Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Facebook Investor Peter Thiel Makes Thousand-fold Return

The fall in Facebook shares since the IPO isn't much of a worry for the earlier investors. Peter Thiel sells 80% of his Facebook shares for $400 million. He bought his stake in the company for $1/2 million. Another way to look at it is that he made a 137% p.a. return in the eight years since investing.

P.S. 22 August

Actually, he made more than a 2000-fold gain.

Friday, August 03, 2012

Bill Gross is Wrong

In this piece, Gross says that stocks have had a 6.6% real return historically and asks how that can continue if the GDP grows at only 3.5% per year.

The answer is simple - you get a dividend of 3% and the value of your stock goes up by 3.5% in real terms to reflect the growth of future dividends in line with the growth of the economy. If you don't pay any taxes and reinvest all your dividends, the value of your asset grows at 6.5% per year and you would own an increasing share of the stock market. But in the long-run no-one can do this. At least they haven't. Even endowments like Harvard spend some of their earnings all the time. The stock prices of companies that don't pay dividends but make normal profits would go up at 6.5% per year. Berkshire Hathaway is a company that hasn't paid dividends for more than 40 years and its stock price has gone up enormously. At some point the model of buying more and more companies will run out of steam. In fact, I expect that after Buffett dies the managers will end up breaking up the company.

Thursday, August 02, 2012

Moominvalley July 2012 Report

A whole month has gone by with no posts since the first day of the month... This seems to be the fate of a lot of personal finance blogs, eventually after a few years they die out. But I have been blogging on my professional blog quite a lot this month. I guess there isn't much nowadays that I feel like sharing with the rest of the world on personal finance. Things have been very busy at work and I have also had flu too.

Financially, things went well. We hit new net worth highs in both Australian and US Dollar terms of $A626k (+24k) and $US659k (+42k). As you can see the Australian Dollar is again rising.

Non-retirement assets are now substantially ahead of retirement accounts again. Our rate of return was 5.26% in USD terms versus 1.4% for the MSCI and S&P500, which is nice. Only 2.87% in Australian Dollar terms though. The monthly accounts look like this:

The monthly accounts show that we earned $14.5k in salaries etc. (this includes some reimbursements) and $3.3k in retirement contributions. We spent $6.3k but some of that was work related and will be reimbursed and so the core expenditure is $5.2k in line with recent behavior. Total investment returns were $32.4k but $14.7k of that was due to the rise in the Australian Dollar. All in, net worth rose $42.3k.

I have computed Snork Maiden's taxes for this year and it looks like she owes a little money. So I won't submit the return until October when I do mine. My taxes for the year are now in the region of $A42k. My tax reducing strategies are having little impact now given my large rise in income. I guess that is a good thing.

Also, after both our salaries went up my employer is contributing more than the $25k annual concessional limit to superannuation. This means that $500 of it will be taxed at the top marginal rate. There is no way to reduce this contribution. Snork Maiden is now just below the cap including her salary sacrifice contributions. In future, we will have to reduce those, assuming the super rules stay the way they are.