The handful of you who know me in real life will already be aware that I’ve become a bit of a bore over the last couple of years.

No, not about index trackers, or high-yielding shares.

Instead, I’ve been boring people on the subject of another sort of investing: investing in human capital, namely myself.

That’s right. I’ve been getting an education.

Sell-by date

Now, let’s put that in context, lest you all think that you’ve been reading words penned by some unlettered ignoramus.

I actually have four degrees, including a Ph.D and MBA. But time, as they say, marches on, and as I approached 60 I was increasingly aware that a growing proportion of what I’d learned was past its sell-by date.

Which, when – like me – you earn your crust selling what you know, raises some troubling questions. In particular, I recognised that my data analytics skill set was looking very dated.

The amount I knew about open source analytics and modelling packages such as R, for instance, was zero.

Whizzy analytics techniques such as Excel’s pivot tables? Likewise.

Handy analytics and numerical analysis packages in Python, another open source language? Ditto.

Number-crunching

At which point, let me share the broader strategy with you.

I’ve always enjoyed analytics, and that Ph.D involved some fairly hefty statistics and multiple regression modelling. A not-insignificant part of what I do for a living is writing-up survey results, and carrying out secondary analysis. Clients send me Excel spreadsheets or SurveyMonkey output, and off I go.

(My rates are very reasonable, so if you’d like to discuss a project, get in touch. Note to our host, The Investor: I take it that I am allowed such gratuitous promotional plugs?)

I’d like to do more of this sort of work, and quite frankly see it as a very enjoyable – not to mention rewarding – potential retirement activity.

But as I’ve said, the world is moving on, and my analytics skill set was largely mired in 1970s and 1980s techniques and applications. Heck, back then the spreadsheet had only just been invented.

Incidentally, does anyone else remember working with VisiCalc? Or SPSS? (Now owned by IBM, and eye-wateringly expensive for individuals to buy, as is rival SAS’ equivalent package.)

Massively Open Online Courses

Hence the grand plan: Get up to speed with more modern analytics techniques and applications, and also catch up with more modern approaches to analytics.

But how? Enter the world of ‘MOOCs’, otherwise known as Massively Open Online Courses.

MOOCs come in a number of flavours. Leading American universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, for instance, provide online learning. Britain’s Open University is arguably one vast MOOC.

Any number of computing-specific MOOCs exist. My son and some of his friends, for example, are ploughing through courses at Coding Academy. The well-known Khan Academy also counts as a MOOC, although it lacks features found in some others. Ditto LinkedIn’s Lynda.

In short, MOOCs are hot, and venture capitalists (and philanthropists such as Bill and Melinda Gates) are pouring money into them.

What you get

So I’ve been taking courses at Coursera, and at edX. Both take the route of partnering with leading universities and other entities (such as Microsoft, say, for IT-specific courses) to offer a vast range of courses in all kinds of subjects.

From my experience, a typical course takes four weeks, and may be combined with others to form a specialisation.

A typical four week course costs in the range of £35-£45, which certainly meets my definition of ‘open’. Many permit learning for free, but the advantage of paying is that you get a certificate that can be posted on LinkedIn or shown to employers. Learn for free, and you don’t.

All courses have online forums where students can interact with others in their four-weekly cohort, and interaction with lecturers and teaching assistants is common.

There are lecture videos to download and watch, tests to pass, and assignments to perform. Individual approaches to deadlines vary – most will allow slippage if you pass by the end of the course. A recent Coursera innovation is to allow learners to move from one four-week course to another, if they fall behind.

Pass or fail?

My experience has been overwhelmingly positive. In just short of two years I’ve completed 12 courses, all of which feature on my LinkedIn profile. I’m almost at the end of a further one.

Courses vary in quality. The medium is new, and not every university and every instructor is yet up to speed with the limitations and advantages of MOOC-based online learning.

If you value interaction with other students (such as when you’re stuck on a particular problem) then busy courses are obviously better than quieter ones.

But, as I say, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive, and I have most definitely gained the skills that I was looking for.

Indeed, I’d go further: I can see me becoming a ‘serial offender’ – because as new courses are added, it’s oh-so-tempting to sign up.

Silver surfing studying

For the Monevator crowd – and in particular The Greybeard’s own retirement-focused readers – the merits of MOOCs are obvious.

Low-cost learning – what’s not to like? Either as a retirement hobby, to keep the grey cells ticking over, or like me to refresh old skills (or acquire new ones) in order to keep up-to-date with what is going on in the world of work.

Or, to whet your appetite even more, to acquire investing and finance skills. Yes, there are MOOCs here, too.

