Steve Hemingway

Oh no, I've trashed my own blog

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:35:05 +0000

I seem to have destroyed my website. I have never really got to grips with Movable Type and now I'm paying the price. I was desperate to remove some custom links from my templates, and so hacked here there an everywhere in attempts to do this. Mainly I have switched to a different style with a view of picking up default main and other templates. Something has gone wrong and I'm lacking stylesheet info or similar which would create the proper set of columns.

This is all something to do with the fact that I've installed MT to be the 'root' directory of my website (i.e. if you just type the bare domain name, you'll get MT pages). I set it up five years ago and now I really can't remember how it works. Or be bothered to search through the web to find out again.

So for the time being you'll have to put up with this pants formatting. Some time eventually I'll sort it out. If you are a MT expert I'd love to hear from you. TBH I think I'd be better off these days with something like Blogger. It's not as though I post frequently or, arguably, interestingly.

Advertising on the Interweb Thingy

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:06:06 +0000

Like most people of my age, I don't really get Facebook. I can see that it's an interesting exercise to get nearly everyone with an internet connection to post their contact details in one place, and to add a bit of photo sharing and messaging to go with it. But can this be worth fifty billion US dollars of anybodies money? Most of us will have never handed over a bean to Mark Zuckerberg, who must by now be employing a lot of bodies and hardware not to mention bandwidth.

I however did get a tiny insight into why it could be valuable. In my last post I talked about setting up an investment club. I decided, just as an experiment, to advertise this fact to anyone within 40km of where I live, via Facebook. I thought to myself 'What would Larry Page do?' and googled for 'advertise on Facebook', and landed here. I logged into my regular FB account (none of the complexity of setting up an advertising account as required by Microsoft or Yahoo). I filled in a few basic questions, mainly just the page I wanted the ad to go to. FB did the rest, practically writing the copy by scanning the destination page.

I then was able to target. This is what, in my view, makes FB a killer app. I could specify location (easy enough: 40km around Stevenage, my nearest town), age (no minors), and people who had specified in their profiles that they were already interested in investing. This market is a few hundred people.

I then specified how much I was willing to spend: no more than 50p a click, and a couple of quid a day, and I was done, bar selecting a random (free) image to adorn the ad. Start to finish ten minutes, max. My ad was approved with a half an hour - it is remotely possible that a human was involved in this part of the process, but I doubt it.

Now I will simply sit back and wait for the emails. I need to attract one or two percent of the market to have a viable number to form a club. The advertising will cost me a few pounds. I will report here if it works. It may be that 50p is too low a bid to get my ad displayed: unfortunately well-heeled brokers and IFAs are completing with me for the target market, which is the downside.

I will report back. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, but my initial reaction is: don't short FB yet (not that you could anyway, because it's still a privately-held company!).

Investment Clubs

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 12:32:51 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

I decided as a sort of new-year resolution that I'd join an investment club. I know a few people who trade shares and other securities but I do not belong to any organisation dedicated to securities investing. I am a member of a few groups that discuss (real) property investment, but usually the propery people do not have an interest in or experience of stock (or bond, futures, options, FX, contract for difference etc. etc.) market investments.

I know a bit about this topic, but I'm always interested in hearing other's opinions on this, not least because the a pure rational approach to investing is not a sure-fire way to riches, as I know to my own cost.

Investing in the UK is very frustrating. The whole industry is regulation-driven model, with investors directed into collective investments with high fees and poor performance. Individual investors are t

Image via Wikipedia

errified of investing directly in the stockmarket even though all the evidence suggests that they are likely to do just as well as highly-paid fund managers, even if they choose stocks at random.

Proshares used to offer some support for investment clubs but, as you will see from their own bulletin board, their service is practically moribund. Time To Trade has a better-looking website, but as you will see from their Herts Directory they don't exactly have a lot of clubs listed.

I have been contacted by someone in Herts who is interested in setting up a club. I'll probably post a few things on Facebook, but if you are interested in joining a club to discuss investing then get in touch. I'm not convinced about setting up an actual legal entity which will do investing, as it seems to me that unless we get a lot of interest (and a lot of capital to invest) the hassles with accounting and tax statements will exceed the benefit of simply discussing market trends, etc. and investing in our own portfolios.

