Credit crash revisited

While reading a great Piotr Kuczynski's blog, I have came across a link to a nice article explaining how the credit-backed investment instruments are being constructed, and why all of this will colapse ;)

The funniest (and scariest) part is that comparing CDO^2 with BSE...

As always, I'm wondering why such developments as sophisticated instruments (CDOs, CDSs, etc. in this case) were not available eariler. After all cell phones were theoretically possible almost one hundred years ago, but only developed with the presence of modern computers. The same applies to many other things like AJAX, Zopa, digital cameras...

OTOH this means that there is still hope for new companies and entrepreneurs like hopefully myself in the future.

Endgame

From time to time I'm taking a look on Bartosz Weglarczyk's blog and I must say it's really good, however the amount of posts overhelms my perception abilities ;)


One of nice things I've found there is Simpons' creative spot based on latetly popular spots: go here

Few interesting blogs

While reading wealth.pl I have came across a blog of it's President/CEO and I find it quite a good read, see here (in polish).

Also those linked from it look promising:
Janusz Jankowiak
Piotr Stasiak

Interlaken trip

Last Sunday, I went with four colleagues to Interlaken, and above, to the Grindelwald. The weather was not very pleasant, by anyway it was a very nice trip: see pictures

Save $400k for retirement

I just came across a decent column on how to save $400k for retirement, with doable sacrifices. 

Follow this link to learn how.

It's a good reading, and good to learn too that those rich americans can buy latest Honda Accord with just $21k. I love polish taxes...

Investments

As this blog is also about investing, I should file something in this area. Especially regarding my investments.

I strongly believe in investing in value, the approach described in "intelligent investor" written by Benjamin Graham, and I try to follow this approach. Therefore my current portfolio (diversified over few accounts, including IKE which allows to avoid capital-gain tax) looks approx. as follows:

27% BPHFIZSN - undervalued polish real-estate fund
14% stock fund
13% KGHM - high-yield copper mining company
11% deposit in WIG20 future (Long certainly :))
9% INVFIZ - investors.pl flagship semi-hedge fund (200% return in 2 years, a pity I wasn't here from the beginning :))
8% INVLBFIZ - new investors.pl fund specialized in LBOs
6% PPWK - publisher specializing in maps, recently hooked up with google
4% NET - small telecom from poland
2% PKN - oil company
2% PKM - IT company
1,5% polish cash fund
this is pretty much all I can recall, I hope it will give steady return, minimum 8% anually.
However I hope to have a better one, thanks to undervaluation of most of these papers. Also timing and asset reallocation gave me some return recently, and I hope to continue with
this approach in the future.

Recently I saw an ad of wealth solution's structured fund, based on alpha pairs sectors index. This gives a hope for decent (positive :)) returns during market downs and therefore seems a good diversification strategy. The other plus is capital protection and being free of capital-gain tax. The main disadvantage is liquidity (lack of it, actually) and 4-year investment period. But all in all this seems pretty attractive anyway.

First day with mac

Today, at a brand new job, I received my brand new MacBook Pro. Awaited this moment with both hope and fear, I must say I was pleasantly surprised.

As my history of using computers included only PCs (excluding C64 and Amiga 500 from the early days of mine), with Windows (before) or Linux (until recently), I have expected that first days on Mac are going to be hard.

Almost nothing like that happened. Excluding few things I was used to (FF way of browsing, double button mouse and hardware button for eject) the transition was really smooth. And I was amazed much more by the nice UI than I could have expected. 

Few ideas are really good, now two things that I miss most is right button of the touchpad and how to watch movies and avoid screen getting dark when lights are turned off :)

Most compelling ideas are dashboard, this how-to-name-it f9-f10-f11 things and Finder.

So I'm pretty sure that my relationship with mac will be good and will last quite a while. Unless of course Google releases it's own laptop ;)