Wednesday 1 January 2014

Happy New Year

New Year in Sweden


Happy new year everyone! I wish you all the best for the coming year both investment wise as well as for you privately!

For the last ten years or so I have not bought any fireworks for New Years Eve. As a kid I loved it and I must admit that I bought a lot and I did indeed have a lot of fun with it. Today I look upon it as one of the purest forms of money waste. You light it, if your lucky it goes off and blows up like it should. All in all it takes maybe 15 seconds from lighting it to that it blows up. Those 15 seconds of excitement can cost anything from one euro up to easily 50 euros and more. Calculate the hour rate on it and I am sure that you will not buy a single firework again.

I can honestly say that I will never ever buy fireworks again and I also think one can kind of look at the financial situation of a country by observing how much fireworks have been bought. Everyone knows how useless it is and yet when people are financially well off they just have to have one to fire.

Did you buy much/any fireworks this time?

3 comments:

Chris Bailey said...

Happy New Year. I agree on fireworks: money 'up in smoke'. Here's the irony, the Chinese developed fireworks but now have high savings rates and growing economic power. The overspending malaise captured by firework consumption goes much deeper in the West.

Good luck with your investments in 2014, i look forward to reading about your progress. I believe this year will offer strong opportunities to beat indices, even the rampant DAX!

Fredrik von Oberhausen said...

Happy New Year Chris! That is indeed an irony of it but from my understanding the young Chinese are consuming like crazy so maybe it starts to change also in China.

Thanks! I also hope I will manage to beat DAX but I doubt it. The unrealised loss on Asian Bamboo is just too large to catch up unless it recovers.

Good luck to you too with your blog and your investments!

Chris Bailey said...

2014 is a new year and as your experience accrues, treat each discrete period (a quarter, half-year, full-year as you prefer) as a stepping stone indicator. A good investor has a 'batting average' of 6 out of 10, so out-performance cannot be expected in every period, but over time this can lead to strong index-beating results. Psychologically move yourself on from AB (i know you still have a retained position)having learnt some very useful lessons. My observation is that your chances of beating indices like the DAX in 2014 looks very good indeed.

Good luck with everything, continuing to enjoy your postings.