Not cheap, Fiscally concerned

My browser of choice is Fire-Fox, the biggest reason is the most important plugin out there - “AdBlock Plus”. This plugin prevents you from wasting time and bandwidth downloading ads which will often blur your vision while trying to read web content. I’ve been using it for more than a year and it has made browsing the web much faster on many different machines.

I know that many bloggers who actually do make money from blogging (not me) are using AdSense and other services to allow a tiny monthly income, and this plugin kills it for everyone - but for the web content consumers it is simply worth it.

P.S.
Before downloading Fire-Fox and installing AdBlock, be nice - click on an add on this site. Just clicking on an adsense sends me a cent or two, clicking on other content like Zecco or others might not make any dough for me, but I assure you I try to collect ads which could help you the reader. It is more important to me to provide you with value than make any money. Is this why I didn’t make any money? No it’s because I don’t chase readers and advertise much, so I get very little traffic - if you’re here, I’d love to hear feedback about the kind of content I provide…

Sample ads you can click:

OK - back to business, download and browse faster here:

Firefox

Adblock Plus

Happy Faster Browsing,
Cheers!

To those who downloaded and are using “Free Stocks Ticker”, here’s a quick FYI:

When you add feeds in the options xml, if the feed URL has the character ‘&’ in it, replace that character with & to avoid a crash and losing your options xml file. This is an XML standard, the character is used by that standard to signal many other characters as is documented in this wikipedia page.

To try it out, here are a few sample RSS feeds from financial websites you can add:

<feed>
<name>Coke stock market watch feed</name>
<url>http://www.marketwatch.com/rss/newsfinder/AllMarketWatchNews/?p=word&amp;pv=KO&amp;t=KO&amp;dist=TQP_Icon_rss</url>
</feed>
<feed>
<name>Pepsi stock google finance feed</name>
<url>http://finance.google.com/finance?morenews=10&amp;rating=1&amp;q=PEP&amp;output=rss</url>
</feed>
<feed>
<name>Alteria stock yahoo finance feed</name>
<url>http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=MO</url>
</feed>

Another note, for some feeds, like financial news for individual stocks, you might wish to increase how old you want the posts to be allowed, I increased it to 60 for these feeds:

<maxDaysOld>60</maxDaysOld>

Cheers!

I went early in the morning to Staples, and was disappointed not to find anything from what I was looking for. Some of the stuff that was supposed to be there on sale throughout the weekend, they didn’t even have any to begin with. Usually - that’s my favorite least stressful black Friday and general holiday season bargain place for office supplies, school supplies and electronics. I’ll track online for any better deals up to the end of December.

My two sites of choice for shopping this season:
Amazon.com
DealsOfAmerica.com

Cheers!

When I said there’s more to life than money (or losing it in the stock market) I meant it. I’m happy to announce that today our third daughter, Maya, was born.

No bad weather can spoil days like these.
Cheers!

I used to question the relevance of studying imaginary numbers in school. I was told it is useful in physics.
Wikipedia: Imaginary number - so yea, no imaginary numbers - no battery for you.

In times of extreme market pessimism, you might squint at your brokerage statement, look at the number and get confused, you might think for a moment that you are looking at imaginary numbers…

Just remember - there’s no i or square root of -1 in this financial calamity.

You know - it might be a cliche but there are more important things than money. Money doesn’t buy happiness, though it can help. Our family is getting geared towards a fantastic next week and I’ll post about it after the occasion. Focus on the good stuff in life.

Here’s something funny I stumbled upon, within Math Humor, found:
Top Ten Math Major Pick-Up Lines

10. You fascinate me more than the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.
9. Since distance equals velocity times time, let’s let velocity or time approach infinity, because I want to go all the way with you.
8. My love for you is like a concave up function because it is always increasing.
7. Let’s convert our potential energy to kinetic energy.
6. Wanna come back to my room….and see my 733mhz Pentium?
5. You and I would add up better than a Riemann sum.
4. Your body has the nicest arc length I’ve ever seen.
3. I wish I was your derivative because then I would be tangent to your curves.
2. I hope you know set theory because I want to intersect you and union you.
1. Would you like to see my log?

Cheers!

… They bite too…

30 reasons for Great Depression 2 by 2011

What’s the point of reading that - except to recognize that there’s real negative sentiment right now?! Yes - economic news these days is shitty++. Bulls are off in vacation (whereas some of them should be in prison…).

I should mention that this particular gloom and doom bear is… well… not really appreciated by his peers. Appropriate response found to his gloomy article:

I thought this guy had been a little too quiet lately. Apparently he was preparing his excuse for those bullet-proof, can’t lose “Lazy Portfolios” he pitched all year.

