October 2025 Update

Monthly Thoughts

The weather in the desert has now settled into ‘wonderful’ mode and will stay this way until April/May next year. The little news I hear from back home is mostly negative, so don’t think I’m missing much, although I am starting to look forward to the Christmas visit to see family and friends. The benefit of the current UK government doing whatever it’s doing is the exchange rate is moving favourably for sending cash back home!

Vital Viewing

The best podcast I’ve watched for a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCp6ixlzyh0

The title, “One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met — Pablos Holma”, isn’t really representative of what’s discussed (clickbait I think they call it!). A wide ranging interview covering everything from energy, investing, tech, Oakley glasses and a tiny bit of hacking.

Net Worth Comments

After pondering for too long, last month I finally bought some gold. It’s not a substantial amount (~2% total) but enough to provide some benefit and scratch the itch. Luckily, I was early enough to catch the last of the recent rally, so despite a pullback I’ve still done well. For further details of the pros and cons, have a read:
https://www.deshaw.com/library/worth-its-weight
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5525138
https://monevator.com/defensive-asset-allocation/

I’ve also taken this opportunity (stock markets increasing relentlessly over the last few months) to purchase more bonds. I’ve still got room to allocate more to bonds without being overweight (currently ~5% total). Next month I’ll allocate according to the market, if up, buy bonds, if lower, stocks.

An exercise I’ve just carried out purely for my own amusement, is to plot the time taken to reach each £100k. For me it’s very non-linear. The 1st £100k took 209 months! Before you start trying to work out my net worth, the chart below doesn’t start at the beginning :P. After this it settled down to a more regular drumbeat, but then took a large step down since my income increased. My takeaway is that in my position, income, filtering down to savings rate, matters more than interest.

Overall, stocks and gold are strong, bonds still boring and crypto is having a bit of a pullback. My overall stock/bond performance is now >10% which is impressive, especially considering the time involved.