There are some wonderful sites out there for tracking investments. I just signed up to Wikinvest. I'm not sure how well this copes with UK-listed stocks but it does a brilliant job with US listed equities.

If you live within easy reach of the Stevenage area, and would be interested in joining a club to meet, say, once a month, please drop me a line to steve.hemingway@gmail.com.

I have created a Facebook group for this group. If you are on FB then please think about joining. You can see the group here. I don't plan to actually run the group on Facebook, unless everyone who joins also is on Facebook. If this turns out to be the case, this will probably be the easiest way of arranging things.

Line Dancing

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 23:32:25 +0000

Malcolm Sergeant reputedly stated that he would try anything once with the exceptions of incest and Morris Dancing. I have not personally been tempted by either, but I have just had my first experience of line dancing, or Scottish dancing, or at least something with a distant relationship to dancing at a Burns Night Supper which took place in the last few hours in Knebworth Village Hall.

I have to say that I enjoyed it somewhat more than I was expecting. You probably think that this is like saying that it was more enjoyable than root canal work, but actually I was vaguely curious to know what it would involve and was quite willing to have a go when I got the signal that we should join in. The wine was good too.

We had a go at classics such as the Gay Gordons, Stipping the Willow and Dashing White Sergeants; names coined in a more innocent age. It helped that we had a charismatic caller in the form of the leader of Harry's Band, a rollicking authentically Scottish 5- (6-?) piece band, with guitars drums and accordian. I'd love to give them a plug in the form of a link, but I can't find them. They must be doing something right because the front-man mentioned that they'd taken a booking for 2013 at this very event.

The local MP was present, both in the hall and on the dance floor. He appeared to be a fully-signed up member of the human race, which is quite something.

This evening was a first in another respect: I ate haggis for the first time. Maybe I missed something, but I don't think I'll be eating it again for another year.

Google Sites

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:27:39 +0000

I've always been terribly impressed by Google software. It seems pretty bizarre that they are being investigated by the EU competition authorities. This article from the Daily Mash sums up my feelings about the investigation.

Image via CrunchBase

I used Google Sites to create the Knebworth Parish Council Website (warning: if you click this too soon you may not be able to access the site since it is currently under review by the Members). I have a little experience with gsites, but not much - just a couple of one-page sites - and I found it a joy to use. The layout and formatting is very good, with user-defined templates, lots of gadgets, and a very user-friendly rich text editor.

There are lots of themes that can be applied with a single mouse-click to the site, to the extent that the separation of form and content is unparalleled. Being able to embed Google Calendar (and many other Google Apps document types) into a page is excellent. And best of all the hosting is entirely free, not even 'ad-supported'. Possibly the only downside is that the site can't be accessed in China as the Great Firewall blocks all sites hosted by Google.

In many ways G Sites is better than Moveable Type - the blogging system I am using to create this. Certainly the image handling is better. And this is definitely not free. As the Daily Mash says: "Google admitted that it failed to stop its search engine being much better than all the other ones and that it probably should have done more to give its competitors as much free advertising as they wanted," increasingly this goes for non-search products too.

A Ponzi Scheme Bigger than Madoff Could Have Imagined

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:39:20 +0000

Infographic by Mortgage Rates

Read this and weep.

Sync Google Calendar with Nokia 6700 Classic Mobile Phone

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:50:50 +0000

I am a great fan of all Google stuff. I've been using Google Mail since 2005, and I also use Google Calendar, Google Sites, Google Apps, etc. etc.

The most useful of these are undoubtedly Google Mail and Google Calendar. These are models of how web applications should be written. Google Mail was the first serious application written in Javascript, and shows what fantastic results can be produced using a fairly simple programming language. The combination of this with astonishing fault tolerance and redundancy in their server infrastructure is, to my mind, unbeatable

Image by HRC via Flickr

.

I keep changing my phone, as lots of you will be aware. I have had smart phones since 2006, starting with the Motorola A1200 Ming, a lovely phone running Linux that insanely Motorola failed to launch outside of China. I upgraded to Android as soon as it came out, but kept dropping and otherwise destroying the hardware, and decided, via a very disappointing S60 phone (the Sony-Ericsson P1i) to go back to basics, with a Nokia 6700 Classic. This runs System 40, a basic Nokia operating system, and is just a phone. With the mental branding that phone companies seem to be addicted to, there is another Nokia 6700 phone, the slide version, that runs a completely different OS, the S60, which I think is basically the latest Symbian OS.