As I say, my own experience has been at edX* and Coursera. But let me leave you with a taster of what is on offer in the money-related domain – MOOC Tracker, a popular link, maintained by the Financial Times, of business and finance-specific MOOCs.

See you online!

Note: If not using the hyerlink URL above, please be aware that edX is to be found at www.edx.org, and not www.edx.com.

Good reads from around the Web.

I have not been alone in wondering whether politicians and central bankers might someday look to cure the world’s debt problems via a burst of high inflation.

Paying off a massive debt with a little bit each month takes ages. Run inflation at 3-5% for a few years, however, and you’ve got a big ally in whittling away your borrowings. Inflation was the Help to Buy scheme enjoyed by our parents and grandparents.

As things have turned out though, most inflation measures have remained subdued in the wake of the financial crisis. Indeed, fears have as often turned to deflation.

Asset prices have arguably been inflated, especially government bonds. But their resultant low yields only make the little sense they do in a world in which investors believe that central bankers will at least keep inflation in its bottle, and where there’s also a fear of stagnation.

What if markets are wrong about all this? What if after years of hysterical commentary about hyper-inflation and returning to the gold standard and – each and every month for the past seven years – the bond bubble being called to burst but doing no such thing, everyone has become complacent just at the moment when central bankers finally play their hand?

What if the governor of the Bank of England just said:

“Our judgment in the summer was that we could have seen another 400,000 to 500,000 people unemployed over the course of the next few years … so we are willing to tolerate a bit of overshoot in inflation over the course of the next few years in order to avoid that situation, to cushion the blow.”

Only in the face of a persistent rise in inflation would the central bank raise interest rates, Carney reportedly went on.

Ding dong

I am definitely not saying Carney just rang the bell at the top of the UK bond market (though I’d get a lot more traffic if I did do that every three months).

For what it’s worth I spend more time warning people against second-guessing the bond market than I do predicting its reversal! People, especially over-confident blog commenters, have been wrong, wrong, and wrong again. Far better for most to invest passively with a strategy that doesn’t rely on them being right about such things.

But Carney’s aside does make me a tad nervous, and wishing I had a big, cheap mortgage. Maybe it’s time to bite the bullet, despite loony house prices and the banana skin of Brexit.

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Good reads from around the Web.

Brexit started with a bang in June. The stock market plunged and a bloodbath unfolded at the top of the major political parties. We were all hooked.

But like a TV drama with a limited budget, things tailed off as we got bogged down in turgid mid-season plot building.

Theresa May’s appointment was reassuring but hardly a thriller, as the crazy Andrea Leadsom story line went nowhere. The Bank of England did its best to liven things up by cutting interest rates and warning of a greater chance of a recession, but more positive data kept coming in.

Even I had to admit – not without some relief – that I’d been wrong about the initial impact of the Leave vote. I wondered aloud if commercial property in London was now a buy.

Many viewers began switching off.

But in the past week, Brexit got back to its barmy best.

Not so much like Game of Thrones as the early episodes, mind you. More The Man in the High Castle, as an alternative universe started to take shape around us.

The right kind of workforce

It all started when Prime Minister Theresa May announced that she would trigger Article 50 this coming March. That sent the pound falling.

Later, she made it clear that curbing immigration rather than preserving the economy was her top priority. Pandering to fear and prejudice – the fantasy and lies of the Leave campaign – was more important than trying to maintain the profits and tax revenues that might actually help address the very real inequalities that motivated a big chunk of the vote to Brexit, and that she identified in a conference speech that otherwise had much to commend it.

As a result of this posturing, a ‘hard Brexit’ now seems firmly on the table, to the dismay of business [search result]. The pound fell some more.

Then we had some sinister new plot twists. Talk from Jeremy Hunt that the UK should be “self-sufficient” in doctors set the tone, but worse were the almost unbelievable plans from Home Secretary Amber Rudd to force companies to publish the proportion of “international” staff on their books.

Rudd said she wanted to “flush out” companies that she deemed to be harbouring an inappropriate number of (entirely legal) foreign workers.

This would “nudge them into better behaviour”. (Better as defined by Amber Rudd and the new order in Britain.)

It didn’t take an LBC radio presenter to point out where we’ve heard this kind of language before. Still, James O’Brien did an excellent job of drawing the parallels.

Ukip won the war, but it’s losing the plot

Before some bold Brexiteer turns up in the comments to tell me to calm down, it does seem Rudd may row back on these plans.

But that is only because of the backlash from business and other commentators. Clearly they felt appropriate at the time her wonks drew them up.

