The NRMA and NRMA Insurance are not the same company

Fergus Young, Leave a comment

Be aware that NRMA Insurance and NRMA Motoring and services (“The NRMA”) are NOT the same company and have been separate entities since 2000 despite the two companies sharing the same brand. Yes, indeed this is confusing as anything whereby even Australians to this day do not even realise the distinction.

I occasionally observe NRMA clients complain about an acrimonious experience on either the insurance or roadside assistance side, mentioned they’ve been members for years or decades, and then state they will now move both their insurance policies and roadside assistance to another provider as retribution.

NRMA Insurance and more recently, NRMA Motorserve (now rebranded simply to “Motorserve”) are actually owned by Insurance Australia Group (IAG).

“The NRMA” (Motoring and Services) have largely evolved in my mind to be more of a travel and tourism company. Their traditional roadside assistance services appear to be increasingly supplied by another, separate company called ClubAssist whose personnel (staff and contractors) are supplied with NRMA branded Vehicles and Uniforms while actually being employed by Club-Assist.

The NRMA and NRMA Insurance are not the same company

Cold calls from Georgeson a Computershare subsidiary

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Turns out the phone calls from +61 3 9415 5000 I’ve been receiving is from Georgesons, a Computershare subsidiary who are using the same outbound number and probably utilizing the same call centre staff as Computershare. While my view may certainly be debatable, I feel personally this impacts on Computershare’s reputation of impartiality as a share registry and Administrative service.

“Georgesons” acting on behalf of APVG (wishing to take over MetLife Care) have repeatedly called me on my number stating the directors of APVG are encouraging MetLife Care shareholders like me to vote yes to the take over offer.

They also wanted me to advise right there and then on the spot which way I would be voting. I repeatedly replied saying that “I have yet to review the information and I am unable to provide you an answer right at this point in time”. I suspect that Georgeson staff are given incentives.

Have finally got around to reviewing the documentation and will personally be voting ‘No’ to the take over offer. In a high level (superficial) nutshell…

  • Offer I feel is a little bit too low for the potential future gain I will be leaving on the table.
  • (To be direct) Tired of losing access to an ever diminishing range of investment opportunities, given the global liquidity glut courtesy of central bank endless money pump.

NZ Shareholder’s association have also provided their views to their members with the view of voting against the take over offer.

 

 

Cold calls from Georgeson a Computershare subsidiary

Security Warning – Click Hijack investigation

Fergus Young3 Comments

Investigations so far suggest that there is some type of conditional redirect exploit/hijack being planted on many WordPress websites redirecting search engine referred visitors to fake award/survey sites such as “moviesuddenvalley”, “applefacetook”, “hurryexpectsugar”, “mouthtroubleask”, “ondiesmall”, “thendownmeat”, “makemodernfive”, “sayhitome”, “whateyeweight” among several others typically ending in a “.live” or “.top” address. While this Hijack, as far as I have seen appear to predominantly affect some WordPress websites, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this possibly affects other types of websites as well.

In my experience, for sites that are affected, to replicate…
(These most certainly could differ depending on the site affected)

  1. Prerequisites…
    • Needs to be done from an IP address that has yet to access the site in question. (e.g Mobile Data Connection, activate and deactivate airplane mode to get a new IP address)
    • Chrome or Firefox browser (Win 10 or Android) in Incognito Mode (No plugins). Reportedly in other variations of the exploit, it only occurs on Safari under iOS
  2. Search for the site in Google search
  3. Click on the search result that points to the website. Instead of loading up the website as expected, you get redirected to a hijack site.

The hijack will not fire If you access the site directly (via bookmarks or typing the address directly in the address bar of your browser). This appears to be some conditional exploit based on visitors coming from Search Engines. (e.g by typing the site URL directly into the Address bar, you won’t get redirected) and it looks like it will only fire once per IP Address each week (resets at the start of each week).

I probably should add that many so called WordPress vulnerability scanners online I’ve discovered aren’t even set up to detected this sort of hijack. The scanners based on “Securi” certainly will not detect this exploit, I’ve found.