Image via CrunchBase

The confusion of branding makes it very difficult to work out how to do stuff with the phone on the web, especially the Classic, which is, I assume, not the choice of geeks who want to share their syncing secrets with the Web. However, Google apps integrate with mobile devices pretty well. The guys at Mountain View understand that the computer of the future will be a phone. The mail works straight out of the box - Nokia support gmail natively. The contacts can be synced with gmail pretty easily using the well-established SyncML product. This is pretty easy to set up too, although I've had a bit of practice. This is pretty close to what you'd need to do for the 6700 Classic. Generally when in doubt use the instructions for the 6300, which is the predecessor phone.

Getting the calendar to sync is an altogether more difficult challenge. There are a number of commercial solutions - GooSync seems to be well regarded. But I have an aversion to paying for something on the web. I think it's because lots of software of this ilk don't work in all cases and I don't want to pay money up front for something that has a significant chance of not working. I came across syncme , which does actually work a treat. The setup instructions are pretty good, but it took me a day to find where to actually initiate a sync. For the record you go:
Settings->Sync and Backup -> Data Transfer -> Server Sync . When you get to the last menu you should (if you followed the setup instructions correctly) be asked 'Synchr

Image via CrunchBase

onise data with Person Config. Syncme? Calendar.' What completely threw me was that sync for contacts is under contacts. It is possible to have two sync. server settings. You do this under Settings -> Configuration -> Personal Accounts -> Options-> Add New.

Anyway, I am a great fan of Syncme. Congratulations to the smart and generous people at lorenc consulting.

Where is the dollar going?

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 09:33:50 +0000

There are a lot of good articles in the FT. I find that the most interesting ideas are often from experts invited to give their views in the 'View of the Day' column on the inside back page.

A subject which I have a great interest in is the US dollar rate. The dollar has been falling for a good long time. Nobody really knows why this is. It is possible that the reason is that the world believes that it would suit the US government to inflate its way out of paying off its huge debts to the rest of the world. It is a huge advantage to be able to borrow in your own currency from foreign borrowers. It is certainly the case that Tim Geithner loses no opportunity to tell the Chinese that they should allow the dollar to fall against the yuan.

So, this suggests that the dollar is overvalued and will fall. This is certainly the view of Tadashi Nakamae who points out that over the last 15 years inflation in the US has amounted to 43% whereas in Japan it has been practically zero and yet the FX rate has remained roughly constant. This makes Japanese retail goods much cheaper in the US and suggests that the Yen is seriously undervalued, and that, by implication, it is overdue for strong appreciation against the dollar. Given that the US Fed is unlikely to intervene to stop such appreciation, since a lower dollar will help US exporters, this seems a 'no brainer' argument in favour of going long-dollar, short yen.

Unfortunately then I read this view by Dharval Joshi. It does not address the issue of the yen specifically, but is forward looking and examines the money supply in the US. It points out that the creation of broad money, and therefore inflation, is overwhelmingly driven by total mortgage lending, which has fallen off a cliff and is likely to keep falling, with the result that inflation is likely to remain extremely low, which will support the dollar.

So, two experts put forward two arguments about the future of the dollar which are both convincing but predict opposite movements. Maybe the outcome will be another fifteen years of low relative movement! Another conclusion to reach is that it's unwise to commit your life savings to speculation in the currency markets.

Turkeys, Christmas

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 11:51:35 +0000

It's now time to think about ordering your turkeys for Christmas. We like turkey, but not that much, and we like to get a small bird. Any delay and we find that there are no small birds available to order.

For the last year or two we've bought ours from Home Farm, Bedford Road, Ickleford, which is linked by family to The Homestead, Clothall, Road, Baldock. Various members of the Crosse family rear these birds. If you are local to Hitchin or Baldock, it is very convenient to go to the farm to pick up the oven-ready bird in the last couple of days before Christmas.

