Just in time for my having to change money, the dollar declined so far this week. That shows you the value of the famous remark attributed to Yogi Berra: "Never predict, especially not about the future."

Who would have ever thought that the likely breakup of the euro over a Greek exit would result in a strengthening of the euro against the US dollar? Who would guess that the unlikely prospect of a last-minute patch-up would weaken the euro today? Or that the stock market across the pond to suffer the most would be... London? And that gold, the ultimate refuge, would fall both yesterday and today?

The impact of the threat of Grexit was imperceptible, because of the long build-up, and, I suspect, because Greece represents a mere 3% of the Euro area's economic output. Alexis Tsipras stood on the top of the Acropolis shouting "prosaki" (Greek for "attention") and nobody paid any heed. So today he went on national TV and said they wouldn't dare kick Greece out of the EU.

I leave tomorrow night for a flight to London en route to an irresistible conference about retirement and investment taking place in the Algarve, the sunny southern coast of Portugal. There my husband will speak about retirement, having practiced it for 5 years, and I will talk about global investing.

Apart from weird currency moves, things are otherwise in good order. After nearly 9 weeks of dithering, my imminent depart​ure​ from these shores got the brokerages involved in transferring my stocks and bonds from E*trade to Interactive Brokers to activate their hidden secret team of real human beings to make the process work.

It is an illusion fostered by technology experts to believe that one can automate transfers of securities and money; collecting proper fees for conversions, and dividends for ADRs; custodianship; back offices; market-making; and other bits of the securities business. In the end to get things done there had to be two people talking to each other at the brokerages along with plenty of nudging by the client whenever something went ugly, which was often. Robots screw up terribly!

The worst problem so far was the Japanese custodian for E*trade allegedly giving instructions full of typos. Since Japanese stocks are identified with 4 numbers because there is no way to write stock names foreigners can read, producing a typo must have required real effort. This snafu arose for what my paid subscribers must have guessed was for Chris Loew's locally-listed ordinary shares without American Depositary Receipts. I name them below, for those who may hit the same problem.

The dumbing down of investment options continues, beyond the failure of Barron's to maintain its record on reporting data on closed-end funds and E*trades decision to shut down its global trading facility next month. The latest gap in knowledge is The Financial Times of today failing to report on​largest trades, gains, and losses in each market. It is an illusion fostered by techies that people don't want to know this after a big market crisis day. In fact that is when they want and need data the most. I was thinking of installing a ticker tape machine in my office to fill the gap.

The Shanghai market is up 5.5% today after the week-end 0.25% rate cut failed to revive Chinese stock exchanges. To get the markets up, the "Communist" government in Beijing issued new rules allowing state pension plans to invest up to 30% of their money in stocks, which would create inflows of nearly $100 bn. Bloomberg said China was behaving like "a penny stock".

*I will present www.Global-Investing.com to participants at the Live and Invest Overseas conference on July 10 at 11 am at the Tivoli Almansor hotel in Carvoeiro, Algarve, Portugal, in the Lagoa room. I will also tell people about bringing dogs to Portugal in the same room the day before, and my husband will speak at much greater length about Portugal as a retirement destination on Weds at 10:30 am.

More from Japan, Spain, Finland, Kenya, India, South Africa, Britain, the UAE, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, France, Colombia, Greece, and Egypt.

*The Japanese custodian's typo was over Rion or Shinmaywa.

*Banco Santander faces a second managerial reshuffle less than a year after Ana Patricia Botin took over from her father to chair the Spanish bank, and it is a humdinger. Juan Rodriguez Inciate, a 30-yr veteran at SAN who worked closely with her father is stepping down from its board.

Enrique Garcia Candelas is being ousted as Spain country chief and sent off to Portugal which is a downgrade. Garcia Candelas is being replaced by an Ana Patricia associate from her days running the London operations, Rami Aboukhair, who will its new country head for Spain. A Spaniard by nationality, born in Granada, Señor Aboukhair began his career working in Latin America for Repsol, a Spanish oil firm. After studying at Insead in France and the Advanced Management Program at Harvard, in 2002 he joined Banesto, a SAN sub. There he invented a credit card linked to the Spanish world cup team's red colors before tackling the bad customer service reputation of SAN's British units and breaking down the barriers between private banking, insurance, and normal banking under the 123 account under Ms Botin.

His distinction is not his record but his ethnicity. To judge from his name, he is the kind of Spaniard last seen running things in that country prior to 1492, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled the Moors from Spain. In the interval, Granada was where Moors sighed, not a place from which they rose to run things in Madrid! Of course everyone is too polite to mention this except me. I have no idea what religion Aboukhair practices.

​Even if it is Christianity, this doesn't make his name less Moorish.

Oil and Water

*News that future oil exploration spending is being cut by Brazil's Petrobras will reduce output by a third or 1.4 bn barrels per day by year end means that the famous glut of oil may also come to an end soon. Former BP plc chairman Tony Hayward famously predicted there would be a new crude shortage as soon as next summer and a new bull market in oil. While everyone expects delays at US startups producing shale oil and tight gas, the Brazilians were not expected to cut back too. Also facing production problems is Iraq and its neighbor Iran may not be able to flood the market with its oil if sanctions aren't lifted. Where will the shortfall be pumped from? My state has just banned high-volume fracking because of a probably misplaced fear of leakage of chemicals into underground water reservoirs which have survived 60 years of oil drilling in some parts of New York State.

