Good reads from around the Web.
I laughed out loud reading The Escape Artist’s FAQ for City workers who are thinking about attending a summer festival.
Here’s an extract:
Can I catch communism at a festival?
No. Communism is not a communicable disease. Communism is in fact a sub-optimal system for organising the allocation of scarce resources favoured by The Soviet Union and China prior to the 1990s. Unfortunately for the millions of working class people that died as a result.
Festivals are excellent examples of capitalism at work. Like companies, festivals work best when they treat people as humans, are lightly regulated, flexible and run by good people who don’t get too greedy.
Yes, there are plenty of stalls selling…ahem…non-essential items such as healing crystals, whale song CDs and vegetarian sandals…but these are small entrepreneurs providing what people want.
The irony is that many bankers think festivals are full of communists. Yet it is the bankers that work in monolithic faceless bureaucracies supported by The State.
Most banks make decisions with the efficiency of a 1930s Soviet tractor factory.
Many Monevator readers are City workers. A few of you might be offended, but to be honest I suspect you’ll find it funniest of all.
(Besides, he is talking about the other people…)
Do read the full FAQ.
From the blogs
Making good use of the things that we find…
Passive investing
- Asset allocation: Make it personal – Vanguard blog
- How contributions affect your rate of return [Ignore Canada stuff] – CCP
- Why optimal portfolios are so hard to create [Geeky!] – Rick Ferri
- The case for gold: It’s more than a pet rock – Alpha Markets
Active investing
- Share buybacks: Good or bad? – Woodford Funds
- Total UK dividends just hit a record high – DIY Investor (UK)
- 5-year compound return for gold miners lowest since 1980s – SSOL
- Are we nearing peak commodity hatred? – Pragmatic Capitalism
- Ferreting out the fat cats – Richard Beddard / iii blog
- Disruption and Aggregation Theory – Stratechery
- Valuing the FTSE 250 – UK Value Investor
Other articles
- Shouldn’t the Jones’ be keeping up with us? – Dividend Mantra
- Uber Irrational – The Psy-Fi blog
- The case for paying off your mortgage early… – Under The Money Tree
- …or indulging in some extreme downsizing – The FIREStarter
- 2015: First half progress report – Retirement Investing Today
Products of the week: The Telegraph says that the new two-year and three-year fixed rate savings bonds from Paragon Bank are Best Buys. They pay 2.34% and 2.66% respectively.
Mainstream media money
Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view these enable you to click through to read the piece without being a paid subscriber of that site.1
Passive investing
- Tips for choosing an ETF – ETF.com
- Hedge funds as a class perform like pricey ETF portfolios – ETF Trends
Active investing
- Swedroe: Hedge funds continue to fail – ETF.com
- Housel: Everyone was mad for gold in 2011. Oops. – Twitter
- The extra tax that’ll be due on £20,000 of dividend income – Telegraph
- Harry Nimmo’s investment trust is on a big discount – Telegraph
Other stuff worth reading
- Would you pay more if income tax and N.I. is merged? – ThisIsMoney
- Secure your future with money you didn’t know you had – N.Y. Times
- Life stories from Generation Rent – Guardian
- Entrepreneurs get money (not genes) from their families – Quartz
- Simon Evans Goes to Market: Coffee [Podcast] – BBC Radio 4
- Meet the man who flies the world for free – Rolling Stone
- Inside the Government’s Nudge division – BBC
Book of the week: The algorithms that nowadays attempt to guess our every move occasionally get lucky. So it was this week at Amazon
Like these links? Subscribe to get them every week!
- Note some articles can only be accessed through the search results if you’re using PC/desktop view (from mobile/tablet view they bring up the firewall/subscription page). To circumvent, switch your mobile browser to use the desktop view. On Chrome for Android: press the menu button followed by “Request Desktop Site”. [↩]
Had to laugh when the Tory graph said standard life smaller companies is on a big discount at 10%
I’ve been recently flouting my no active investing rule and buying dunedinin enterprise at a 33% discount to NAV which is a proper investment trust discount
TI
Many thanks for the headliner slot on what is surely the Pyramid Stage of all UK PF blogs!
TEA
p.s. and yes, you are spot on, it was indeed the other people I was talking about 😉
Investor,
Thanks so much for the inclusion.
So glad to know that communism isn’t contagious. I can take off this silly surgical mask now… 🙂
Cheers!
@ Neverland: That’s SME private equity, though. The stockmarket hates them; if you’re lucky it’ll move to a 25% discount.
@article: “Many Monevator readers are City workers.”
Gosh, really? I thought this was a site for normal people like me, just a worker, outside the finance industry.
Somehow this fact makes Monevator.com seem less relevant and interesting to me. (Since I’m currently reading Richard Thaler’s “Nudge”, I think I see why there might be such an irrational change in my sense of “belonging” to the target readership.)
You probably already realise this, but this article isn’t on the homepage of your website.
Thanks TI – some very good article this week, even a few that made me feel a little better about gold.
I enjoyed the optimal portfolios piece, but when I read these articles, I am constantly reminded of the Authers article some months ago which compared various asset allocations from the whizzy down to the Permanent and the performance difference was modest, and the fact about the dead Fidelity investors. Behaviour trumps a fine-tuned asset allocation.
I also like UTMTs thoughts on mortgages and the Uber article.