What caught my eye this week.
I was bemused to see Adrian Chiles penning a glowing paean to the Delay Repay compensation scheme in The Guardian this week. I’d always imagined such warm feelings were an Investor family quirk.
As Chiles writes:
After a bit of a fiddle setting up your account, you automatically, as if by magic, get a cash prize if your train is delayed. OK, it’s compensation rather than a prize, but it’s still a beautiful thing.
On the services I use most regularly, generally having bought single tickets, on Avanti West Coast and GWR I get back a quarter of the price if it’s quarter of an hour late. And, along with LNER, I get back half the ticket price if it’s half an hour late, and all of it if it’s a whole hour late.
And it’s so quick! If your train’s not on time, into your account goes the money, bang on time. It makes the delay so much more bearable; even interesting. I end up willing it to pass the 15-minute mark.
Me and my sister know just where Chiles coming from. Trains to our ancestral home – a bungalow four hours from London – are invariably delayed. But Delay Repay has almost made it fun.
We’ll text each other as we approach the crucial cliff-edge for a higher payout:
Me: Nooo! I don’t think I’m going to hit the 30-minute threshold 🙁
Sister: Hang tough! There’s still time to get stuck behind a late-running train that leads to a shortage of platforms!!
German and Japanese trains may run on time, but where’s the fun in that?
Indeed if only the rest of the UK’s creaking infrastructure was gamified with cash payouts.
No doctor appointment available for six weeks? Enjoy coughing up your lungs as you shuffle out to spend this £10 voucher!
Brexit got you tied up at the borders? Here’s a free month of Spotify to entertain you while you wait.
I’m only half joking.
Have a great weekend.
From Monevator
Talking about inheritance has psychological as well as financial benefits – Monevator
Running a 31-fold gain in pursuit of a 100-bagger – Monevator [Moguls]
From the archive-ator: The first law of thermodynamics and investing risk – Monevator
News
Note: Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view click through to read the article. Try privacy/incognito mode to avoid cookies. Consider subscribing to sites you visit a lot.
PM seems unsure whether shareholders count as ‘working people’ – This Is Money
UK business growth slows to an 11-month low ahead of Labour’s first Budget… – Reuters
and consumers are in a ‘despondent’ mood too – CityAM
Patients to get full access to their data via NHS app – BBC
Record number of landlords set up limited companies to cut tax – This Is Money
The IPO market is lagging globally even as markets soar – FT
North Korea is sending troops to aid Russia in Ukraine – Sky
London tube map exhibition celebrates the iconic design – Reuters
What to make of Goldman’s forecast 3% returns from US stocks – A.W.O.C.S.
Products and services
How does Natwest’s new £180 bank switching offer compare? – This Is Money
Eight free or cheap deals for kids for half-term holidays – Which
Premium Bond rate cut to 4.15% – Money Saving Expert
Get £100-£2,000 cashback when you open a SIPP with Interactive Investor (T&Cs apply. Capital at risk) – Interactive Investor
‘Bespoke’ private banking: the ultimate in customer service? [Search result] – FT
How to save a few quid when you renew your house insurance – Which
What are the most efficient ways to use energy in the home? – Guardian
Open an account with low-cost platform InvestEngine via our link and get up to £50 when you invest at least £100 (T&Cs apply. Capital at risk) – InvestEngine
You can save £100 or more by switching energy tariffs, say experts – Guardian
Annuities versus pension drawdown: pros and cons – Which
Cozy cottages for sale, in pictures – Guardian
Comment and opinion
Skis, bikes, and diversification – C.I.A.I.