Other resources…

—

Original Post (Old):
Noticing some apparent weird intermittent redirect hijack on the general web where some sites are allegedly redirecting to some dodgy website with names such as “mouthtroubleask”

Update – 2020-09-11T06:55:00+12:00: Added steps to replicate (from my own experience)

Update – 2020-09-12T18:20:00+12:00: Added note to mention that all of the online WordPress malware scanners I’ve tried won’t detect this sort of hijack.

 

 

Security Warning – Click Hijack investigation

Tech Bubble 2.0

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

As always, all views expressed in this site is my personal opinion only. Not financial Advice

With Faceborg shares, along with other Tech shares up 6-8% today on something I can’t pin on, I’m declaring this as a classic bubble in formation as the FOMO factor along with mania very obviously increasingly takes hold. As mentioned in my previous post, If I were a short term speculator type who likes riding by the seat of their pants, yeah, I would probably look to go all in.

Also reaffirming view of the bubble scenario. COVID-19 was essentially only an interruption to the larger trend originally sensed…

Old scribble I made in November 2019. Will need to be re-drawn to include COVID-19.

Not planning to substantially change my current mix of investments, however will probably now look to offload some over valued holdings in the next month or two and then rebalance things. Currently, I see many stocks are valued far beyond any reasonable metric and strongly believe that we are in the midst of a forming classic bubble. Short term, I now expect shares, in particular, technology stocks, to shoot to the sky towards completely absurd levels. Long term, I now expect pain (should the optimism continue).

For longer term folk, who aren’t into thrills and speculating, we may just have to sit tight for a while longer. I believe personally it is fairly clear that things are now running on almost pure emotion / euphoria. Though again, who the flip knows?

 

Tech Bubble 2.0

Unusual Economics

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

The original bull trap assessment is well and truly dead I believe. If a down leg as part of a great depression type scenario were to have happened, it should have occurred by July and no later than the middle August. Coming to the view that COVID-19 was a mere interruption to the previously assessed larger trend.

The financial markets from many accounts appear to mostly now be sentiment (emotionally) driven and would not be at all surprised to see Asset prices continue to drive higher as a result of the FOMO affect (before possibly abruptly pulling back), helped along by Federal Reserve support and other interventionist (as opposed to classic free market) policies.

The ‘Efficient Market’ disciples can argue blue in the face that the markets are forward looking and the market is factoring in that things will drive back to normal before we know it, but this argument simply isn’t stacking up for me… at all.

I see a forming Technology bubble, driven by the likes of TSLA whose prices are being driven far beyond what facts, fundamentals and underlying data could ever justify.

While this certainly seems like a classic bubble with the usual tell tale signs including Taxi drivers talking about their gains in Property + stocks, and phases such as ‘Permanently high plateau’ + ‘This is a new paradigm!’ being banded about (i.e this time being “Modern Monetary Theory”), these bubble signs and anecdotes have been going on for an extraordinary long time, considerably longer than what would have normally occurred in a text book bubble. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I feel the last secular bull run from 2009 to today is highly unusual.

Nothing can be said for certain as all I can see is that much of the information coming out to date is simply too poor to base any meaningful longer term decision making off of (have long held the view that Economics as a discipline is in disrepute), and that the markets in my view have most certainly been interfered with.

—

Current personal investment focus is towards NZ Farm Land where prices on average have not shifted a huge amount over the last decade (See Farm land price Graph at interest.co.nz and REINZ Rural + Lifestyle property data). How one might be able to partake in this may be through funds such as the Booster Private Land and Property Fund, however, the types of properties they appear to cover are rather limited. In regards to other investment related thoughts… Continue reading “Unusual Economics” →

Unusual Economics

Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 4

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Experimented with running Pi-hole on the Raspberry Pi 4 that I have.

5 Minutes in, Pi-Hole showing how tragically ad ridden the modern web has become.

The Set up at least for the more tech inclined is very easy, all you had to do was launch a command line prompt and type this command…

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

After running it for an evening. Thoughts and findings so far…

  • Predominantly Does a DNS level block with a blocklist of known advertisement serving IP addresses.
  • YouTube is a moving target whereby ads are served from youtube.com itself and therefore very difficult to (completely) block with Pi-Hole.
  • Mobile devices with Ad laden apps will perhaps see the greatest reduction in ads.
  • The default configuration doesn’t block nearly as many ads as say uBlock Origin installed on Desktop Firefox. This is not a replacement to having Client side ad blocking.