Small free-range birds are selling now at £7.19 a kg. I don't know how this price varies, so do not complain if the price has gone up by the time you order.

They have a website here with all the contact details you could wish for. I just rang 01462 712229. I can confirm that the turkey we had last year was delicious, although of course that might be entirely due to the brilliance of the cook.

Property Investor Show, Excel Centre, 14-16 Oct

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 20:06:56 +0000

I spent a day at the Property Investor Show today. I have been to a few property shows, but I think that this is the first time I've been to this one.

The range of investments seemed pretty big to me, although some old hands said that the show is a shadow of its former self. The buzzword of she show seemed to 'SIPPable'. Everyone wants to offer investors assets that they can hold in their Self-Invested Personal Pension. The tax man seems determined to prevent people putting residential property into their tax-sheltered savings, so this is one that will run and run.

The overseas investment destinations ranged all over the world, but nobody was offering Greater China. Egypt was very visible, also Brazil and, in the form of distressed opportunities, the USA and Spain, but all overseas promotions together were outnumbered by people offering investments in the UK.

Of the UK opportunities the biggest, numerically, were the 'Below Market Value' investments. Essentially these are all the same: distressed assets, sold at a heavy discount with a large amount of debt financing. The usual plan is to get the lender to lend based on the 'Market Value', which is some theoretical number provided by a tame Valuer. This modus operandi seems much more believable now that a lot of borrowers are in trouble, and a number of corporate investors are exiting the sector, and I think that there is some value to be had. The most impressive on the day was an outfit called Property Investment Portfolio, although there was a lot of competition.

Image via Wikipedia

One firm has packaged BMV deals into a kind of fund. The idea sounds alright, but the rubric on the website, e.g. "The Fund aims to deliver a minimum return of over 100% which will more than double the shareholders investment over the life of the Fund" suggests that they are not targeting the sophisticated investor. I should mention the Rapid Property Group on the basis that they had, working on their stand, a happy investor who had been with them for a number of years.

There were a number of general purpose IFAs exhibiting, not particularly offering property, of which I was impressed by TailorMade and Abraham Associates. I was underwhelmed by St James Place however.

There were lots of people selling other services which I personally not very interested in. The most impressive of which was Hotel Solutions. If you ever want to start a hotel they are the guys to contact!

Embedding maps in blog entries

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 21:18:49 +0000

View Stuff in Cardiff in a larger map

I'm really not quite sure why this has always seemed to be such a problem. If one goes to 'My Maps' in Google Maps (probably the link is only there if one is logged into Google Services) then one can create a new map, complete with markers and routes, and pick up an iframe link to embed in a blog entry, much as you can see above.

I have been on a few enjoyable walks around Hertfordshire recently, and made a record of them on my new GPS enabled phone. Expect them to appear here fairly soon.

Why new bank regulation will fail

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:05:28 +0000

David Benson, writing in the FT, wrote:

"Regulatory barriers to entry in investment banking are now higher than before the credit crunch, creating an ever-stronger oligopoly still capable of generating supernormal profits. Following the bail-out of the banking system, the scale of public subsidy to the industry is also unprecedented, creating moral hazard from explicit state guarantees to unsecured creditors."

Lots of writers and bloggers, including John Kay in the FT, have pointed out that more

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

regulation is not the answer to the question. The banking industry, and investment banks in particular, are some of the most highly regulated entities on the planet. The budget for the FSA is about half a billion pounds (here) which the FSA coyly states "is met from a levy on the firms we regulate", but of course in reality is met by customers of the regulated firms: do you imagine that when the FSA levy was introduced shareholder returns and staff salaries dropped to take up the strain?

I'm surprised that Benson was allowed to tell it as it is: investment banks get their supernormal profits from their privileged position in the provision of financial services, largely as a result of the very regulation that is designed to protect their customers, and taxpayers. Yes, it's true. Bankers don't get paid enormous salaries because they are smarter than the average worker, it's because they work in an industry where barriers to entry prevent economic rents being competed away.

So, it's just a matter of time before we start the cycle again, and banks build up a huge head of pride before they fall. There is an alternative though. Disintermediation is now easier than ever. It is perfectly possible for you to open your own dealing account and build up your own portfolio and do a lot better than that highly paid fund manager that you used to keep in Porsches. The City adds no value in routing funds from savers to borrowers. Just refuse to be part of it.

