General

What do you seek in online financial content? A good night’s sleep, a rude awakening, challenging content?

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | January 20, 2015

Bruce Redstone Photography-4466-3 — Andrew Teasdale (photo: Bruce Redstone)

By Andrew Teasdale, CFA

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

What do people look for in online financial content, especially a site dedicated to Findependence? Are they looking for technical information on pensions, investments, private equity, complex products, opinion pieces, confirmation of their own decisions or their advisors/advisers, reassurance in times of financial crisis, or something else?

Personally I find basic technical information, beyond a point, boring. You can find basic information anywhere: just type in the key words into your browser and bam! Likewise, there are now books galore on every facet of personal finance, so much so that I fear we have long ago overloaded on dry rudimentary comment. Continue Reading…

How to find cheaper air flights

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | January 19, 2015

An interesting gambit for scoring cheaper airline flights was revealed in this week’s Economist. The short item titled Phantom Fights exposes two methods of exploiting anomalies in the air ticketing system in the U.S. market.

The first is to use a web site called Skiplagged that hunts for so-called “hidden-city tickets.”

The second is a ruse called “fuel-dumping” by which traveller add extra flights to their itineraries that they don’t actually intend to take.

Both gambits have been relatively little-known, according to the article, were it not for the unintended consequence of a lawsuit against Skiplagged’s 22 year old founder. As the newspaper notes, “there are few better ways to draw attention to something than trying to have information about it taken down from the Internet.”

Why do we invest?

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | January 9, 2015

By Aman Raina, Sage Investors

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

One day as I was perusing the world wide web, I came across a posting about DRIP investments, which ran in the new blog by PWL Capital’s Justin Bender.

What caught my eye had nothing to do with DRIP investments but more about a comment made at the end of article that really got me thinking. It said:

“…Investors should be focusing their attention to more important investment decisions that are likely to have a bigger impact on overall success (such as savings rate, expenses, risk, fees, taxes, and behaviour)…”

Make no mistake, these are important factors in developing your investment ideology or strategy. However, these elements just get you into the game of investing; on their own they are not going to guarantee you will be successful. Continue Reading…

Hub book reviews: Why the West is Losing the New Cold War with Russia

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | January 2, 2015

By Jonathan Chevreau

Over the holiday break I’ve been reading about Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, who came to power at the turn of the millennium. As one of the three books flagged below points out, Russia is the only power that has the capacity to destroy the United States in a nuclear strike. Those who assumed the west “won” the Cold War when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 should keep reading. From Ukraine to the War in Syria and the battles over gas pipelines and the plummeting price of oil, Russia is very much in the news as we enter 2015. It’s a fascinating story in itself but investors will find it of particular relevance.

The Man Without a Face

Before his surprise appointment by Boris Yeltsin, little was known about the former KGB (now FSB) operative, which is why Masha Gessen titled her 2012 book about him The Man Without a Face. Subtitled The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, the gutsy Moscow-based veteran journalist pulls no punches about the true nature of Putin’s Russia.

She traces Putin’s formative years in a chapter entitled “Autobiography of a Thug.” Continue Reading…