Not just links this time
I went to a lecture on investing on Saturday, put on by the Nikkei Shimbun for subscribers. While it was much better than the last one I went to, I wasn’t too impressed this time either.
The gist of it was how to use data (such as that provided by the Nikkei, natch) to choose companies to invest in. The lecturer again boasted about how he does 400 classes a year teaching people about investing. The talk was peppered with acronyms and references that the attendees clearly didn’t understand, seemingly to make the presenter seem more like an expert. The audience was 90% male and 90% of retirement age. The questions people were asking at the end (how to open broker accounts, or how to invest when they didn’t have 50,000 yen to make a minimum trade) showed a bit of a mismatch between the content and the needs of the participants.
I’m always very skeptical of people who claim to be great at something and then spend their whole time running around trying to get people to pay them to teach about it. I kind of doubt Warren Buffett runs around teaching 400 classes a year.
The kind of active investing showcased in this lecture makes for a good story (there was a definite push to upsell people to the ‘investment school’ the speaker works at), but I’m not convinced it’s a good fit for most people, who should arguably just buy 2-3 index funds instead.
Once again I wasted my time so you don’t have to 😉
Here are this week’s links:
- A droll millionaire interview.
- Seems safer than I thought: Safe Withdrawal Rate for Early Retirees.
- What’s going on with bonds? Checking in on Bond Market Losses.
- I knew the anecdote, nice to get the full story: WHAT HARRY MARKOWITZ MEANT.
- This seems familiar: INVESTING EXPERTS URGE ‘DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO’.
- Will we choose win-win or lose-lose. My money is on the latter: What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like.
- Looking good, MrFreeat33: DIVIDEND INCOME UPDATE FOR SEPTEMBER 2018.
- Given the global situation, this is incredible: Japan continues to rely on coal-fired plants despite global criticism.
- They’re not the right kind of tourists, you see: Japan is struggling to deal with the foreign tourism boom.
- A former English teacher in China doing well.
- Some interesting background: What is a Security Token? A Comprehensive Guide to How They Work and Their Impact.
- The lower your fixed expenses, the tougher you are: Taking Inventory.
- My time horizon is at least 30 years, my endurance? Not so sure: Time Horizon vs. Endurance.
- Why does the stock market go down? Big Down Days.
- Were you happy or sad to see the market fall last week? Who Benefits From a Market Correction?
- Will your money last long enough? How Much Money Will You Take to Your Grave?
- I need to reprogram my brain so it enjoys doing pushups: Brain Training.
- The end of private car ownership? Why you have (probably) already bought your last car.
- Looks like it might happen this time: Gov’t to announce 2019 sales tax hike to address debt mountain: reports.
What do you think? Anything good in there? I was struck by #6 and #8, particularly the jarring disconnect between them. More about that on Thursday.
And here are some books I am reading/have read/plan to read soon:
- Death’s End (book three in the Chinese SF trilogy I’ve been reading) -Finally finished this. I really enjoyed this trilogy and it left some really big concepts in my head. To be honest, I enjoyed the first book the most, as the second and third ones went in quite a different direction. Still, some of the freshest and most original SF I have read for a while.
- The Girl in the Spider’s Web (sequel to the Millenium trilogy by a different author) -Was very disappointed by this. Loved the originals, but this is just a generic ripoff with none of the flavour of the original. The writing is pretty pedestrian too. Can’t recommend.
- The Martial Apprentice (autobiography by Roy Dean, a jiu-jitsu instructor I like). So far so good, if you are into martial arts 🙂
Yeah i agree about the millennium trilogy- it was a total rip off. Loved the chinese SF trilogy finished it myself earlier this year – wasn’t my usual read TBH – if you are looking for something else you should check out the netflix altered carbon tv series – based on books but the tv show is brilliant
Heard good things about Altered Carbon. Was considering checking the books out (I prefer reading to watching if possible).
As a retiree, I was of course interested in #2 and #16. I’m sure I’ve seen 16 or something like it before, but some things deserve repeated attention.
In #10, while it looks like there’s a great life ahead for that family, I’m personally not comfortable including a personal house or condo in a picture of overall net worth, especially if it represented a major portion of it. Maybe I’ve lived too long in Japan, where housing generally depreciates (I wonder what 修繕積立金 and 管理費 cost in China). A personal residence seems more like a necessity than an investment, at least from my POV.
Yeah, I don’t include our manshon in our net worth figures. It’s more a way for us to save on rent 🙂
I also don’t think of my house in that calculation but I guess if someone lives in California (where home equity seems to be 90%+ of net worth and people eventually move somewhere else) it may make sense. On the retirement withdrawal rate question, the problem with all of the studies is they cannot account for people adjusting their withdrawal rates mid-retirement based on how their assets have performed. It also seemed like the link did not account for how the 4% rule includes increased withdrawal amounts each year based on inflation. Bengen invented the 4% rule before the Trinity study and one of the risks he was most concerned about was inflation early in retirement (something we never see here in Japan).
It’s a long way off, but I am considering a 5% withdrawal rate (with no inflation adjustments). I’ll pull that amount out and keep it in a cash reserve account that should be higher than my expenses/needs. Plan probably needs a little work, but it seems fairly easy to implement.
Your experience with the seminar is typical of what I’ve seen. I don’t know why we see so little substance in financial advice in Japan and the people who give these seminars usually strike me as the last person I would turn to for investment advice. Why is the quality of financial advice here so consistently poor?
I know, eh? The thing is, there are people that give good advice (like Minako Takekawa, or Hajime Yamazaki), but these guys running around doing these ‘free’ seminars are sadly not doing so.
I guess there is more of a market for the ‘teach me how to make money’ as opposed to ‘anyone can make money using these simple principles + patience’. Sad.
What figures do you recommend to include in net worth?
I just put my liquid assets in: investments + cash. I don’t include expected pensions, or the resell value of my manshon, or cars, etc.
Also don’t include the possible sale value of my wife’s school, as that would be dependent on us successfully finding a buyer, etc.
So it’s a very conservative figure, but it should be reliable.
Japan seems to be building its renewal energy infrastructure, with medium-sized solar power installations popping up all over the place here in rural areas. If they want to get off coal in the short-term, though, they’re going to have to restart their nuclear power plants. The visceral reaction to nuclear is really hurting the environment.
I’m disappointed by how much say the power companies seem to have in terms of refusing to allow third-party renewables on the grid (which they control). I think renationalizing the grid would be a big step towards a better energy policy.