MRD Applies

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:03:22 +0000

This letter is a classic plea bootlegger and baptist campaign. All the authors stand to receive, directly or indirectly, some tax pounds channelled into carbon capture and storage. They really don't care what the economics are and feel that we should all be grateful to pay something towards saving the planet.

The Treasury presumably wants to apply some rigorous cost benefit analysis to the subs

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

idy. Politicians hate this kind of exercise, because voters vote on emotional grounds, and nothing is more emotionally charged than the environment. Well, OK, maybe the NHS, but that's more like a religion than a political issue. Why else would David Cameron charter a jet to travel to Greenland to be photographed hugging a husky?

A recent BBC Radio 4 documentary suggested that CCS cost around twenty times the current price of carbon emission permits.

In case you're too old to get the reference in the title, MRD refers to Mandy Rice-Davis and something she said when interviewed. Google her if you are not familiar with the story!

Waiting for Superman

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 11:14:45 +0000

Waiting for Superman is a documentary about how big the gap between rhetoric and reality is when it comes to provision of complex public services like education. The USA is by far the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. It is a proper, functioning democracy that regularly replaces incumbents with challengers and thereby creates a proper incentive for elected representatives to govern in a way that makes voters better off. But in reality, public education in the USA has failed.

The funny thing is that everyone from the president down must know that it has failed, and will continue to fail. Initiative after initiative have been tried, but none of them have really succeeded. The UK usually follows the US example, after a discreet delay, to discover that the bright ideas of American educational theoreticians work no better in a European context either.

Different types of enterprises have different natural optimum scales. It seems that run a supermarket chain it's good to be really big. Maybe this is because then you can get the best deal from your suppliers. Maybe its because then you can afford sophisticated analysis of your customer's behaviour. Maybe it's because by being present in lots of locations you get to build a brand that a more locally-limited competitor can't manage. Your scale emerges naturally.

Schools, it seems to me, shouldn't have a big economies of scale. With the internet, cheap books, you should be able to run the purely academic side of school life on a very small scale. Maybe for sports and music you need a bigger institution. What is really far from clear is that you need a national curriculum, national testing, Ofsted, and the Department of Education. If we abolished GCSE's and 'A' levels, kids would not stop taking exams, they'd start taking the International Bacculaureat, or some externally set exams.

Nobody in any major party is willing to suggest any radical changes to the public sector education system in the USA or in the UK. The consequence is that those who can afford to support the public sector through their taxes, and have enough left over to educate their kids privately, will continue to dominate the well paid jobs in society for generations to come. Maybe this has something to do with the willingness of the political class to keep the status quo ante.

If you think that I'm crying wolf, and that education in the UK is really not that bad, just remember that one in four people in Wales leaves school functionally illiterate and one in five in England does so. This is after 15,000 hours of compulsory education. If Michael Gove believes that six 'free' schools are going to fix a problem of this magnitude he must be more deluded than his predecessors, which is setting a very high bar indeed.

Total Factor Productivity

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 23:02:19 +0000

I am no economist. I always thought that total factor productivity was some kind of weighted average productivity of all the factors of production - capital, labour, and the rest.

According to Wikipedia it is actually the part of changes in output that is not accounted for by changes in labour and capital factors. The example was given of agricultural productivity - one year might vary from the next in terms of yields because of different weather. This is not a measurable input but will account for a lot of variation in output.

It seems that TFP accounts for around sixty percent of GDP growth. Governments all seem to want make economies grow. Politicians promise growth. Unfortunately nobody seems have a proper predictive, falsifiable theory of productivity. So there is really very little chance of governments pulling this off. In fact, as time has gone on and economics has become more mathematical and sophisticated, GDP growth has got weaker and weaker.

Usually improvements in productivity are put down to technological progress. Like all generations since the Enlightenment, we like to think of ourselves as the most innovative, creative, society since the dawn of time. Either we are, but this innovation has for some reason stopped translating itself into better GDP growth. Or we are not as innovative as we thought. Or we are changing the organisation of society to prevent this innovation from having the economic benefit that it should.