Dave & Dana in Australia

Well that was the easiest move ever. Basically all we moved were clothes, a TV and a mattress! Plus, we have our old place for a couple more weeks so if we forgot anything it’s no big deal. Moving sucks, so this was good. As for the new place, we’re pretty darned happy. I hadn’t seen it - Dana went and saw it - and I like the way things are shaping up. We’ve had a good chunk of the furniture we bought delivered, and we’ll do the rest of the shopping this weekend for some dishes etc.

Moving was the culmination of a busy week, so the opportunity to hang around the house and the beach, relax, and clean and set things up is appealing. We were also able to go to the quarantine station this week and visit Fritz and Jasmine, who arrived last Thursday. Thankfully, they were in good shape and were very happy to see us. Incredible animals those cats - flown all the way around the world, with no real clue what the heck was going on, and they’re doing great. Speaking of incredible animals, Dale is in town from Monday to Thursday next week for a visit, so there will no doubt be the odd late night next week.

In other news, I got official word that I passed my CAIA exam, so now I have another reason to order new business cards. That will be all for a while I think, as I plan to concentrate my spare time efforts in the next few months to improving my surfing and having a crack at this fancy kite-boarding thing.

For those of you who are curious, I thought I might briefly explain what it is I do here at Mercer. My official title is: Senior Analyst, Manager Research. Basically, I’m part of a global manager research team of about 40 people that research all types of investment managers. We have 6 people here in Sydney, 5 in Toronto, about 15 in Chicago and Boston, 10 in London, plus some in Tokyo and Singapore. The managers we research invest the pension, endowment, and corporate funds of our clients. The manager researcher’s job is find these managers and understand just how they propose to earn a better return in their chosen area of expertise than one could earn without paying someone for their expert judgement. My job at this point is to make a judgement about whether I think their proposal has merit, is likely to succeed, is sustainable over longer time periods, and finally whether it’s more likely to succeed than other investment managers with the same specialty. So, if I’m looking at a manager who manages portfolios of Australian stocks, I would try to understand how they do it, decide if it’s likely to succeed, then decide if it’s more likely to succeed than all the other managers that manage Australian stocks.

The end result is that when a client comes to Mercer looking for help deciphering how to allocate and who should manage their pension fund, we’re at the ready with a ranking and a view on all the potential candidates out there. My specialty in particular is the catch-all term of “Alternative Investments”, which is made up of hedge funds of various types, infrastructure investments (airports, toll roads, parking lots, what have you), commodities and the like. I also have a list of Australian stock and bond investment managers to look after as well.

So there you have it - what I do in a very small nutshell. By now 90% of you are asleep, the rest I’m sure are mesmerized :). Most importantly though, I find it interesting.

I’m really not sure what Dana and I were thinking when we thought we would be fine without a car, just renting when we wanted to go out of town. Maybe in Manhattan that would work, but the experience of having a car since last Thursday in Sydney has shown just how silly that was. Cruising around in your own vehicle almost instantly releases you from a portion of being a tourist that makes you concious that you’re a tourist - not having convenience of movement. That’s different now - now it’s just the ability to see all this new stuff in a comfortable way, without an excessive need to plan ahead.

This made the weekend a bit more busy for us. We did some serious shopping for furniture for the new apartment (after all, we need practically everything) over the course of Saturday and Sunday at a mall called the Supa Centa, which is hilarious. We also signed our new apartment lease officially, but still had time to do a bit of cruising around, swimming, lying on the beach, etc.

Last Sunday a workmate of mine (maaatte!) was nice enough to , along with his wife, take Dana and I touring around our soon to be new neighbourhood and some of the things to do in the area. He (Nick) has a classic Holden, and they took us for a drive up all of the Northern beaches - all the way to Palm, about 45 minutes away.

It’s really incredible - beach after beach, and the farther you drive the less crowded they get. Nick was very helpful with where his favourite surf spots are. We stopped at Palm, at the end, to take a dip in the ocean before having lunch on the lagoon side of the peninsula. On the way back they showed us where the local pool is, where the best places to buy surfboards are, tennis courts, local mall, best grocery store etc. Really a valuable trip.

All this driving around and seeing what the area was going to offer us got us thinking about the fact that we’ll want to take advantage of these things ourselves, along with all of the other things we’ll want to do that involve travelling on the weekend. We were thinking that renting a car when we needed one was going to be the cheapest answer, although with a sacrifice on convenience. All this is to say…we are now the proud new owners of our very own Volvo 240 GL. Ian, I hope we’ve made you proud. Our 240 has only 255,000 km on it though. Isn’t she a beaut!