Another sign of the times – we learned yesterday that foreign-born academics have apparently been barred from giving the government official advice on the upcoming Brexit negotiations:

It is understood up to nine LSE academics specialising in EU affairs have been briefing the Foreign Office on Brexit issues, but the school has received an email informing it that submissions from non-UK citizens would no longer be accepted.

Relevant departments subsequently sent notes to those in the group, telling them of the instruction.

One of the group is understood to be a dual national, with citizenship of both the UK and another EU member state.

The Foreign Office was said to be concerned about the risk of sensitive material being exposed as article 50 negotiations over Britain’s exit from the EU – and subsequent talks on its future trade and other relations with the bloc – start to get under way.

Because, you know, being born in a country is the best way to judge a person’s trustworthiness and loyalty!

It’s frightening how quickly we’ve got to a point where our vibrant economy that attracts talent from across the EU and the world has become in the language of politics a cartel of unpatriotic gangmasters, shiftily employing Johnny Foreigners who hop over the border to steal our wages as well as our benefits.

As Ian Dunt, the editor of Politics.co.uk puts it, the Conservative party is arguably morphing into Ukip and the direction is disturbing.

Take the government’s ongoing refusal to guarantee the right to remain for all EU citizens living in Britain. Dunt writes of the logical conclusion:

Mass deportations. It sounds alarmist doesn’t it?

No, it wouldn’t involve Nazi officers banging on doors. It would all be very polite and English. A very polite but firm Home Office letter would come through the letter box and it would have a deadline.

If you don’t make that deadline – or if the authorities say they have reason to believe you won’t – the immigration enforcement vans come.

The sudden exodus of three million people from the UK. That is the suggestion. That is the threat.

That is what is implicit in Fox’s card game. It might be the most shameful policy Britain has considered in living memory. It is so shameful no-one dares say it out loud. They only imply it. But that is what he is proposing. That is the reality.

This is the great and final victory of Ukip. They have taken their economically catastrophic EU agenda, their bizarre sense of thin-skinned personal victimhood, and their culture-war poison over immigration and embedded it in the guts of the Tory party.

Do I think it’s likely that millions of EU citizens will ultimately be asked to leave the UK?

No, not particularly. Not yet.

Am I ashamed and dismayed that we’ve come to this in three short months?

Absolutely.

Thankfully, there was also a comic thread running through the latest episodes to lighten things up. It also came from Ukip – the cast of characters who by giving voice to the common man (or more specifically voice to his or her bigotry and fearfulness, rather than his or her better nature) seeded the germ that’s now eating us up.

This week we saw the leader step down after 18 days at the helm and Nigel Farage come back from the political dead to resume his place as top dog. Then one of its MEPs was hospitalized after confrontations with another Ukip MEP in the European Parliament.

Yep, funny alright. Albeit like a Tarantino movie is funny.

Investment implications

The pound is around $1.24 as I type – down from $1.30 before the Conservative conference, and around $1.50 in the moments before the Leave win was confirmed.

Overnight the pound fell to $1.14 in a flash crash that was blamed on robots (there being no Romanians or Poles nearby to take the blame, presumably).

The precipitous fall in the pound is making our country and its citizens poorer. That’s true however much you personally are managing to offset the declines with your investments in a Vanguard global tracker fund, or however much you believe Blackpool and Skegness can beat anything a fancy pants foreign holiday has to offer.

The FT has a big piece on the winners and losers from the pound’s decline [search result]. So far foreign tourists are the biggest beneficiaries. Quelle ironie!

If the fall in the pound is followed by a decline in overseas investment and a widening of our current account deficit, then all bets really are off again. The least we can now expect is an inflation shock. We import far too much for sterling’s collapse not to show up in our grocery bills.

The iShares index-linked Gilt fund is 23% higher since Brexit day. That had seemed like a crazy move. Now it’s looking prescient.

It will also be interesting to see where Theresa May’s opinion that low interest rates may now be causing more problems than they’re worth fits into the picture.

Some onlookers say a political intervention to reverse low rates is being signaled. I think it’s more likely cover for a big fiscal push in the Autumn Statement.

Get with the programme

Investing aside, I hope the more reasonable end of the Brexit voting spectrum will be as dismayed as me that what was (wrongly) dismissed as a xenophobic fringe element during the EU Referendum campaign is alive and kicking in the mainstream body politic.

If I was that kind of reasonable Leave voter, then rather than downplaying every lurch to the right in the rhetoric, I would be speaking out against it.

Millions of people who came to the UK with the best of intentions – and who we welcomed in, employed, worked alongside, and enjoyed the company of for years – now find themselves the subject of a bogus political scrutiny.

Even if it all comes to nothing, damage has been done on a personal level, and perhaps soon enough on an economic one.

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