Good reads from around the Web.
August always means the dog days for Monevator, and this year is no different.
Visitor numbers to the site are well down, as many of you unfathomably find fun, sea, and sunburn more appealing than pondering your optimal tax sheltering strategy.
The City, famously, gets sleepier. Hard to believe in these days of robot traders and PhDs fighting for scraps of additional return, but it seems to be true in the small caps I follow, where trading volumes are very light.
The Accumulator takes August off – which this year partly means taking a month off his on/off hiatus to write Monevator: The Paper Version (working title).
And Greybeard missed his monthly pension article deadline, due to illness.
(I’m sure he was poorly, but still… what about those Ashes, eh? 😉 )
As for the wider investing world, nobody is very excited about the interest rate speculation that so-called Super Thursday in the UK and the latest Federal Reserve minutes might otherwise have whipped up.
Even my tropical fish look bored.
Some things on my mind
Perhaps Monevator is having a mid-life crisis?
My co-blogger sent me an article from The Atlantic [1] about the famous halfway stage through life when you look around and let out one almighty “meh”.
The author recalls his own happiness hiatus:
As the weeks turned into months, and then into years, my image of myself began to change.
I had always thought of myself as a basically happy person, but now I seemed to be someone who dwelt on discontents, real or imaginary.
I supposed I would have to reconcile myself to being a malcontent.
It’s well worth reading the article in full, but it’s also a convenient jumping off point for a few bits of housekeeping aimed at any of the Monevator faithful who are tuning in on one of the most pleasant weekends of the year.
Feel free to skip to the links below, as it’s all pretty self-indulgent stuff about the site that you don’t really need to know.
What does “US but relevant” in the links mean?
A few people have asked me why so many of my links in Weekend Reading are from the US.
Also, they add, what’s with the “US but relevant” comment that is appended to some US links but not others?
On the first point, I include a lot of US content because there’s so much more to choose from. If anything I show home bias, considering the relative mass of commentary!
This leads into the second point. Much of the US stuff I include is about general investing strategies, or interesting stocks or sectors. And where it’s just about US markets, that’s often directly useful too, at least to active investors – the US is still the elephant in the global money circus.
“US but relevant” is a warning I tend to save for where an article also talks about specific aspects of personal finance that won’t be applicable to UK readers.
Typically these include US savings vehicles (e.g. 401k plans) or quirks of the US tax system (such as its treatment of capital gains made by funds, which differs from the UK).
In such cases, “US but relevant” will hopefully stop people getting misled by such minutia, especially newer investors.
No discussion forum, after all
Last week I finally decided to to scrap a Monevator discussion forum I’ve had in sporadic development for a couple of years.
I’ve hinted at such a forum in the works to a few of you who’ve asked for it over the years, so I thought I should warn you to now stand down.
It’s a mild shame. The forum had quite a few hours put into it (including efforts made by my collaborator to help debug the-then beta Discourse software we were using) as well some money I’d spent over the past year on some separate server space to test and eventually host the forum.
However last weekend Monevator was hit by a batch of particularly unpleasant comments – mostly aimed at a fellow financial blogger but also a few at me – to the extent that I had to delete a big swathe of mean-spirited stuff, and to post some of the others only reluctantly.1 [2]
I was standing in a tent enjoying a jazz quartet at a festival when it hit me: “Just think, if you finally switch on the forum then you could be lucky enough to miss this sort of thing for more of dealing with that nastiness every day…”
That at last resolved my prevarication. No forum.
Now, many bloggers I know say that reader interaction is one of their biggest rewards from blogging.
I know that The Accumulator is a big fan, too.
But I’ll be honest, it’s never done much for me.
Don’t get me wrong – I do enjoy reading many of your comments.
For instance, I love Mathmo’s attempts to draw a thread through Weekend Reading. I like gadgetmind’s hints from the hi-tech cutting-edge. I’ve even come to enjoy some of Nevermind’s dour pronouncements. And the great warmth from Minikins often makes me smile.
However when it comes to interacting, it’s not such a positive experience.
These days the site often gets hundreds of comments in a week, so just keeping up with reading them is a feat.
(Remember that comments can be posted at any time on all our 1,200-odd old articles. And I see and read them all…)
Time is short for me like everyone else, and so interacting nowadays almost invariably just means correcting errors or deleting nastiness.
On The Accumulator’s passive investing articles it’s a different story.
Here readers do a great job of keeping us abreast of the minutia of changing platform and fund costs. And there’s very rarely any verbals (except when one of those annoying active/passive skirmishes breaks out).
But on my posts, interacting mainly entails addressing loud people who don’t know a quarter as much as they think they do saying something that’s either wrong or half the story.
My mother of all people told me years ago to ignore these comments. At the time I was having a spat with a professed expert who was calling the S&P “obviously” overvalued (this at about half the level it is at now) and me a dangerous zealot for suggesting people stay invested in equities.
Thing is, I told my mum, we don’t write long detailed articles on Monevator only for them to be derailed shortly afterwards in the comments. Hence I often feel the need to keep repeating myself in the comments, to stop readers getting misled.