PBR was upgraded to hold from reduce by HSBC analysts on the cutback news with a $9.15 target price. My play would be BP itself despite the risk that it will have to pay as much as $13.7 bn in fines over the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The US Supremes kicked the case back down to a lower court

*As the Israeli parliament prepares to vote on the security cabinet deal with Delek Group, DGRLY announced that it will boost output of the current Tamar field and speed up developing the future monster Leviathan field. It will also exit other natural gas reservoir development at Karish and Tanin. The cabinet gave Delek and its operator partner Noble Energy a 10-year concession for Leviathan which led to Israeli street protests over the potential monopoly between them. The stock is down but I expect the vote to go Delek's way.

*Veolia Environnement will help to control water supply in Colombia, where problems sometimes arise because FARC guerrillas blow up pipelines, as they did twice last week. VEOEY signed to clean up wastewater and provide drinking water in Monteria municipality by bringing sewage and water pipes to the unconnected 18% of the town under a 2 year contract worth euros 226 mn. The town is on the un-navigable Sinu River between Medellin and Cartagena, where we visited two years ago. It is full of exotics, Indians, Arabs, Conquistador Spaniards, and Afri-colombians. VEOEY is also guaranteeing muni bonds issued by Hodgkins Village (IL) to build a $53. mn biosolids sewage plant.

Ding Dong

*Nokia is peddling its HERE mapping, navigation, and location services and now has found a new function for the software in cars: warning about safety hazards on Finnish roads under a pilot project in NOK's homeland. The test will involve drivers reporting hazards both by cellphone (cell-talking driving is legal for Finns) as well as on-board cameras, both linked automatically to the cloud. The aim is to generate warnings to other cars about obstacles or to get help for accidents from the cloud data to improve road safety. The program will start on small roads but in early next year will become effective on the Helsinki-Turku highway and two of Helsinki's ring roads (1 and 3) where the new information will be considerable. The program will run to 2017 as NOK links with the Finland's transport agency, its Coop highway safety body, and a traffic IT service firm, Infotripla.

*Vodafone announced that it has "comprehensive contingency plans" for a Greek exit from the euro bloc based on electronic payment links between VOD and its suppliers and customers. The process is based on M-Pesa, the cellphone payment system which bypasses banks, invented in Kenya. Greece is one of 46 countries where the M-Pesa system functions. VOD does over 60% of its business within Europe (including Britain) but I cannot figure out how much in Greece. It is probably pretty minor but it offers 4G countrywide in Greek and English.

Separately, Vodacom, VOD's listed South Africa sub, won preliminary Pretoria approval for the acquisition of Neotel, being bought from India's Tata Group for ZAR 7 bn (about $575 mn) which will ease the way for an eventual South African govt exit from Vodacom shareholding.

Too bad I am leaving for Europe this week because after June 2017 the European Union will end roaming charges for cellphone users outside their home country but elsewhere in the 28 nations (if you include Greece.)

*From the Naspers conference call yesterday you might get the impression that China's Tencent is a key focus of the South African firm's strategy, but this is wrong. NPSNY aims to do it again in India where is owns 80% of RedBus (on-line ticketing), ibobo (an on-line travel site with which it bought into RedBus), and 16.7% of e-commerce site Flipkart. Naspers got these sites by buying out TCTZF, its former jv partner in India. Flipkart is supposed to be the Indian Alibaba.

This was reported by Dow-Jones after new CEO Bob van Dijk did his first conference call stressing that Naspers is targeting market​s with above-average growth potential besides China.

What Dow-Jones failed to write is that Napsers is also tackling the Middle East, with 35.8% of the Souq Group which is an online retailer in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, and the Emirates and a 53.6% share of Dubizzle, an online classified ad platform in based in Dubai.

Fund Fun

*Our Dutch-registered Amsterdam-listed Pershing Square Holdings closed-end fund shares are now eligible for settlement by the Britain's Crest system which should cut the discount from net asset value. Under Dutch law, a share may be traded wherever a buyer and a seller get together, which however doesn't solve the foreign settlement matter. We own PSHZF in the US where it trades on the pink sheets in the gray market. If it is full listed in London it will be more liquid.

*A speedy recovery from the selloff was shown by Fibra Uno. FBASF rose over 3%. Eduardo Garcia in www.sentidocomun.co.mx says it si because it raised NMP 1.2 bn ($76.4 mn) with sale of its new institutional instrument for collecting direct investments in its real estate developments.

*New Ireland Fund paid on June 25 a distribution of 28.343 cents entirely from capital gains. IRL

Miscellany

*Infosys did not fall 50% since we sold it, but did a 100% stock dividend. For some reason Deutsche Bank the ADR depositary took a fee for this.

​So geht's.​

Vivian is holding forth a talk about global investing at the www.liveandinvestoverseas.com conference and that you can find out more by visiting www.global-investing.com where she will tell about the meeting and advise about moving to Europe with dogs.