https://yoranbrondsema.com/ Recent content on Yoran Brondsema Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Sat, 15 May 2021 16:39:47 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q1-2021/ Sat, 15 May 2021 16:39:47 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q1-2021/ My investments as of April 1st 2021 Composition My portfolio remains unchanged: a mix of developed equities, emerging markets equities and global government bonds that are hedged to the Euro. ETF Type Allocation Xtrackers Global Government Bond EUR Hedged Bonds 18% iShares Core MSCI World Stocks 72% Xtrackers MSCI Emerging Markets Stocks 10% Growth of the portfolio Portfolio performance as of April 1st 2021. A strong quarter with a 11% increase of the net value of my portfolio. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q4-2020/ Sat, 30 Jan 2021 21:11:44 +0100 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q4-2020/ My investments as of January 1st 2021 Composition After the modifications I did earlier in the year (see why I removed the small-cap fund and the REIT fund), my portfolio has remained unchanged: ETF Type Allocation Xtrackers Global Government Bond EUR Hedged Bonds 18% iShares Core MSCI World Stocks 72% Xtrackers MSCI Emerging Markets Stocks 10% Growth of the portfolio Portfolio performance as of January 1st 2021. The end of the year was very good. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q3-2020/ Mon, 23 Nov 2020 21:12:43 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q3-2020/ Late report The report for this quarter comes very late. It’s already been almost a month and a half since the quarter ended! However, I have found myself extremely busy working on three projects at the same time, each demanding their share of time: Curvo. We’ve finally passed the regulatory obstacle, meaning that we’re currently getting ready for launch. For me, that means that I’m trying to focus as much time as possible on the development of the mobile app that Curvo customers will use to invest and keep track of their portfolio. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/the-guide-to-extracting-statistics-from-your-signal-conversations/ Sat, 12 Sep 2020 10:23:58 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/the-guide-to-extracting-statistics-from-your-signal-conversations/ To be able to visit each other during these strange Covid-19 times, my girlfriend and I have to “prove” our relationship to my country of residence. One of the pieces of evidence is the messages that we’ve been sending each other over the years that we’ve been together. Signal is our main medium of communication for messaging, calls, and video, and we send each other tens of messages daily. So to add weight to our application, we wanted to add statistics around the number of messages that we’ve sent each other throughout our relationship. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/understanding-why-to-invest-through-the-financial-goals-spectrum/ Wed, 26 Aug 2020 22:02:10 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/understanding-why-to-invest-through-the-financial-goals-spectrum/ I’m currently reading Pragmatic Capitalism and the author comes up with a simple way of framing the reason why someone ought to invest his savings. I think you’ll find it as insightful as I did! The financial goals spectrum The thinking goes as follows. When you invest your savings, you have two overarching goals: Protection against loss of purchasing power. You invest in stocks, bonds or other assets because you want to earn a good return. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q2-2020/ Sun, 02 Aug 2020 14:22:39 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q2-2020/ My investments as of July 1st 2020 Composition Over the last few months, I’ve been on a quest to simplify my portfolio. The main reason is to reduce broker fees, although there is also an elegance to a simplfer portfolio. I made two changes: I removed the small-cap fund I removed the REIT fund My current portfolio is as follows: ETF Type Allocation Xtrackers Global Government Bond EUR Hedged Bonds 18% iShares Core MSCI World Stocks 72% Xtrackers MSCI Emerging Markets Stocks 10% Growth of the portfolio Portfolio performance as of July 1st 2020. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/simplifying-my-portfolio-pt-2-what-about-reits/ Sun, 28 Jun 2020 10:17:39 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/simplifying-my-portfolio-pt-2-what-about-reits/ Investing the REIT fund In the first article of this series, we scrutinized the role of the small cap fund in my portfolio. And we concluded that it isn’t worth keeping, because of the questionable benefits of small cap stocks and the higher broker fees that come with having more funds in a portfolio. In this article, we are going to take a hard look at the REIT fund in my portfolio, Amundi ETF FTSE EPRA NAREIT Global1, which makes up 9% of my portfolio. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/simplifying-my-portfolio-pt-1-questioning-the-small-cap-fund/ Sat, 16 May 2020 19:16:53 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/simplifying-my-portfolio-pt-1-questioning-the-small-cap-fund/ Simplifying my portfolio Of all the decisions that I made since I started investing, the one that I regret the most concerns the complexity of my portfolio. It consists of 5 different funds, meaning the broker fees that I pay for each investment round are high. In this series of articles I intend to investigate simplifying my portfolio. I will assess the role of each of its equity funds to determine whether or not I can remove the fund without affecting exposure or performance. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q1-2020/ Tue, 07 Apr 2020 09:10:11 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q1-2020/ My investments as of April 1st 2020 Composition The composition of my portfolio hasn’t changed since last quarter. Also, there’s no need to rebalance yet. Type ETF Ticker Allocation Government bonds Xtrackers Global Government Bond EUR Hedged DBZB 18% Developed iShares Core MSCI World IWDA 49% Small cap iShares MSCI World Small Cap IUSN 14% Emerging markets Xtrackers MSCI Emerging Markets XMME 10% REIT Amundi ETF FTSE EPRA NAREIT Global EPRA 9% Growth of the portfolio Portfolio performance as of April 1st 2020. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q4-2019/ Sun, 05 Jan 2020 14:32:27 -0600 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q4-2019/ Composition The composition of my portfolio hasn’t changed since last quarter. Also, there’s no need to rebalance yet. Type ETF Ticker Allocation Government bonds Xtrackers Global Government Bond EUR Hedged DBZB 18% Developed iShares Core MSCI World IWDA 49% Small cap iShares MSCI World Small Cap IUSN 14% Emerging markets Xtrackers MSCI Emerging Markets XMME 10% REIT Amundi ETF FTSE EPRA NAREIT Global EPRA 9% Growth Change in calculation First of all, I did a small change in the calculation of the value of my portfolio. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/how-many-losses-must-i-be-able-to-stomach/ Sun, 08 Dec 2019 16:03:16 +0100 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/how-many-losses-must-i-be-able-to-stomach/ It’s been a couple of years that people have predicted the impending doom, the end of the bull run that the markets have been in since the end of the financial crisis. This got me thinking: how bad will the next downturn affect my portfolio? What kind of fluctuations in its value will I see? After all, I’ve never experienced a downturn since I started investing. The only way at my disposal to answer this question is look at the past. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/esma-report-on-passive-vs-active-investing/ Sat, 23 Nov 2019 13:56:59 +0100 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/esma-report-on-passive-vs-active-investing/ On September 10th of 2019, the ESMA (European Securities and Markets Authority) published a report that compares the performance of active and passive funds. It’s called “Net performance of active and passive equity UCITS” and you can download a copy here. For this article, I picked out its most interesting conclusions. Importance of the report I think this report is important to the European passive investor because it’s the first time that such an analysis has been done by an independent, European institution. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q3-2019/ Thu, 10 Oct 2019 14:46:44 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q3-2019/ Change in portfolio: to global bond fund hedged in Euro I made a change in my portfolio this quarter! If you recall from last quarter, the bond fund in my portfolio was Xtrackers Global Government Bond (LU0908508731). This fund tracks the “FTSE World Government Bond Index - Developed Markets” index, which is composed of investment-grade sovereign bonds from developed markets (US, Europe, Japan, etc…) It has come to my attention that changes in currency exchange rates are the main cause for the volatility of international bonds. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/backtest-the-back-testing-tool-for-european-index-investors/ Sun, 01 Sep 2019 14:09:32 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/backtest-the-back-testing-tool-for-european-index-investors/ I’ve written several articles on this blog for which I had to dive deeper into the historical performance of my portfolio. Because I couldn’t find an existing tool that allowed me to do this, I wrote my own. Then, with every article, I had to extend it a little bit and it slowly became better and better. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to see how different allocations of my portfolio would impact its historical performance. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/choosing-the-right-rebalancing-strategy-for-your-portfolio/ Thu, 18 Jul 2019 17:40:36 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/choosing-the-right-rebalancing-strategy-for-your-portfolio/ What’s rebalancing? The first step for any passive investor is to define the allocation of his portfolio. What portion of the portfolio should be bonds? What portion should be equity? Once the allocation is defined and the funds have been purchased, it must be maintained. After all, the funds in the portfolio will evolve differently. Some funds may go up while others go down, and over time the portfolio will increasingly diverge from the intended allocation. