12,618.380... ouch

1.00 EUR = 9.83296 HKD, not looking too hot either.

Hell yes, my fund's NAV is -25% for Oct.

If this keeps up I will have to curtail my mongering activities, and amongst my regulars there will be a lot of sad and horny women missing my XL penis.

The only good thing coming from all this mess:

1 this less demand for their services means their prices may fall somewhat

2 less chance of bumping in to some of you folks in the dingy stairwells of some buildings I frequent

3 less getting psyched to see a specific WG and coming across the universal
"please wait" sign




[ Last edited by  gwailoplayer at 25-10-2008 14:38 ]

im not in the market but my superannuation (compulsory here in OZ) has taken about a 20% hit this year which aint good.

at the moment im more worried about the forex rates as i will be travelling in nov

last time i visited HK and Macau in May 08 the ex rate for 1 aud was about 7.5hkd...just checked today and its like 4.7 only!!

so basically ive lost about 40% of my spending/mongering power with the drop in value of the aud

dont worry, this is what it is suppose to be really.

according to the big mac index, HKD is actually 55% under valued.

in this market turnmoil at least HK ppl should start travelling.

I read the Economist but my job does not let me travel in the region too much.

Some of you mobile jet setting brothers should set up a "Big Mac Index" across the region  for our favorite activity We can see how we do relative to other cities

that's right! that's where i got the irrelavent fact from!

good that the Dow is up by around 100 points now.

Big Mac index is flawed, because it does not take into account differing tastes, so while westerners like it lots its not that popular elsewhere...

But things in Hong Kong are cheap due to the tax effect:

Ie:

UK vs Hong Kong...

both capitalist countries , and both semi democracies which are freeish market (though hong kong is a corporate state it has some socialist tendancies, ie the Fanling council towers)..


Hong Kong costs less because the costs are less...

Ie in Hong Kong

to employ somebody you need them to have the right to work
you give them some money end of each month..

Person twice a year pays a cheque to the HK government and fills in a quick and easy to fill in tax return....


In the UK

to employ somebody you need to check if they have the right to work.
You need to pay money to check their NI number is legit
You need to perform a criminal record check
You need to put them on the payroll , and deduct money from their salary to pay taxes every month
You need to pay by BACS (cash in hand is seriously frowned on now).
You need to chip in 12.8% of their wages for class 1A NIC
You need to chip into insurance schemes for death in service.
You need to constantly monitor their PAYE codes.
You need to monitor their attechments and student loan deductions.

If you work as a builder you need a licence and you need to consider CIS deductions

With everywhere being more complicated these costs add up and they filter through to the products themselves...


Just on a like for like basis in the UK we have VAT, and taxes on taxes , etc all which contribute to the much higher costs of everything in the UK.

I prefer the £10 model myself , ie $100 buys roughly the same as £10 in the UK. ie $5.6 for a coke and its 60p here.

back on topic though , watch out for November 4th...

As this is a VERY important day, the Republicans have been propping up the USD quite heavily to try to get Mcain back in office....

This might fall away (the support for) and cause a USD melt down...


Currently though in the UK we are facing sterling annilation , our prime minister knows he will lose the next election badly so he is ruining the country and the currency and is doing the most stupid thing of all paying off debt with ..... more debt as the solution....

I am off to the US next week and was planning on doing some mongering.  However the Aussie dollar has dropped from USD0.98 4 months ago to now USD0.61.  This means I will be doing very little punting.  Bugger!!!.

Yeah.....USD way to go ...up up and away!!!!!!!!!

OK, here is something I've never understood and I have a question that might sound dumb to you guys who are
involved in this kind of thing. The SCMP front page is again about the falling stock market due to panic selling -
everybody wants cash, etc. But, surely, for every seller there has to be a buyer. So who's buying? Or is there
something about the stock market that I don't know and you can sell even if nobody is buying. How does that
work? Very strange.

And what's happening to our MPF Pension Plans. I just received a valuation and saw it was down 3%. I thought,
good, at least they're taking care of my money. Then I saw the valuation date - 1 June to 31 August.

Fuck, that's even before the fuckin crash. So is everybody's MPF going down the fuckin tubes? Luckily I 'retired'
5 years ago and haven't paid MPF since then.

That is the point. Although some people are buying and some people are selling, on balance there are more sellers than buyers. This underlies all of what is happening.

1        People are converting their holdings to cash as is viewed as being a “safer” place to keep assets.

2        Similarly, after people liquidate their holdings to stock and bonds and convert this to cash, where these investments were not in US dollar denominated securities, they are also selling their Won, Yen, Baht or whatever and converting this into US dollars. This selling pressure pushes the exchange rate of the currencies lower, making the currencies cheaper.

The market is still in a panic and people are not yet acting rationally and prices are not yet reflecting real values; HSBC which is a solid stock is selling below HKD 70, the lowest since 9-11. This shows how unstable things are. Best for you to keep assets in USD or a USD-linked currency like HKD.

Keep your cash so you have more to spend on our favorite activity.

Speculators buy thinking the market will bounce. The market has a load of limit orders that sit at various prices like betfair (if you 've ever used it). If someone wants to buy then they can see that somone is willing to sell at one pirce and if someone wants to buy then they can see the price that someone is willing to sell.