The downsizing shakeup [Search result] – FT
Equal weighting: equally bad? – Humble Dollar
Optimists are the best investors – White Coat Investor
Howard Marks: there are only two asset classes, ownership and debt – FT
How much house is too much? – Of Dollars and Data
What ‘Monzo millionaires’ can teach us about share options [Search result] – FT
Fooled by randomness – Klement on Investing
We need to talk about the US ‘bond vigilantes’ – Cullen Roche
Jason Zweig on life, books, and Benjamin Graham [Podcast] – Bogleheads via Apple
Naughty corner: Active antics
Even the biggest winners start off as small caps – Freedom Day
The small cap amplifier – Verdad
Two ways to value dividend-paying stocks – UK Dividend Stocks
[Not surprisingly] Starbucks is now struggling in China – Sherwood
We are watching the death of Google – Where’s Your Ed At
The power of patience – Safal Niveshak
Nvidia is bigger than every G7 country’s market cap except the US and Japan… – Apollo
…so a new US ETF offers the S&P 500 without the Magnificent Seven – Global Newswire
Kindle book bargains
Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How to Fix It by Sam Freedman – £0.99 on Kindle
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis – £0.99 on Kindle
Bad Blood: Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos Scandal by John Carreyrou – £0.99 on Kindle
Casino: The Rise and Fall of the Mob in Las Vegas by Nicholas Pileggi – £0.99 on Kindle
Environmental factors
Investors giving funds aligned to Paris agreement a wider birth – FT
Tourism at the end of the world – Macleans
Five nature wins that have actually worked – BBC
Amazon says it has ditched plastic air pillows – The Verge
How Chernobyl killed four million people – Klement on Investing
We’re in the golden age of garbage clothing – The Walrus
Crypto-o-crypto mini-special
Stripe’s now all-in on stablecoins, but it paid a steep price – Sherwood
Stablecoins: what next for crypto’s killer use case? – The Block
Robot overlord roundup
Google A.I. is inaccurate in 43% of finance-related searchers – College Investor
Anthropic’s latest Claude update can control your computer – Sherwood
The A.I. investment boom – Apricitas Economics
Off our beat
How progress creates its own obstacles – Vox
The free world teeters on the edge of a knife – Noahpinion
Why are we building homes when so many lie empty? – BBC
Apple’s move to turn the AirPods into hearing aid devices – The Verge
An end to passwords is in sight – Vox
The UK’s work sickness time bomb risks a lost generation – BBC
How much have music lyrics changed since the 1960s? – Stat Signficant
And finally…
“He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.”
– Joseph Heller, Catch-22
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Re : shareholders as ‘working people’ – I’m more than happy for people who rely upon owner of shares as their primary source of income to be classed as ‘working people’ as long as they pay the same rates of tax the rest of us pay.
I can’t speak for Japanese trains but German trains no longer run on time. Germans complain about Deutsche Bahn almost as much as we complain about our railways. I myself had experience of a severe delay back in May.
It’s John Sculley in the photo between Jobs and Woz in “Even the biggest winners start off as small caps” not Ron Wayne.
Oh, and as a footnote to my comment at #2, the compensation payment, while not automatic, was processed very efficiently!
Argh I was waiting on your thoughts on new Interactive Investor Community app and if you planning on writing anything on there, but maybe you haven’t seen it yet :))
I got 220 back from a delayed flight recently. Incredibly satisfying.
Labour is the party for workers right, but it’s critical that nobody ever defines what worker s means. Kier should have known that and changed the subject.
On a tangent, should I be seeing ads when on my mobile in a paid Monevator account? Thought lack of ads was one of the benefits of membership? I’m definitely signed in.
Brilliant catch-22 quote. I love that book!
@Rhino — No you shouldn’t. You’re 100% sure you’re signed in? I’ll investigate thanks!
You’re not blocking cookies or similar that may be stopping the ad-blocking from working?
(If anyone else is seeing this as signed-on members please drop a line here.)
Update: I don’t see ads when I’m logged in on a browser on mobile @Rhino! Perhaps you’re not really logged in — I know you believe you are, but maybe you’ve been logged out and it isn’t easy to see on a mobile screen? — or there’s some kind of caching issue going on? 🙂
Or possibly there’s something quirky going on. In which case more specifics please — thanks!
I enjoyed the Klement post “Fooled by Randomness”.
As a physical scientist, the idea that counterfactuals have any explanatory or predictive powers in human society has always seemed very unlikely. As Klement points out, you can’t constantly rerun the experiment, and so you can’t tell what is signal and what is noise.
As Stephen Jay Gould used to say, if you go back to the pre-Cambrian and re-run the tape of evolution you won’t get the same result. Evolution is an emergent property of a complex system. Societies and economies the same.