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q2-2019/ Thu, 04 Jul 2019 12:11:45 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q2-2019/ Composition The composition of my portfolio hasn’t changed since last quarter. Also, there’s no need to rebalance yet. Type ETF Ticker Allocation Government bonds Xtrackers Global Sovereign XG7S 18% Developed iShares Core MSCI World IWDA 49% Small cap iShares MSCI World Small Cap IUSN 14% Emerging markets Xtrackers MSCI Emerging Markets XMME 10% REIT Amundi ETF FTSE EPRA NAREIT Global EPRA 9% Growth Portfolio performance as of July 1st 2019. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/sharpe-ratio-analysis-of-my-portfolio/ Mon, 10 Jun 2019 10:37:54 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/sharpe-ratio-analysis-of-my-portfolio/ In a previous post, I analyzed the historical performance of my portfolio of index funds. I calculated that, on average, it achieved a 6.8% annual return rate for the period between 2000 and 2015. When you look only at the returns of a portfolio, however, you’re not seeing the entire picture of its performance. A high return could be the consequence of taking excessive risks rather than investing wisely, something that could be illustrated by cryptocurrencies, for example. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/introducing-enzo-a-better-way-of-saving-money/ Sat, 11 May 2019 16:32:29 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/introducing-enzo-a-better-way-of-saving-money/ Together with Thomas, my co-founder from Sutori, we started a new side-project called Curvo. With Curvo, we want to drastically improve the financial well-being of our generation by passively investing your savings instead of keeping it all in a savings account. It grew from the realization that investing is difficult, time-consuming, yet is crucial for our generation to be prepared for the future. My journey into passive investing If you’ve read some of my writings, you will have noticed that I mostly write about personal finance and investing. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/how-to-consolidate-your-prepaid-payment-cards/ Mon, 29 Apr 2019 21:17:59 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/how-to-consolidate-your-prepaid-payment-cards/ Have you ever found yourself stuck with various $10 prepaid credit cards, not knowing how to spend them? You can’t combine cards for a single payment and you end up with small change on each card. I found a solution to get the value from all those cards onto my bank account. During my search on the web, I didn’t find a resource describing a solution. I hope to fill this gap with this article! https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q1-2019/ Thu, 04 Apr 2019 19:54:45 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q1-2019/ Composition The funds in my portfolio haven’t changed since last quarter. Also, there’s no need to rebalance yet. Type ETF Ticker Allocation Government bonds Xtrackers Global Sovereign XG7S 18% Developed iShares Core MSCI World IWDA 49% Small cap iShares MSCI World Small Cap IUSN 14% Emerging markets Xtrackers MSCI Emerging Markets XMME 10% REIT Amundi ETF FTSE EPRA NAREIT Global EPRA 9% Growth of portfolio Portfolio performance as of April 1st 2019. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q4-2018/ Thu, 03 Jan 2019 17:12:19 +0100 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q4-2018/ Composition The funds in my portfolio haven’t changed since last quarter. Type ETF Ticker Allocation Government bonds Xtrackers Global Sovereign XG7S 18% Developed markets iShares Core MSCI World IWDA 49% Small cap iShares MSCI World Small Cap IUSN 14% Emerging markets Xtrackers MSCI Emerging Markets XMME 10% REIT Amundi ETF FTSE EPRA NAREIT Global EPRA 9% Growth of portfolio Portfolio performance as of January 1st 2019. In Q4 of 2018, I invested an additional €916 into the portfolio. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/deep-dive-into-the-past-performance-of-my-portfolio/ Thu, 27 Dec 2018 09:41:20 +0100 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/deep-dive-into-the-past-performance-of-my-portfolio/ When I set up my portfolio about a year ago, I based its composition on the recommendations laid out in Richard Ferri’s excellent book All About Asset Allocation. Once I knew what percentages I wanted to assign to bonds, equities from developed markets, emerging markets, etc… it was a matter of finding the matching funds on justETF. However, I never bothered to actually test the past performance of the portfolio before investing my money. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/taxes-you-should-know-about-as-a-belgian-investor/ Wed, 19 Dec 2018 21:10:11 +0100 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/taxes-you-should-know-about-as-a-belgian-investor/ No one likes them but everyone has to pay them: taxes. As investors, we also have to make our contributions that are necessary to live in a fair and equal society. There are four types of taxes that are relevant to a Belgian investor who mainly invests in index funds and ETFs: tax on transactions tax on dividends tax on capital gains for bonds tax on trading accounts What follows is an overview of those taxes. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/what-i-read/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 21:34:17 +0100 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/what-i-read/ I like to read. In fact, I seem to like it more and more as I’ve been reading more and more books every year. To maintain a record, I assembled all the books that I read since July 2013 on a Books section on this website. I highlighted the ones that I especially liked and therefore recommend. “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q3-2018/ Thu, 15 Nov 2018 21:39:27 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-q3-2018/ Changes in the composition of my portfolio Since last quarter, I made a few changes to my portfolio. I didn’t change any weightings but replaced all of the EU-centric funds with more global funds. This way, I am reducing the exposure to financial problems that may arise in the EU. Government bonds I replaced MAA with XG7S. At 0.20% TER, XG7S is slightly more expensive. However, it tracks the FTSE World Government Bond Index, which consists of bonds of all developed countries, whereas MAA only has European bonds. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/reflection-on-how-not-to-structure-your-database-backed-web-applications/ Fri, 03 Aug 2018 17:38:21 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/reflection-on-how-not-to-structure-your-database-backed-web-applications/ The morning paper I’ve been subscribed to the morning paper for over a year now. On it, the author Adrian Colyer, reviews and discusses a computer science research paper every single day. It’s a very impressive feat, considering the breadth of knowledge that is required to even understand the papers that he writes about. Furthermore, the fact that he’s managed to go non-stop without breaking this consistent rhythm since at least October of 2014 makes his efforts even more spectacular. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-july-2018/ Mon, 23 Jul 2018 21:39:27 +0200 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/portfolio-performance-report-july-2018/ In December of 2017, I started acquiring the first assets of my investment portfolio. Since I thought my experience would be useful to other Belgian investors, I decided to document it through my blog. I subsequently wrote about passive investing in Belgium and the asset allocation in my portfolio. This is the first report of the performance of my portfolio. It covers December 2017 up until June 30th 2018. Return As you can see, I started buying assets in December 2017 and continued purchasing until April 2018. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/my-asset-allocation/ Tue, 08 May 2018 21:17:07 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/my-asset-allocation/ In a previous post, I explained some of the basic principles of asset allocation. Here, I am going to present the concrete selection of ETFs that I have started building up since February of this year. First I am going to go over the various allocation classes that are in my portfolio. After that, I will show which ETFs I selected for each class. This latter part is especially interesting for other Belgian investors. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/what-if-i-lose-my-2fa/ Tue, 01 May 2018 20:42:46 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/what-if-i-lose-my-2fa/ Be prepared for the day you lose your phone Last weekend I released a little side-project called What If I Lose My 2FA. The impetus was the famous “Boot Loop of Death” that happened to my Nexus 5X a couple of weeks ago. I got the phone fixed in the end but only after having to reinstall a fresh version of Android. That was not a huge issue except that I had secured many services with 2FA using the Google Authenticator software token app. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/a-crash-course-on-asset-allocation/ Thu, 15 Mar 2018 19:16:30 +0100 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/a-crash-course-on-asset-allocation/ In previous posts, I talked about passive investing and its Belgium-specific matters. I will now discuss asset allocation, which is one of the most important topics in investing. It’ll be more of a theoretical post but I will elaborate on some core principles that I think are important. Why asset allocation? In many situations in life, it’s wise to not put all your eggs in one basket. The same holds for investing. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/passive-investing-in-belgium/ Thu, 25 Jan 2018 22:43:18 +0100 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/passive-investing-in-belgium/ In the first part, I gave an introduction to passive investing. In this post, I will describe my experiences starting investing in Belgium. How do I buy ETFs? You need to go through a broker to buy ETFs. The major banks (Belfius, BNP Paribas Fortis, etc…) can act as a broker but that is not recommended: Every time you buy a fund, there is a transaction cost involved. This is the commission for the broker. