Australian Power and Gas - listed on the ASX - have 10% green product.
Victoria Electricity - owned by Infratil - which is listed on NZ stock exchange - have 10% green product.
ActewAGL - owned 50% by Singapore Power and ACT govt? .. hard to tell because of the vague wording on the web site.
Origin Energy - ASX listed
Overview here:
http://www.greenelectricitywatch.org.au/
Additional comments in an article from Neerav Bhatt’s blog:
http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/dont-get-tricked-into-choosing-fake-greenpower-electricity/
Right now tending towards Origin - even though I left them for TXU a while back because one of their door to door sales people was harassing me at home when I was home from work very sick.
Jack Green looked OK but then I read this story of fairly crappy service from them.
A long time ago I wasn’t impressed with Westpac, so I moved my banking somewhere much better. I also switched my credit card to a product that seemed better at the time, Virgin Mastercard. Now I read (yes I know this is month old news but I just found it now) that Virgin is selling their Mastercard business in Australia to Westpac. Further news from The Age on this here.
No big deal, I guess I’ll just move my credit card over to Bendigo Bank which is supposed to have an excellent credit card product anyway, plus me being a Bendigo bank shareholder I’m kinda sorta putting the fees back in my own pocket.
Also on a similar note if St George Bank get gobbled up.. my St George Bank shares will become Westpac shares and my St George margin loan will end up owned by Westpac.
I just purchased a copy of A Random Walk Down Wall Street which is one of those books I have heard the general gist summarised by others, and agree with what I have heard of this gist.. but never actually read. Ordered from Etrades Moneybags site, though it hasnt showed up yet.
But also while poking about I found this “readers digest” summarised version which appears to boil it down to the key points, available as a PDF file.
From the Vanguard email newsletter, which sometimes has some quite interesting info although I am not currently a Vanguard customer
It’s time in the market that counts Australian share market volatility 1978 -2008
Guess demonstrates even with volatility shares do OK as long as you take a long term view.
Really the news says it all.. I’m GLAD I never heard of these guys when I was choosing my margin loan.
I haven’t been able to find any definitive word on what protection banks offer to peoples savings in Australia - now it looks like not much:
Link: Is your bank deposit safe? No - but it could be
For a long while I presumed they were, mainly from reading US and UK info on banking, where bank deposits are protected, at least up to $100K in the US, or 35K pounds in the UK. But now it seems clear there is no despit insurance for Australian banks.
Though I have a buy and hold policy time to stop buying parcels of shares every so often and just put some cash into the margin loan to keep the LVR on an even keel until it settles down a bit while I focus on boring house hunty stuff.
Well the Usenet group aus.invest is completely dead, downed in a wave of spam and crossposted garbage.
But a new google group has been created at http://groups.google.com/group/aus_invest that needs a google account to post to, hopefully the good content from the old aus.invest will appear there without the crap. Looks like spam and crossposting has finally killed NNTP?
Well the portfolio has dropped in value by 8% due to the current market uncertainty. This is no big deal with the long term picture (provided they keep coughing up dividends) but I am not increasing the margin loan amount at the moment to keep it on an even keel and to stabilise the gearing ratio. I have picked up a bunch more SLF as the price dropped, partly to get more at the new cheaper price, and partly to help stabilize the gearing ratio. A few other good shares seem to be cheap now, will make a few more purchases at regular intervals to use dollar cost averaging to keep things stable.
addendum: a week late I snarfed some TGG and AEZ, which are down 24 and 33 per cent respectively.
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