Who am I to know if he’s right or not. For that matter - I believe the current market reactions only proves that nobody really knows what will happen next. The only thing that is certain is that nobody sees any good in the future.

Continuing from my previous posts about strategic portfolio allocations, I present to you the following called “Bearded-Bear”:

Allocation is as follows:
SHY - 80% (Safest known income - Short term treasury bonds)
IAU - 10% (Gold trust)
SH - 10% (Short S&P 500)

The rational behind this portfolio is as follows: The portfolio seeks to maintain asset values over the long run regardless of the market volatility. The portfolio assumes the value of the treasury bonds will erode over time and therefor has a small allocation of gold. The allocation to gold and to bear funds is very small to reduce the affect of volatility. In case the portfolio is implemented at times of bull markets, the portfolio is expected to maintain its value because the large allocation to bonds will produce enough income to overcome the losses of the bear fund. It should show some gains when inflation is in play by the rise in the price of gold. At an extreme bear market like we are having, where deflation is in play, the bear fund takes it’s turn and bursts ahead to produce a portfolio that could withstand time.

That was the thought behind this portfolio, I’m not trying to sell it to you. In fact, I encourage you to read my disclaimer.

Related Posts:

Go no where Portfolio
Strategic Income Portfolio
Collection of Standard Sample Portfolios (Balanced, Conservative, Growth etc)
Investment Tactics

Cheers!

P.S. I just heard Bill O’Reilly telling his radio listeners “Frugality Now”… So I’ll link back to my own “Frugality Now” post.

Cheers Again.

I’m kind of embarrassed to write this, but I did do this. Many restaurant chains out there provide you with excellent birthday coupons if you register for their “club”. For the price of being subjected to promotional spam, once a year you get a cool coupon for a free appetizer or meal or soup or a cup of water. I opt for the better coupons of course.

Now what’s the hustler part here? No one will check your ID for your real birthday. Also, many won’t check for multiple registrations with different emails. So, if you open multiple hotmail accounts, and register with – say – 50 different birthdays, one a week for a whole year, you’d be flooded with birthday coupons.

A coupon is nice, especially if you like the restaurant – but it’s still only a coupon and in this climate, I don’t know who can afford going out to a restaurant once a week.

My preferred birthday coupon is from my preferred restaurant –“ On The Border”. I get free empanadas, which are just yummy. I’m a bit sorry to report that recently they decreased the portion size of their servings, and increased the price. I hope they won’t run out of business like many other chains. I track their stock ticker for news and hold my fingers they make it through because I really like their food. I don’t care that much for Chilli though (part of the same corporation). Ticker is “EAT” – and they pay 5.4% dividend right now. Sadly though – the price action shows investors are betting Brinker is going under…

Mmmm… Empanadas and cerveza… grrrr….
Cheers!

Depressor of the day to peek out of his hole, see his own shadow and run back in. It is winter after all…

Bespoke/Financial Times: Merrill CEO compares situation with 1929

Warm and Fuzzy Headline of the Day
While the volatility in the market has been giving similar signals for several weeks now, we haven’t seen many high-profile headlines like the one in today’s Financial Times below:

Mr. Thain went on to say, “Right now, the US economy is contracting very rapidly. We are looking at a per­iod of global slowdown…This is not like 1987 or 1998 or 2001. The contraction going on is bigger than that. We will in fact look back to the 1929 period to see the kind of slow­down we’re seeing now.”

Now, it would be one thing if the headline and comments had come from any number of economists who typically take a dour outlook. But these comments came from the CEO of one of the largest brokerage firms in the world. His company’s job is to sell stocks, and comments like this don’t necessarily give investors nostalgia for the good old days.

Looking on the bright side, as we learned earlier in the year when the firm raised additional capital twice after repeatedly telling investors that it was well capitalized (see comments below), when it comes to comments from Merrill’s management, investors should take everything they say with a grain of salt.

In a “half glass full”, kinda psychotic way - I think Thain forgot to say “wink-wink-nudge-nudge know what I mean?!”

I suggest hacking to major DNS servers and replacing all the news site mapping to this:
happynews.com

That should relieve the consumer confidence crisis and have the economy shooting back up. It sure beats the usual “upbeat” stream of news. Don’t click that link to CNN unless you really want to get depressed.

Cheer Up. Wink-Wink, know what I mean?
Cheers!

Is it my imagination or did MorningStar.Com found a new shade of red to signal the state of the market? I Believe they went from bright red, to scorching lava to “too close to the sun” red.