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Comments relating to the new blog post How to lose money in the stock market.

What? They should be putting their money where their goddamn mouth is.”

That was the response from one well known but irate US investor when I told him that fund industry professionals appear to be touting the advantages of active management as part of their day job, while investing their personal assets in low-cost passive funds.

Indeed, a poll by Ignites, an FTfm sister publication, of 1,001 fund staff – many of whom make their living promoting active products – reveals that two-thirds have a sizeable amount of their personal savings in passive funds. This includes 45 per cent who say they have a “significant” portion in passive products. Only one in five say they avoid passive funds altogether.

The findings should not be surprising, given that three-quarters of active managers never actually beat the market – a statistic those in the fund business know all too well. It does, however, leave a bitter taste in the mouth.

Here's the full article: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/23eba484-dffe-11e2-9de6-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2b4hXwcTq

It sucks being popular. Everyone gets jealous and nasty...

In case the rest of you were wondering what went on yesterday afternoon and evening, my server was under a DDOS attack. That's distributed denial of service in non-techie speak.

What it looks like is that someone was jealous that my main site was taking business away from theirs. Attack came from inside South Africa too, nice guys. Kept me up for a few hours. It doesn't look like this site was the target, just unfortunate collateral damage. The target it seems was my main site, a local (uhuhm should I let the cat out of the bag...) dating site 

Anyway, it appeared to stop just after midnight, so I'm really hoping things will be more normal today.

If you are wondering about the huge jump up and then back down the leaderboard today, it's due to the fact that Central Rand Gold changed the way they value each share. The change in every day english, is that for every 50 shares you had, you now have 1.

If you had them in your portfolio you'll see the change. Hope you enjoyed the day waaaay on top of the leaderboard, and did some good bragging for a while too 

Here's the SENS announcement:

(b) in relation to the register of members of the Company maintained in South Africa:
(i)
49 of every 50 Ordinary Shares held by a member as at 5.00 p.m. (South African time) on Friday, 14 June 2013 shall each be redesignated as Deferred Shares;
(ii)
any Ordinary Shares held by a member who, as at 5.00 p.m. (South African time) on Friday, 14 June 2013, holds less than 50 Ordinary Shares shall each be redesignated as Deferred
Shares; and
(iii)
any additional Ordinary Shares held by a member following the redesignation in sub-paragraph (b)(i) above shall each be redesignated as Deferred Shares.

This is a guy on the e-bike forum. He works for zero motorcycles, and at one point decided to use an electric motorcycle motor on a bicycle. Then he upped the amps a fair amount. Love the warning just before he goes "And you know the bike is dangerous"...:

I was looking for a compound interest calculator that would let me do two things. 1) Let me email the numbers around, and 2) show me the value of my future investment in today's money.

Well after quite some searching I couldn't find one so had to make my own. Here's some example figures I'm using to show a collegue how much money she'd have after 20 years if she gave up smoking and DSTV, and invested the savings on the JSE:
http://www.investorchallenge.co.za/calc_compound.php?initial_deposit=0&monthly_deposit=1225&yield=17&years=20&inflation=6

Hope you find it useful 

I know the traders do it all the time, but what are the thoughts on gearing your investments? My access bond has funds available at under prime, I've been considering for some time putting into either an ETF or just adding it to my unit trust account.

Obviously the risk here is that the market takes a dive, and at the current levels I think it's too expensive to consider this. Perhaps I'd be better off holding into it, and in the even of a big correction i could use it to double down.

If only this was real. Interestingly, the bank would be well near the top of the leaderboard. Take a look below, I've got an up to the minute total of all the fees collected, what a business to be in, pure profit!