North America for suitable tracker fund as Dow rises
gains, from keeping an eye on charges and performance to making sure you’re not exposed to more risk than you’re comfortable with.
“When money is tight, people tend to watch their expenses more closely than when they are feeling flush. In the same way, some investors can neglect to monitor their fees and transaction costs when markets are rising,” said Glassey.
“Letting expenses slip is like trying to fill a bath with the plug out.” against getting in at the top of the bull-run. So where is the top?
The club’s paper and pencil (pap) analysis sees the FTSE climbing to about 6,625 points, where it should start to find some resistance to any further advances without some consolidation. It came to rest at 6,430 at the close of April giving it only 195 more points before it starts hitting resistance. But it is America which is the dominant market that sinks or floats the others. Currently, pap analysis has the Dow reaching a ceiling at around the 16,000 point mark. At the end of April it was sitting vestments with the purchase of a tracker fund and trying a different angle on the traditional buy-low/ sell-high strategy to a buy-high/ sell-much-higher one.
This we still intend to implement in the month ahead if we come up with suitable candidates to fill the roles. The club will not need to sell any shares to make the new investments because we have a small cash pile of about £10,000 that’s doing nothing but giving some stability to our portfolio. However, the recent bull run in shares is getting quite long in the tooth and the club must militate at 14,840, giving us points to play with.
The pound, after hitting a low of $1.49051 on 12 March, 2013, had climbed back up to $1.5536 at the end of last month. It should, however, end its run up at $1.5589, the half-retrace mark to the previous fall, this should initiate another decline.
Therefore, the club is going to try to find a suitable North American tracker fund where we should get the benefit of a rising Dow Jones with a falling £/$ rate. Let us hope we do not select another FastDebt share in May.
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I’M AN economist, or at least I was before giving up the day job. We economists like to think we are pretty smart, which is a bit of a stretch given our well-deserved reputation for forecasting what is not actually going to happen.
But there is one skill at which we excel – coming up with complex and utterly splendid explanations for why things did not pan out as promised. This is important; turn up to present to an audience for a second time and they’ll display a sneaky tendency to remember what you said before, often rather better than you do. So being nimble-footed is an essential part of the kit.
If an audience can hold you to account for something you said maybe a year before, how much more daunting it is to be appearing on people’s radar much more frequently. Thanks to quite extraordinary editorial generosity I’ve been popping up in this spot every four weeks since what seems like
“First quarter growth of 0.3 per cent was pretty dismal but justified the bubbly”
the beginning of time. And in a constant triumph of hope over experience I’ve chattered away about the future, setting out consolingly plausible forecasts for almost anything that moves, in an economic sense, that is. Inevitably I’ve got a lot of it wrong – or I would have done had I not sniffed the wind and adjusted the view.
And actually that is the whole point. Economics may be known as the dismal science, but so far as I am concerned it is more of an art – an art form that relies on a solid scientific base in order to function but which is ultimately an expression of judgment amidst extreme uncertainty. When the soon to be retired Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King peppers his forecasts with caveats about uncertainty and the probabilities of error he is not being a wimp or hedging his bets. He is telling the truth. l Peter Bickley is aconsultant economist