2008 May | WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com

A Lap Of The Blogs

Posted by Preet on May 30, 2008 | 5 comments

Don’t forget to enter May’s Money Movie Giveaway – click here. From Around The Blogosphere The Canadian Capitalist asks if a membership at Costco makes sense. Four Pillars explains that free burgers don’t taste that great if you can’t get one. The Million Dollar Journey suggests a great savings strategy: ask for savings! Michael James on Money provides a great description on what exactly all the hub-bub is regarding BCE. Canadian Dream: Free at 45 is saving quite a bit of money by cutting his own hair. This Week’s Racing Video Martin Brundle (ex-F1 driver and now a commentator) provides a very top level view on oversteer...

Breakfast with Dr. Jeremy Siegel Part 2

Posted by Preet on May 29, 2008 | 0 comments

Don’t forget to enter May’s Money Movie Giveaway – click here. Some other highlights from the breakfast presentation with Dr. Siegel: From 1957 to 2006 the S&P 500 index returned 10.83% If you had just kept the original 500 stocks, instead of tracking the index as it changed over time, you would have returned 11.72% (not even factoring tax effects) If you separated the 500 stocks into quintiles, the S&P 100 (top quintile based on yield) would have returned 13.80%, with a Beta of 0.94 His findings regarding the top yielding stocks may be partly responsible for his involvement with Wisdom Tree Investments (which specialize in ETFs that are not...

Breakfast with Dr. Jeremy Siegel Part 1

Posted by Preet on May 28, 2008 | 3 comments

As I mentioned, I was lucky enough to attend a private breakfast presentation from Dr. Jeremy Siegel over the weekend and he shared with us some of his research on the capital markets and personal finance. Here are some of the highlights: If you had taken US$1 and invested it into the following assets in 1802, by the end of 2007 they would have grown to: US Stocks: $766,854 Bonds: $1,320 T-Bills: $302 Gold: $2.45 The US Dollar: $0.06 The return on stocks represents a real return of 6.8% (real return means ‘after accounting for inflation’) over this 200+ year period. The real return on gold has been 0.1% annualized over this time – this even accounts...

May Money Movie Giveaway Contest Is On!

Posted by Preet on May 26, 2008 | 31 comments

It’s time for Round 3 of the Money Movie Giveaway on WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com! All you have to do is enter a comment on this post for a free entry! Boiler Room and Glengarry Glen Ross have been chosen by the previous winner’s so this month’s winner can choose from the following: 1. Wall Street 2. Boiler Room 3. Casino 4. Trading Places 5. Glengarry Glen Ross 6. Ocean’s Eleven (The original from 1960) To enter this month’s contest, you just have to leave a comment on this post before midnight, May 31st, 2008. The contest is open to everyone, but for delivery locations outside of Canada, the recipient is responsbile for shipping charges....

Jeremy Siegel, Rex Murphy and Frugal Trader – All in one weekend!

Posted by Preet on May 26, 2008 | 3 comments

I had a great adventure in St. John’s, Newfoundland this weekend. What a beautiful backdrop to have a conference in – the countryside is gorgeous, and the people are just so welcoming and friendly. The conference was for stockbrokers and financial planners from my firm and we had the pleasure of hearing numerous speakers – two of which really stuck out: Dr. Jeremy Siegel (author of Stocks For The Long Run) and Rex Murphy (CBC personality). I won’t go into too much detail right now about Dr. Siegel’s talk since I plan on slowly disseminating the material of the presentation over the week. I will tell you it was the most informative...

A Lap Of The Blogs

Posted by Preet on May 23, 2008 | 2 comments

What’s Going On With Me I’ve been working on a number of different projects lately, one of which is planning the careful migration of this blog to a wordpress format. It’s taking some time, and in order to maintain my search engine ranking I will have to manually edit the URLs in the new MySQL database for a seamless transition (and to maintain valid destinations for inbound links). (I think.) So hopefully you will bare with me as the posting frequency may go down until the launch of the new site which should be in mid-June. I think the site has gotten a bit ugly, and I’m looking to take it up a notch in presentation. Thanks for your patience!...

Calculate Your Own Portfolio's Standard Deviation

Posted by Preet on May 22, 2008 | 3 comments

You may know if your portfolio’s average returns are better or worse than your benchmark or other comparison portfolio, but how can you compare the risk? One way to get a better picture would be to compare standard deviations. While the standard deviations of benchmarks and individual mutual funds are easily available, no one provides you with the standard deviation of your own portfolio – so here is an easy method to do just that. (Actually an even easier method is at the end of this post.) 1. The first thing to do is list your calendar year returns, for example: 2000: 8% 2001: -6% 2002: -12% 2003: 3% 2004: 15% 2005: 17% 2006: 17% 2007: 6% 2. Now,...