A lot has been written about the disconnect between Main Street (the economy and businesses) and Wall Street (the stock market) in the US. With record unemployment in the US, reduction in consumer spending and closures of businesses, it was surprising to see the S&P 500 and Dow Jones indices record a 'V' shaped recovery… Continue reading The Illusionary US Market Recovery
Tag: USA
Recession Fear and the Bond Yield Curve
Since December 2018, something rare has been happening to the US treasury bond yields and the trend is still continuing to today. The yield on bonds with durations longer than 1 year have been gradually dropping while the yield on bonds shorter than 6 months have slightly nudged upwards. This has finally resulted last Friday… Continue reading Recession Fear and the Bond Yield Curve
Investing Like Warren Buffet
Anyone who has read about investing would likely have heard about Warren Buffet. Many books have been written about him and there are many people who try to copy his investing styles. Heck, there are even people willing to part with over half a million dollars just to have a chat with him. Unless those… Continue reading Investing Like Warren Buffet
Building The Foundation Of Your Retirement Savings
This is going to be a simple post because the idea is pretty straight forward. We may all retire some day. Some aspire to do it as soon as possible (such as those in the the FIRE movement), while others choose to delay it as long as possible since there's pretty much nothing else productive… Continue reading Building The Foundation Of Your Retirement Savings
Why You Should Consider Buying A House
From the perspective of investments, properties have plenty of undesirable traits. It's expensive and typically you will be unable to buy it outright - you pay part of it as downpayment and then borrow the remainder from a bank. When Buying, Set Aside More Than The Downpayment The downpayment can be quite substantial - usually 20% of the purchase price… Continue reading Why You Should Consider Buying A House
Long Term Trend of the S&P 500
On Christmas eve, the S&P 500 lost 2%. By itself it would have been an uncommon event, if weren't for the fact that year-to-date, it would be down by over 12%. It is also almost 20% down from its peak in September. Everyone was wondering if Santa has neglected the stock market investors this year.… Continue reading Long Term Trend of the S&P 500
Financial Advice For My 25 Year Old Self
Assuming that my 23 year old self had followed a disciplined approach to balance my income and expenses, at 25 years old I should be well into building my emergency savings. Once I have accumulated an emergency savings worth 6 months of expenses, my savings should now go into riskier investments. There will be things… Continue reading Financial Advice For My 25 Year Old Self
Financial Advice For My 23 Year Old Self
My first job as a telecommunications engineer paid about MYR2,300 (~USD600) a month. That's pretty reasonable for an entry level job in Malaysia but boy sometimes it seemed that I could never make any headway with my savings. If only I knew then what I know now about managing personal finances. I didn't really keep… Continue reading Financial Advice For My 23 Year Old Self
US Federal Interest Rates
Today the US Fed raises the rates from 2% to 2.25%. The stock market has been embroiled in a sea of red declines since October and the rising benchmark borrowing interest rate has been blamed as one of the causes. Actually the long term trajectory of the interest rates has been on decline since 1980.… Continue reading US Federal Interest Rates
It’s Not You, It’s The Machines
About 70% of the trades in the US stock market are made by computers. That means that there are many computer programs that automatically buy and sell stocks everyday without human intervention. The programs take in a variety of inputs such as the news, analyst reports, financial performance, economic data, etc. and then make a… Continue reading It’s Not You, It’s The Machines