Curiously noticed these appearing in the query-log…

  • www.collab.apps.mil
  • www.gov.teams.microsoft.us
  • www.dod.teams.microsoft.us

Why would Teams try and poll for these addresses is beyond me. It does raise a sufficient level of curiosity that I will be checking this out.

 

Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 4

This picture can not be explained

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Update: 1st August 2020 – The Agent rang thanking me and mentioned it was given to someone in Ngāruawāhia intended to be distributed by local children for a local letterbox drop (possibly as part of a fundraiser I believe). Still strange where it ended up though.

—

Box of about 1,500 Real Estate flyers left under a tree in a ditch at the Waterworks Dam on Hakarimata Trail. I really don’t understand why anyone would go to the trouble of hiking in a box load of glossy flyers, then leave it under a tree all alone. Very weird and odd…

Box of Real Estate flyers dumped on Hakarimata Trail

Initially though it was gear or supplies for track maintenance and/or weed control, but seemed really weird to keep it in a cardboard box, so peered through the opening.

Took the box out of the reserve and dropped it off to Lugtons (Hamilton based Real Estate agency). While I was initially hesitant to touch it, It didn’t appear to be used to transport/hide drugs or any other nefarious activity, and I did not think the colourful flyers made for healthy fertilizer hence the reason to remove it.

In hindsight… Could be as innocuous as someone wanting extra weight to hill train with but simply aborted the idea halfway with the intention of picking the box back up upon coming back down (but never did or otherwise forgot).

This picture can not be explained

NRMA Motoring and Services + ClubAssist (Battery service)

Fergus Young, , Leave a comment

This post is more of a personal point of reference (leading on from an ongoing, personally conducted investigation into a different matter)…

—

National Roads and Motorists’ Association (“The NRMA”) to me these days are more of a Travel and Tourism company and would say in my own sole opinion they are perhaps now a different organization from what they were originally before demutualization.

They apparently own several Resorts & Holiday Parks, Travelodge Hotels (as a Joint venture with TOGA / TFE Hotels), Manly Fast Ferries, Thrifty Car rental Australia & NZ along with a couple of Tour companies. To confuse matters, they do not actually own NRMA Insurance (which is currently a brand of Insurance Australia Group since 2000) nor do they own NRMA MotorServe (now also a brand of IAG). Even to this day, appears many of their own clients and members are unaware of the distinction between NRMA Insurance and NRMA Motoring and Services.

Some NRMA roadside assistance personnel (while still being provided with a NRMA branded Van and Uniform) are in fact employed through a separate company called Club Assist who NRMA Motoring and Services have contracted out to for the provisioning of battery replacement sales + assistance, and auto-glass replacement to their members. While it looks like NRMA owns 30% of Club Assist, I’m not sure how many of the other Roadside Assistance personnel are still directly employed by or otherwise contracting directly to NRMA Motoring and Services.

Club-Assist are apparently contracted to do quite a bit of the Battery related call out work by other Motoring clubs in Australasia including Automobile Association Batteries here in NZ and supply batteries bearing the branding of the Motoring club they’re working for. That said, anecdotally, some people within my immediate social circles have claimed they did not find them the best value (Club Assist reps are allegedly incentivised to sell new batteries) and I would say it still pays to shop around if you’re in need of a new battery.

Club-Assist have also been deploying the NRMA branded charging stations over New South Wales along with the RACV branded charging stations across Victoria.

NRMA Motoring and Services + ClubAssist (Battery service)

Stream of Consciousness Week 22nd June 2020

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Stream of consciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into its own separate post…

  • Was good to catch up with some old friends who I haven’t seen in a while (who now live outside of Auckland) and just actually relax this weekend along with visiting some older haunts.

Older Stream of Consciousness thoughts can be found here.

Stream of Consciousness Week 22nd June 2020

Pumping up the Money Supply, the ultimate treatment for financial market ailments?