Counterfactuals are great for fiction, c.f. “The Man in the High Castle” or most of steampunk, but useless for considering ‘what would have happened if?’.
They also have some value in scenarios, where you are trying to imagine alternative futures. You can then try to nudge the system to get the future you prefer. You don’t know whether your actions will work, and you don’t know whether other factors will turn out to be much more powerful, but at least it gives you something to do and a story to tell when tackling wicked societal problems.
As a regular visitor to Japan, I can tell you that the trains do indeed run on time. It can be done.
A late train is such a rarity, that a train running just a few minutes late will make the news.
@TI not seeing ads anymore so maybe a signing in issue as you suggest. Thought I was signed in as I was able to post about it in my name. Apologies if it was user error on my part.
Good to see Goldman Sachs and Howard Marks aligning with my own thinking on asset allocation. Vanguard forecasting the same way.
It will be interesting to see how all the diamond hands 100% S&P500 index fund youtubers will react after a sustained bear or sideways market.
Can’t wait for this budget so all you capitalists get taxed out of existence. Stealing from the rest of us by getting free money from shares and other assets – none of which you deserve. We need a 90% tax on all income over £50K , property taxes on ALL homes (say, 5% of the house value a year) and a 20% a year tax on all unrealised capital gains. Time you lot paid your fair share!
“How Much House is Too Much?” seemed entirely arse-about-face. It implies that you should buy a house to balance your portfolio rather than buy a house that suits you to the maximum extent compatible with your being able to afford it. I suppose it also implies that you should move house from time to time to rebalance your portfolio.
Sounds like a road to ruin to me: transaction costs on housing are huge (especially, I assume, in those American states where property taxes on a house you already own do not increase with its increasing capital value but would leap up if you moved into a new house that’s more expensive than your current house originally was.)
Next: Google. Its searches have certainly become less useful to me. What else should we try on our Macs? (Please don’t suggest Bing which introduced malware-like misbehaviour to my Mac.)
I appreciate your desire to return to Europe, but German trains are terrible
https://fortune.com/europe/2024/07/03/german-railway-system-deutsche-bahn-punctuality-national-embarrassment-euro-2024-underinvestment/
The Swiss have started preventing late DB trains from entering Switzerland.
“PM seems unsure whether shareholders count as ‘working people’”
Someone should ask him “Your father Rodney was proprietor of the Oxted Tool Company and ran its factory; does that mean he wasn’t a working person and that therefore you are not from the proletarian background you claim?”
Nigel Watts #12
Have you thought of joining the Labour Party?
@ R. S
He can’t join the Labour Party, you need to be 13 or older.
@dearime – I’ve noticed a lot of my more tech savvy friends moving away from Google over past year, DuckDuckGo seems to be the alternative they’re going for.
@dearieme
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for about 8 years now. https://duckduckgo.com
Rarely use Google these days.
The XMAG ETF (S&P500 minus the magnifico seven) looks interesting. No doubt it’s unavailable in the UK though.
@Curlew, Rhino: thanks.
I travel on DB Railways in Germany quite a bit,and I can assure you they do not run on time. They used to, but no longer. Hopefully when Great British Railways finally comes into being ( The Bill is going through the House of Lords at the moment) things will improve, but we’ll have to see.
I travelled on ‘Great’ British railways before they were privatised and I can assure you they were absolutely awful then as well. I didn’t want yo invest in a car but they left me no choice.
‘After a bit of a fiddle setting up your account, you automatically, as if by magic, get a cash prize if your train is delayed. OK, it’s compensation rather than a prize, but it’s still a beautiful thing.’
Does anyone know how to do this? I have been looking at my train app and cannot see a way of setting it up.
Also looked at GWR app and still no option to set up auto payments♂️
I remember the golden days of Delay Repay Sniper, from around 10 years ago it must be now.