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/intro-to-passive-investing/ Wed, 24 Jan 2018 21:56:56 +0100 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/intro-to-passive-investing/ For the past few months I’ve been interested in passive investing. I read books, did research online and have been investing a portion of my savings. Many of the things I read are targeted to investors living in the US. Fortunately, a lot of the knowledge carries over to any other country. Still, while investing myself, I encountered Belgium-specific things that I had to figure out. Therefore, if you’re living in Belgium and are getting into passive investing, this series of posts could be useful to you. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/move-to-netlify/ Thu, 30 Nov 2017 18:35:50 -0600 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/move-to-netlify/ In a previous post I explained that I used a simple FTP server to deploy this blog. However, I have since moved to Netlify after I heard about it in a Hacker News thread. It offers the following advantages: It hooks into the repository on GitHub so every push to the master branch triggers a deploy. This removes the need for custom Git hooks and deploy scripts. It acts as a CDN so it should be quicker to load (I haven’t measured this). https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/passing-functions-as-parameters-to-ember-js-components/ Sun, 12 Nov 2017 16:12:12 -0600 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/passing-functions-as-parameters-to-ember-js-components/ When you pass arguments to components, these are usually values, i.e. numbers, strings, Ember Data models, etc… However, Ember.js does not really care what type of object a computed property computes. Nothing prevents it from being a function instead of a value. This means that the following is perfectly fine. // components/outer-component/component.js export default Component.extend({ widthAsFunction: computed(function() { return () => { return this.element.offsetWidth; } }) }); // components/outer-component/template.hbs {{inner-component widthAsFunction=widthAsFunction }} and https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/single-sign-on-and-privilege-escalation/ Thu, 09 Nov 2017 20:55:05 -0600 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/single-sign-on-and-privilege-escalation/ Over the past few years, it’s become common to use your Google, Twitter, or even Facebook account to sign up for other services. This speeds up the sign up process as you don’t need to fill in any sign up form, nor do you have to open up your email client to click on the verification link before your can actually use the service. It also removes the necessity to choose and remember yet another password, although this is not as cumbersome anymore if you use a password manager. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/do-type-or-not-to-type-quantifying-detectable-bugs-in-javascript/ Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:48:27 -0600 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/do-type-or-not-to-type-quantifying-detectable-bugs-in-javascript/ Tonight I read an interesting paper entitled To Type or Not to Type: Quantifying Detectable Bugs in Javascript. It attempts to measure the effectiveness of static typing in Javascript by analyzing randomly selected issues of open-source projects on GitHub and checking which ones could have been prevented if a static type checker such as Flow or TypeScript had been used. The most important conclusion is that 15% of the bugs could have been prevented with type annotations. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/do-not-pass-records-to-your-rails-mailers/ Sat, 04 Nov 2017 15:46:43 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/do-not-pass-records-to-your-rails-mailers/ The problem Sutori has a system of inviting users to your story. As the author, you give the email of the invitee. In the backend, it then creates a record of type Invitation and sends the invitation email. The mailer looks like this: class InvitationMailer < ApplicationMailer def invitation(invitation:) mail( to: invitation.email, subject: "You've been invited!" ) end end Then we started getting the following errors: ActiveJob::DeserializationError: Error while trying to deserialize arguments: Couldn't find Invitation with 'id'=12345 The crucial part is that the email is sent asynchronously through ActiveJob. https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/yoranbrondsema-com-v2-0/ Thu, 02 Nov 2017 19:37:17 -0500 https://yoranbrondsema.com/post/yoranbrondsema-com-v2-0/ Unfortunately I was too laxist with renewing the hosting that this website was previously using. By the time I wanted to renew, it was too late and the entire site had been deleted by the hosting provider, including the database. This means that all the content that was on there was lost. This is a shame and I take the blame for it. My only consolation is that a lot of the posts were about Ember.