off in mining investment and rising unemployment.
So is the move driven by fundamentals?
SQM Property Research publishes a weekly rental index. Over the past 12 months its index reading for Sydney and Melbourne (houses) is up 0.2% and 2.1% respectively. On the other hand, SQM’s weekly ‘asking prices index’ for the two cities over the same time frame is up 7.2% for Sydney and just 0.4% for Melbourne.
What does this tell us? Well, first of all understand that this is just one of many measures of house price data. SQM will have different results to RP Data or the Australian Bureau of Statistics. But it does give us the ability to compare prices with earnings, which for houses is rent.
So on this basis, you would argue that Sydney has moved ahead of its fundamentals over the past 12 months while Melbourne has actually underperformed. But with lower interest rates, and the prospect of more cuts to come, you could also argue that Sydney’s strong house prices reflect the discounting of a lower interest rate environment.
On the other hand, you have to ask yourself why interest rates are expected to fall. It’s because of a slowing economy. It’s because of fears over the growth prospects of our largest trading partner, China, which hasn’t even began to reform its hopelessly imbalanced economy yet.
With this in mind, it’s difficult to see how we’re going to get enough growth in national income and wages to maintain ‘earnings growth’ (rental growth) for residential property. If that is the case, and we think it will be, the recent spurt in the property market will be short-lived. [Read more →]
July 31, 2013 Comments Off
Why You Should Be ‘Hands On’ When Investing Your Money.
July 31, 2013 Comments Off
The Difference Between Great Technology and Great Technology Businesses.
July 31, 2013 Comments Off