High Yield Portfolio - what's in a name ?

A High Yield Portfolio (HYP) seems to me a harmless and generic name for any group of investments cobbled together in an attempt to bring in above-average income.  Until recently I had no idea of the origin of the term, which is common enough in the FI blogs and even the MSM.

However, to the boys over at The Lemon Fool forum, HYP is a religion.  It has its own messiah, texts, rules, specific and tightly-moderated forum boards and a gaggle of hard-line disciples, with a kill-the-heretic mentality for anyone daring to suggest actually selling portfolio shares or including investment trusts etc.

The constant bitching that goes on between the strict adherents and the heretics is actually quite amusing.   Check it out, they're in top form at the minute ...

It reminds me of Graham Chapman in the Life of Brian asking 'are you the Judean People's Front ?'

2016 Goals - Remember, trying is the first step towards failure...

With an acknowledgement to Homer Simpson, for the excellent piece of lifestyle advice in the title.

It's the time of year when many bloggers are writing detailed reviews about their last year's personal and lifestyle goals, and either congratulating themselves or indulging in self-flagellation depending on their degree of success.  

And then setting out even more ambitious plans for the year ahead.   Some I've read mention up to 25 goals for the year - that averages out at two per month.  

Cut yourself some slack, FFS !  

Why does Daylight Saving Time start so much later than it finishes ?

From looking at my earlier post on growlights, it again raises a question that been puzzling me for a long time.  

Take a look at this sunrise-sunset-daylight hours graph for our location. from that post, but with a few extra intercept lines I've added.  Click for a larger image....

British Summer Time (BST) will end this year on 25/26 October 2014, but it won't begin again until 28/29 March 2015.  

Why should this be ?

Teaching kids about finance.....

I see from the MSM that teaching kids about '...personal finance...' will become part of the UK National Curriculum from September this year.

No doubt a laudable objective, but has anyone seen how this will actually be done in practice, by whom, and what specific subjects are to be covered in the curriculum ?  God forbid that sharks from the major banks are allowed to be visiting lecturers....

I'm really looking forward to the day 10 or 15 years hence when someone sues the State because their teacher happened to mention to an eight-year old that he/she has an account, investment fund or holds shares in any particular company, which then goes tits-up soon after the first students from this new regime manage to get enough money together to invest in it.

Watch this space....

The cost of minority trying to move to mainstream.....

When Countryfile was considered a 'minority' programme and tucked well away out of sight on BBC2 on Sunday evenings, it was actually quite worth watching.

But the mandarins at the BBC decided that this programme was attracting a sufficiently large audience to be transferred to what they erroneously perceive as being their primary channel, BBC1.

However, being overpaid and over-pensioned public television 'executives', they failed to spot the obvious in that those people who watch Countryfile are not necessarily the same as watch Eastenders, The Apprentice or Strictly Come Dancing, just a few examples of how the BBC abuses its legally-enforceable compulsory taxation status and therefore wastes shitloads of its too-easily obtained and ill-gotten gains on these and other equally crap populist programmes.  

I'm not totally knocking this type of stuff (well, I am !), if that's what you're into, but they could all easily find a home on commercial television channels, where success or failure would rest or fall on their ability to attract private subscriptions or advertising revenues.  However, there's no justification for a body funded solely by legalised theft to be seen as trying to compete with the professionals in that particular game.

In the process of moving Countryfile to BBC1, they sacked practically everyone of adult age who was remotely connected with the original, and popular, version of the programme, which apparently has subsequently been the subject of several lawsuits over alleged 'ageism'.  

I say sacked all, but they hung onto good old John Craven, best known for trying to present news programmes to seven-year olds in the 1970s and 80s.  That says it all.....

The current crop of presenters, all probably from the home counties* and regularly clad in designer gillets and woolly bobble-hats, presumably because they've never been outdoors in what the rest of the country perceives as being cold or even a little cool, are a complete disaster.

To add insult to injury, they screen Countryfile at 7.30 to 8.00 pm in the summer and autumn months, when anyone with an ounce of sense would know that a large portion of their likely target audience, i.e. those who actually work the land, are still outside during the light evenings, tending their livestock and harvesting produce etc.

It's time to end this state-sponsored TV licensing fiasco, and the sooner the better....