When the market is stable then you get a Mexican standoff on these prices. But in a market panic people start selling market orders (sell at whatever price is available on the market) and speculators buy at a limit price (they think stock is good value at X). Often in a crash this can mean that the share price falls with relatively little volume as teh number of sellers vastly outnumbers the buyers.


Yeah, valuations aren't very up-to-date. Any equity-linked pension is screwed. A pity for anyone who was just abuot to retire. A year earlier and they would have had twice the pension fund.

At somepoint you have to think that the market has overreacted to news, it invariably does, and then you could benefit by moving back into the market. The golden egg is figuring out when as the art of valuing stocks is treacherous. That's also not the only problem. You can be as smart as you like and spot a great "under-valued" stock but if no-one else in the market is smart enough to see it then you're just some schmuck who will be crushed by the wave of ignorant sellers.

i know what u mean mate - im flying out this weekend for a month long trip to KL, HK, Macau, Zhuhai and SG. And with the aud dropping like a sack of shit my budget for mongering is seriously depleted! I was also gonna go over to LA and LV but that aint gonna happen now!

the only silver lining i can see is that IF (and thats a big IF) i win a bit at the casinos in macau it will be worth that much more when i change it back to aud!! (i won $30Khkd last trip in May, from a start of around $5K)

very true. my PF value has shrunk by 60%. ((

Jake, Yes!  You are 100% correct.  For every seller there is a buyer, and the price that is paid is agreed willingly by both of them.  Does your head in, right?

I have an online trading account, and sometimes when I'm bored I like to watch the bids displayed in real time - gives me a kick to know that I'm watching a world-wide voting system where millions of people are participating - anyway, you can see the lowest offer for sale, and the highest bid to buy, and the gap between them - you can also see a stack of lower bids underneath, all outbid by the highest bid, along with a stack of higher offers for sale that are undercut by the lowest offer.  It's a bit like No-Man's-Land in a war - all the buyers are hoping a seller will come down to their price and the sellers are holding their breath waiting for one of the buyers to cave in and take their price ... and ... nothing happens for a while.  In fact, the prices can sway up and down, with no transactions, as a prospective buyer advances his price a bit and the sellers try to tease him higher ... or vice versa ... Then suddenly you see a transaction logged - a real price where someone jumped the gap.  Then there's a mad scramble where all the prospective buyers and sellers update their prices, hoping to get a better deal, and the waiting game begins again.  

So yes, all of the transaction volume has one buyer and one seller, and the price displayed is the price someone paid to own that stock at that moment.  

It's not the number of buyers and sellers that goes out of balance, it's the level of confidence.  When people are scared, they take a lower price than they really wanted.  When people are excited they pay a higher price than they really wanted to.  And the market moves.  

Who's buying?  Warren Buffett for one, he's said so a number of times.  And must be a lot of other people who either saved up cash, or were smart enough to buy Put contracts and have made a killing.  Then there's another group who are also buying - frequently, prudently - and that's the short-sellers.  They hold their position, but know better than to wait too long - this is why after a big dive you always see a recovery: a bunch of people "buying back" stock that they sold that they didn't have in the first place, pocketing the difference.

So whoever bought HSBC at 75 last Tuesday is now laughing all the way to the, ahem, bank ... is the rise yesterday a popular vote of confidence in HSBC's strength? ... or is it just short sellers covering their positions?  ... we'll know in a week or so ...

Best strategy I'm hearing at the moment is to start buying, a little at a time, rationing your capital to spread your purchases over the next year or so.  

But don't quote me if you do that and lose money - I'll just deny everything!!

Thanks for the info bro. Sounds like a fuckin crazy, stressful business. I'm way too laid-back to deal with all that crap.  

various points:

There are always fools who you can sell things to, ie people who think the market has bottomed out , sure the Dow jones might be going up and down but its a case of people falsely thinking it has bottomed out......

A few of my uncles told me they had bought loads of shares as they were cheap and I was a fool, the market crashed they lost 33% of their value..

Also for things like IPOs and rights issues , you have a company that underwrites these share issues, in that if you sell 1000 shares you have company XYZ underwrite these shares,if you sell 500 of them the underwriter has a contract to buy them no matter what....

This worked badly when HBos tried a rights issue they sold 8% of the rights issue and the underwriter was left holding the can for 92% and made a massive loss.


You also have fund managers who want to get some losses onto their investment portfolios this might sound like madness, but if you put some losses into your portfolio you pay less tax....... and or they think they are cheap and may increase in the future...

After I was killed, I managed to pull back a lot of the earlier losses during the few bounce-backs.  But I died again!  No more man!  I am going to take my losses like a man and just let it be.  

JAKE:If you are selling and there are no buyers you are fucked, so the answer is NO to selling anytime you want to.  You put up a price and see if their are buyers for it, at points the market is stagnant and everyone is just waiting for something to happen, I call it "THE MOVE".  The more "moves" the better the chances of the stocks going up, the more stagnant the more fear burns in the hearts of the hardcore stockies.  Anyone can make a killing in today's market as long as you don't fall into the many traps that are prevalent in today's market.