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Disclaimer: Not financial advice (as with anything else in this blog)

With endless money ‘printing’ and liquidity injection, the US Financial Markets have almost completely (if not completely) decoupled from their underlying real economy. Financial markets globally no longer represent the general health of their respective economies by any reasonable measure I feel.

The decoupling I believe started way back in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 when liquidity creation was employed to restart the economies. So far since then, it seems when any sort of crises happens to spook the market, the treatment response has been to pump even more liquidity into the system and it seems to have been surprisingly extremely effective at least at treating any symptoms for the last 12 years.

What the end game is? I don’t know. It goes back to a post I penned back in November 2019 where I asked what would be a trigger to a sustained correction? (Not just short sharp corrections of the types we’ve been having recently)

One potential threat which could end up defeating the effectiveness of such monetary policy would include some sort of catastrophic, devastating and tragic famine by way of insect plague or widespread natural disaster where food security gets impacted and food supply contracts causing food prices to spiral out of control (by way of hyper inflation) where people find themselves being forced to sell assets into a sliding market to feed themselves and their families just to survive. Continue reading “Pumping up the Money Supply, the ultimate treatment for financial market ailments?” →

Pumping up the Money Supply, the ultimate treatment for financial market ailments?

No new active COVID-19 cases in NZ

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

There are officially no more known ‘Active’ COVID-19 cases in New Zealand. We move down in to Alert Level 1 tonight.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/418524/prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-reveals-move-to-level-1-from-midnight

Still need to be vigilant obviously.

“We will almost certainly see cases here again. That is not a sign we have failed.”

“If we get one or two cases in the future – which will remain possible for some time to come due to the global situation and nature of the virus – we need to shut down those cases fast. The last thing … we want to do is move up the alert level system again.”

My feeling is though, heading into the Winter seasons in future years, it may still be a good idea to practice some sort of social distancing primarily to protect the more vulnerable in our communities.

No new active COVID-19 cases in NZ

Stream of Consciousness Week 1st June 2020

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into its own separate post…

  • The question of the weekend: Can continually adding financial stimulus keep the economy propped up indefinitely regardless of what happens? Or is there a point where this plan will simply stop working and we end up paying for it dearly? What is the end game here? On that vein, the current rally being a bull trap, as part of a great depression style bear market, is something that has become less likely. Looking more towards a secular side ways market with large up and down gyrations, must like we had from 2000 to 2009.
  • Western sentiment in the last few days appears to have suddenly snapped back to “life is normal” again. More celebrity, pro-sports and entertainment news making the headlines once again. Casinos and entertainment venues around the world reopening.
  • Ticking things off for the sake of ticking them off admittedly isn’t my buzz personally and is not really how I prefer to spend my leisure time.

Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.

 

 

Stream of Consciousness Week 1st June 2020

Stream of Consciousness Week 25th May 2020

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…

  • Walked Pae O Te Rangi Farm Summit, looping back via the Disc Golf Course. Fairly short walk of approximately 2 hours return. Track is not marked on any of the Topomaps I can see, however, was present on the Kauri Die Back map as being an open track. Open Tracks PDF Auckland Council.
  • You know why people are saying the COVID Tracing QR codes ain’t working? Because there are two systems which are branded so similarly (with the yellow stripes), no wonder people are complaining when they use the official COVID-19 NZ Tracer app, they get an error. See both the official NZ COVID Tracer app developed by Rush Digital for the Ministry of Health NZ and then Simple Trace developed by a separate company called Springload.
  • Easy and cheap credit I feel is eroding the value of working. Seems the days of actually earning your keep and then using your hard-earned money to say buy a place of your own is now getting further and further out of reach of people. The pathways are disappearing. We are rewarding rampant speculation, supporting zombie corporations that should have gone under decades ago, investment into non-productive assets and further deepening the wealth divide.

Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.

 

 

Stream of Consciousness Week 25th May 2020

Stream of Consciousness Week 18th May 2020

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…

  • Huntly Bypass was apparently opened on early March 2020. Only discovered it last night 17May2020 when coming home where I found that the Expressway continued on after Taupiri. The Weekend just past has been the first weekend on Covid-19 alert level 2 (Previously, interregional travel was not permitted)

Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.

Stream of Consciousness Week 18th May 2020