* I can detect a slight Geordie accent from one of them, but he's obviously from the richer parts of Newcastle or the surrounding towns and villages.  Still, one presumes he must have been outside in cold weather before...

Long live the North-South divide.....

I stumbled across a TV show tonight, which was called '...Location, Location, Location...'.

I watched almost disbelievingly as the presenters tried to convince a pair of hapless buyers that a flat for £600,000 in a post-modern Stalinist block in Holloway, North London, was actually a good buy.... I'll spell it out - six hundred thousand pounds for a god-awful two-and-a half bedroom flat, FFS !

And believe me, I know all about Stalinist flats, having lived in several during my times working throughout Russia.

Here '...up north...', we own a three-bedroomed house on a 600 square-metre plot, with only three near neighbours, open southern and western farmland aspects and a protected woodland to the north, for which we paid around a quarter of that sum, including the recent garden extension purchase.

And lest you think we're severely disadvantaged and remote from any trappings of so-called civilisation, within a mile or so from us we have a 24-hour Tesco Extra, an ALDI, a Boots, several health centres and dental practices, plus an array of small & specialist high-street shops and banks.  Within five miles in another direction, we have another 24-hour Tesco Extra, a Sainsburys Superstore, a Morrisons Superstore, another ALDI, a Lidl and an M&S Food store, and a small town centre hosting many of the national high street favourites.

I'm a 20-minute taxi ride and then a two-and-half-hour train journey away from central London (or around four to five hours by car), for the very occasional visits I need to make to the Metropolis.  I'm half-an-hour from an airport from which I can reach, via empty roads and a short hop to Amsterdam Schiphol, just about any major city in the world.

And before anyone tries to justify the ridiculous London house prices by talking of the higher wages available, I know I'm not alone in the North in being able to charge my clients London rates for the services I provide, without all the cost disadvantages of having to live there.  I can also say that in the past I've turned down six-figure offers of full-time employment in London. 

I've got no beef at all against the very fine people of London, many of my friends live in the wealthier suburbs and I also worked there myself many moons ago, for several years via the weekly-commute routine.  

However, to paraphrase an old Victoria Wood comedy sketch, "...I'd like to apologise to those readers living in the South - it must be terrible for you..."

Pan fried et al...

We've been watching Masterchef for the last few weeks, and unfortunately it's scheduled to go on for quite a while longer, probably right up to Christmas.  

But, to be fair, the wife loves it and it's something on UK TV which she can fully understand, because her English isn't quite up to the level of being able to appreciate University Challenge or even the latest dramas.

However, what a pretentious bunch of tossers there are in the Masterchef programmes, in the presenters, 'expert chefs', critics and even the contestants themselves.

My own 'favourite' restaurant epithet is 'pan-fried', among a dozen or so others in a similar vein.  FFS, have you ever tried to fry food in anything but some kind of pan - how about holding boiling oil between your fingers for ten minutes ?

Like I said, pretentious tossers, the lot of them..

Why's that pink duck only got one leg ?

What's happened to television advertising these days ?

Maybe it's just me, but ads seemed much more witty and sophisticated in the eighties and nineties than they are now.

I don't watch much television at all these days but whenever I do the frequency of advert breaks, and both the repetition and subject matters of the ads, can be really off-putting.

To continue the rant, most modern cinema features and television programmes are filmed and cut into endless numbers of takes of just a few seconds each - watch a modern music video and the number of screen changes and jumps between camera angles makes your head spin. 

The producers and directors seem to think that their target audience has the attention span of a goldfish, and that the punters won't watch the screen for more than two seconds at a time if they're not constantly bombarded with fresh images.

Perhaps they're right...

Beating inflation at a local level...

How much do macro-economic statistics actually matter to you ?

Take, for instance, the oft-quoted official rates of inflation.  They're maybe important if you've pension income or other similar indexed returns dependent upon them, but are these rates of price increase in any way rooted in the reality of your own particular existence ?

At the time of writing, the official rate of UK inflation is around 3.0%.  However, most of the money we spend on a regular basis goes on food items, for which the annual inflation rate on the items we buy is always many times higher than any 'official' rate.  We can see this just by pushing a supermarket trolley around – we don't need bodies of self-professed 'economists' to tell us.