Stock Market, Crypto, Real Estate, Funds – September 2024 Edition

Well this is strange… as I said in nwradu state of septemberwe bought a new apartment and for that we completely liquidated all our savings and investments, including stocks and mutual funds. I only have another one because it was not a good time to sell it.

So are these articles still useful? Anyway, I still study the market and keep up with what’s happening on the major exchanges, so I can write this article as well. Little by little I would like to rebuild a portfolio anyway, but first we will build a suitcase, so to speak.

COMMUNICATION

My position in eToro is that I only own NVIDIA because I didn’t sell them. It was a bad time, about two weeks ago, when the stock had fallen as low as $101 on September 6th. I had a feeling they would go up again and they did, a week later they were at $115 and now they are up to $122 as well.

Otherwise, eToro refunded all my money without any problems and it was a great amount. This is basically the end of my eToro adventure and I can’t complain about anything so far. If I had $1 for every time I’ve heard someone complain about this service (“the shares aren’t yours”, “they have a huge spread”, “they don’t give d ‘ money back” – all wrong so far ), I would have bought more actions.

The transfer took about 2 working days. I indicated a Euro account from ING. The money arrived, and the conversion from dollars to euros was done at a standard rate, although it’s not like you had a choice about it.

Overall, September was down for a couple of weeks, but then the market came back and went up even more. The same thing happened in August. It’s basically a series of news or financial results that make some investors sell, but there are others who can’t wait to buy and the market has recovered both times. It seems to me a good sign, a sign of trust.

Here, by the way, is the index of Fear & Greed which is now on Greed, and a month ago it was on Neutral. All that is confidence that the market will grow.

The NASDAQ 100 had a similar evolution, but with a less pronounced increase. Technology stocks rebounded, but a little harder.

Overall, this is how the month looked:

INTERPRETATION OF ROMAN STOCK

Nothing important happened here either, except for the purchase of shares by Fondul Proprietatea. That would have been a good opportunity to sell back the shares. The market value was around 0.4 lei/share. FP bought them back for 0.6622 lei/share.

Unfortunately, the shares were offered for redemption. A total of 1.845 billion shares were submitted for the buyback. FP bought back just 269 million shares. That’s a ratio of 14.5%, so the current holders only sold 14.5% of what they owned and are still holding the rest.

CRYPTO

Bitcoin has risen steadily over the past two weeks, if not spectacularly. It opened the month at about $59,000. today stands at 65 000 $. However, Bitcoin has been hovering around such values ​​since March 2023.

You could become rich with Bitcoin within a year. A year ago, its value was around 27,000 US dollars. A 110% increase in one year is very rare. But no, you know how it is, everyone could become rich if they knew what the future holds.

This increase in the last few days again caused a wave of comments and articles like “done, now Bitcoin is exploding, in December it will be 250,000 dollars”. I don’t think it will. In fact, it seems to me that it has settled at $65,000 and at that level it is resistance that it has never been able to break. They may not have enough interest in this market to drive this growth.

REFERRAL OF APPEAL

The currency had the same evolution as the stock market. The exception is the money that invests in Eastern European companies, which do not have as good a result as they have not received since the start of the war in Ukraine.

Immobility

What we have learned now, taking a loan ourselves, is that the interest rate can be easily negotiated. We took the credit from Intesa Sanpaolo BankFor example. We went to discuss all the banks that have branches in our neighborhood and then ranked them according to the interest rate offered.

In first place was Raiffeisen, with an interest rate of 5.3%. In second place was Intesa, with 5.49%. Intesa told us from the beginning that if we make a request in this regard, it is very possible that we will be approved for the interest rate to drop to 5.3%, and in the end that is what happened, it was it was a simple formality.

(I’ll tell you soon why we didn’t take the loan from Raiffeisen, it’s funny, even though we went there first.)

Another thing to remember is that the banks increase the interest badly if you don’t collect your salary with them. Basically it was their way of making you a customer of various products. For example, I looked at Raiffeisen and the interest is 6.3% if you don’t collect your salary with them, compared to 5.3% if you do.

The bottom line is that some banks will not communicate this clearly to you. For example, if you simulate credit on the Raiffeisen website and answer with “no, I don’t collect my salary here”, you will find that the interest rate is 6.3%, but it is not tell you clearly that it could be. with a lower percentage point if you open an account.

Anyway, the real estate market in Bucharest seems to be growing. I see no reason why it wouldn’t go up again, absent fundamental changes in the market. For example, this year an average of 19,300 apartments were sold in Romania per month, compared to 19,600 apartments in each month of the previous year. The difference is almost non-existent. The total value is slightly higher, a sign that more expensive apartments were sold, but with such a monthly volume, the most plausible explanation is that they increased in price.

I wish you a profitable month!