@Gizzard > ‘Great’ British railways before they were privatised and I can assure you they were absolutely awful then as well
they were a different sort of crap, but you didn’t have to take out a mortgage for the price of the fares or book in advance, you could just show up and buy a ticket at the station and go
@all — Dismayed to hear about the German trains. I had a formative moment in Germany decades ago when a train was about 30 seconds late leaving and my German friend was apologetic and embarrassed (albeit partly because they’d been boasting to me that trains *could* run on time).
@Fi-firefighter — I always have to individually apply too and don’t know how to do it automatically.
@TI, Fi-firefighter
It’s only certain companies that have any automation about the process: a quick search unearthed LNER and c2c. It looks like it only works with advance tickets that are purchased online, which is understandable due to the difficulty of otherwise associating a person to a particular ticket and journey.
@ Curlew – great info, thank you
I don’t mean to burst your bubble any further, but Germany has just binned Schengen, so everyone will be held up at their border to boot whilst also waiting interminably on a train.
Having been there for the football in the summer, not a single train I took left on time.
I must say, as much as I enjoy reaping its benefits, I’ve always felt Delay Repay is a bit too generous – I’ve had periods where almost every journey ‘earned’ some level of refund, often for fairly mild amounts of inconvenience. While on the one hand it is nice to see a clear market incentive providing a pressure towards good customer service (something airlines could definitely benefit from), I can’t help but feeling that in the bastardised semi public semi private system that are British railways the cost of delay repay is coming from our pocket either as higher fares or higher government subsidies.
Why should you get as much back for being an hour late as if your train is cancelled altogether? After all, in the former case, the railway has at least delivered the underlying service (transporting you and your luggage from A to B) albeit in a tardy manner. Does being 15 minutes late really detract 25% of the value of the journey? One could counter that even small delays can lead to missed connections, especially to other forms of transport, but the riposte would be that you would be a fool to travel via any other mode for a crucial connection with so little contingency (would you only allow 15 minutes for traffic if you were travelling 2+ hours by car?)
I wouldn’t scrap Delay Repay entirely (as I opened with, I’m never unhappy to receive it and I think its important there is some incentive against poor performance) but increasing the time limits or reducing the amounts (and/or some sort of scaling for journey length) would strike me as a reasonable trade off if it helped reduce fares at the ticket office/machine/website.
@Cantab – I thought the money comes from Network Rail or whoever is to blame for the delay, so train operator fines Network Rail (or whoever caused delay), customer claims and gets passed on to them, anything not claimed they stick in their pockets.
Im not 100% this is is exactly how it works, someone might correct me on this.
@CMC I believe you’re broadly right – there is an army of beancounters who allocate the fault of any particular delay and the cost of the ‘repay’ is passed on to the responsible party (eg if an LNER train delays an Avanti one, LNER pays). However in the current pseudo-franchise system (so-called “passenger service contracts”) of private train operators who are paid a set fee+costs to deliver a defined service with the state taking the ticket revenues in combination with Network Rail as a state owned company which owns the tracks, then the money for that repay is coming either from ticket revenue or state subsidies one way or another. Which brings me back to my underlying point, the system is very generous which is great when you’re a beneficiary but we all must be paying the bill either through taxes or tickets.
@Cantab So an interesting question would be – What happens to the money in this merry-go-round if we didn’t claim? Back into budget for improvements? Seems they would rather people were given these little prizes instead of having the responsibility to improve a service. Until when everyone (or a higher percentage of passengers) claims for every journey that is delayed. Swift changes would follow I would guess.
“ PM seems unsure whether shareholders count as ‘working people”
Well, I’m retired now and on my journey down the merry path living off a portfolio of invested assets in SIPP and ISA alongside a pot of rainy day cash. Definitely not a working person. I suppose the PM and friends might be coming for a share of it. We’ll find out soon. Is it me or do our political classes in government with their nice DB pensions not realise it will soon be the norm for currently working people to be living off investments in retirement? It’s like they live in a parallel universe and the concept is alien to them. Especially for the one who has an act of parliament giving a cushy pension deal. Thanks for the links!
Just came across this information regarding IHT and pensions relating to the budget 2024.
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/inheritance-tax-on-pensions-liability-reporting-and-payment/technical-consultation-inheritance-tax-on-pensions-liability-reporting-and-payment