Unlike most money bloggers, I’ve not talked much about the blog’s progress with you. I’ve reasoned you’re here for thoughts on personal finance and investing, not for updates on my tiny media empire.
On the other hand:
- It’s January, a time for New Year plans
- I want to keep regular readers in the loop
- Monevator is finally getting some traction
- Some of those other bloggers have many more readers than me, so they must be doing something right!
So here’s a run through how the blog is going, and what to look out for in 2010.
Monevator: Where are we now?
Monevator is now over two years old, although it was only in mid-2008 that I really committed to regular posting. It remains a rare UK-based money and investing blog.
Everyone with an opinion about the stock market was confounded in 2009 – even those of us who thought shares were cheap in March covered our backs with long-term caveats.
Nobody predicted markets would bounce back 50% by December, proving again the adage that stock markets always do what will surprise the most people.
Every January, millions of people take out annual membership of gyms they’ll rarely visit, hoping to achieve a svelte version of themselves that in reality they’ll never see again.
Great for the gym industry, which gets its money without having to mop up the missing customer’s sweat, but not so good for the hopeful tubbies, who get fatter, unhealthier, and poorer, too.
I have a dear friend who, being a doctor, knew better than most he needed to lose weight, but who visited the City gym he’d joined no more than half a dozen times a year.
My friend could have had a cheap day away in Paris for the price of day’s attendance at his gym at that rate! Worse, he kept this membership rolling for nearly a decade.
My friend is psychologist, so he really should have known better. But like most of us, he’s better at seeing the problems in other people than himself. He didn’t appreciate he was buying off his good intentions with his gym membership, making it less likely he’d lose weight by joining the gym than if he’d never signed up at all.
Some people love gyms: The shine of well-buffed biceps, the smell of sticky Lycra, the possibility of an illicit affair that starts with a mutual dash for the one spinning machine.
I hate gyms, and only visit the ones in high-end hotels when the alternative is work. And yet here I am, the same weight I was two decades ago when I was still at university and being regularly asked for ‘my secret’ to staying thin.
Since I’ve got a blog, I’ve no excuse not to share my thoughts with my dear but differently weighted readers. Read on, and you’ll never have an excuse again.
Today the FTSE 100 touched the level it was at before Lehman Brothers collapsed in October 2008, the markets tanked, and we all checked our cupboards for cans of baked beans.
But more interesting is that of the major developed markets, the UK has risen the most since then. The U.S. and the Japanese markets are still more than 10% below their pre-Lehman crash levels.
A pretty good predictor of strong stock market returns is the US Treasury yield curve. And right now this signal is bleeping a strong ‘buy’ signal, if you’re not too scared of bear markets to listen.
A yield curve plots the interest rates (yields) on short, medium and long-term interest rates over a particular time period.
With government bonds, the yield curve typically charts the yields on very short-term securities that will mature in a matter of months, through medium term bonds, up to 30-year long bonds.
Due to the time value of money, longer-term bonds normally pay higher interest rates than short maturities, so the curve usually (but not always!) slopes gently upwards as you go further out in time.
Sometimes, however, the yield curve steepens.