The point is policing the comments is hard enough. I just haven’t got it in me to keep a forum up to standard – or even worse from turning rotten, filling up with spivvy stuff that costs people money and hosts scams and so forth.
I have even considered turning off comments on Monevator, as huge numbers of other sites are doing [3] these days.
However we do have a mostly excellent community here on Monevator – partly through luck, partly because I suspect our verbosity and our investing approach attracts sensible people, and partly because I have always applied the benign dictatorship approach to censorship.
So for as long as that continues, we’ll keep the comments.
As for the discussion forum, I’m sorry a minority has potentially spoiled what could have been a useful asset for the majority, but time is just too tight right now to ensure I could deliver something of the quality and consistency that the majority deserves.
Finally, on monetization
Lastly, making money from Monevator – something that’s even more my problem, not yours!
This thought was sparked by a discussion I had with some readers the other day who explained they never see the adverts on Monevator because they block them.
These were regular readers, and they expected me to be proud of their ingenuity and sticking-it-to-the-man smarts.
And sure, as a Web user I don’t like ads any more than anyone else.
However the reality is the ad blocking revolution is going mainstream [4], and it looks like it might soon start to threaten the business model of lots of web publishers, including this one.
Hence I must admit to being less than enthusiastic about the spread of ad blocking!
As things stand, I really do try to keep ads under control here on Monevator.
For instance we don’t do full-site ‘wraps’ or pop-ups, we don’t break up the articles with ad blocks at all (virtually everyone does this now) and we have NEVER sold advertising pretending to be content or text links or things of that sort, despite daily requests to do so.
That is where all the lucrative money is now with web advertising (and why half the sites you visit these days are slow, loud, annoying, and possibly compromised in terms of their editorial).
Anyway, I’ve always just assumed monetization would get sorted eventually, if we built a decent product.
Seven years in perhaps I should try harder to do so!
In an ideal world we’d directly charge you a few quid a year, perhaps via a Patreon [5]-style ‘pay what you can’ crowd-sourced solution. Then we could ditch ads altogether.
Even The Accumulator’s mythical book is an attempt to find a sustainable revenue stream, should he finish it before we’re both on the State pension.
(Please buy it, when it eventually comes out…)
If that doesn’t work we’ll just have to start a hedge fund! 😉
From the blogs
Making good use of the things that we find…
Passive investing
- Fees are guaranteed. Performance is not. – Ben Carlson [6]
- Is beating the market harder than ever? – Canadian Couch Potato [7]
- 3 reasons to cheer higher rates [US but relevant] – Rick Ferri [8]
- Is there a monkey running my index fund? – Vanguard [9]
- Portfolio charts tool [US but relevant] – Portfolio Charts [10] (via JB [11])
Active investing
- The one question long-term investors must ask – iii blog [12]
- There is usually something cheap to buy – The Value Perspective [13]
- Escaping from a value trap – UK Value Investor [14]
- Why emerging markets won’t crash – Behavioral Macro [15]
Other articles
- One man’s story of going off-grid – Mostly Harmless [16]
- Bond funds and rising rates – Kitces [17]
- It’s never a normal market – The Irrelevant Investor [18]
- There is no failure – The Escape Artist [19]
- £1 million: A goal to retire early – Retirement Investing Today [20]
- An attempt to pin $850 as fair value for gold [Research paper] – SSRN [21]
Product of the week: According to The Telegraph [22], the Welsh bank Julian Hodge [23] has just claimed table topping status with its five-year cash ISA, which pays 2.55%.
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.2 [24]
Passive investing
- UK index tracker price war heats up [Search result] – FT [25]
- An overview of fund-of-passive-fund options – Telegraph [26]
- Your strategy should fit on an index card [US, relevant] – ETF.com [27]
Active investing
- The liquidity risk of alternative investment [Search result] – FT [28]
- Why pension funds own real assets and infrastructure – II [29]
- Why TV media stocks are in meltdown… – LA Times [30]
- …but Disney and ESPN will be ok – Stratechery [31]
- Vine is a sleeping giant within Twitter – Quartz [32]
- 10 cheap-looking UK dividend payers – Telegraph [33]
- Contrarian lessons from the Queen’s banker – Marketwatch [34]
Other stuff worth reading
- What is your attention really worth? – NY Times [35]
- Confusing what just happened with what happens next – Bloomberg [36]
- The changing – aging – face of first-time buyers – ThisIsMoney [37]
- Jeremy Corbyn could have solutions to housing crisis – Guardian [38]
- Meanwhile, tougher penalties for rogue landlords – Guardian [39]
- Are Mint’s £100 silver coins a good investment? – ThisIsMoney [40]
- Earn £150,000+? Check out this pension tax perk – ThisIsMoney [41]
Book of the week: Passive investing guru Larry Swedroe is a North Star here at Monevator. If you read the Couch Potato interview above and like the sound of his latest book, The Incredible Shrinking Alpha [42]
Like these links? Subscribe [43] to get them every week!
- Incidentally if any of these people or others try to repeat the gist of their comments again below, I’ll just delete them again. I think we best agree to disagree on this particular subject, eh? 🙂 [↩ [47]]
- 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”. [↩ [48]]