The Failure of My Investment

Is investment really important? When I was teenager, I always thought investment is something which able to bring me greater return than normal savings, with certain risks applied. Perhaps investment can make me rich, or at least ready for my retirement. When I listened to my teachers and relatives, investment is very easy, just dump the savings into somewhere offers more interests than your bank savings account for short or long term. Perhaps they are right, because I know nothing about it at that moment.

When I grow up and enter to the society to work, I tried to do what the oldies have told me. I've started to invest my savings into insurance and unit trusts since 2003. I got about average return of 10% a month from unit trusts, which is good. After few years back, my unit trust portfolio average return dropped to -30%, due to economy recession. Furthermore, the unit trust company is sucking my 5-6% of investment amount per entry. What a thrill! I was very unhappy about it, as after few years time, I've got negative, might as well I put the money in the fixed deposit!

I started to avoid diversification after I know how it increases my risk.

I continued to look for alternative investments which able to offer me higher annual return, which were foreign exchange and stock market. Sorry, I burnt my hand for these investments, due to I know nothing much about them. I proceed to look for other more solid and stable investment like real estate, unfortunately, the real estate price is already at the sky-high level nowadays in our country, and a person like me with average monthly income of RM1-2k should not be afford to pay the installment. Furthermore, I found out real estate is not worth to invest for me, for 3 main reasons. Perhaps I'll explain about it in detail in my coming post.

So what's left now? Marrying someone for her money? No, I'm not handsome and cheeky enough. Buy the lottery with return of RM20 millions everyday? No, I lost interest to do it for now, it's kind of wasting my money anyway. Invest my self to become a movie or rock star? Not potential enough. Fixed deposit and live frugally? No, I can beat the inflation and I want to bring a better living standard to my family. The more i think, the more I pissed off, because I don't know what should my plan be, while my age is growing.

Is real estate investment designed for the rich? Pls wait for my next post.

Until lately, I realized investment should be very simple. Not to blame unit trust or real estate anymore for now, as they can make good money very well too, provided we understand and know how to. To invest, we just need to know some basic rules, understand the investment we want, and come out with a system to do and monitor it. I should be invest without any risk! That's what we looking for, isn't? And investment should be just like a starting-up and managing a business. As you already know, business should be the ultimate investment we should look for. If the business is built successfully, it can gives us the good return perhaps until we are off from this world. If you already know what I'm talking about, very good for you. If not, please try to read 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' again.

So for now, I'm working on my investment plan with a draft system, perhaps I need a couple of years time to prove it works. I really hope it will works and let me have the good return for the remaining of my life. If I'm success, perhaps you'll see me posting up my result here. If I'm failed, well, at least I've tried my best. You won't laugh at me, right.

Is there any giant rich ass in this world doesn't do investment?

Have a nice weekends, my friend.

CommunicAsia 2009

This week, I've been to CommunicAsia 2009, the 20th international communications and information technology exhibition and conference. It was a great experience for me to explore what are the existing and new IT products, services and solutions, surrounding with sexy models and technologies.

Apart from Singapore companies, the exhibitors also came from Austrialia, Brunei, Canada, Malaysia, Korea, China, France, Germany, Russia and so on. Let's look at what are the interesting stuffs and comments I found from the exhibition.

1) Singtel Booth - Driving F1 Simulation
Perhaps Singtel was one of the heaviest investment in this exhibition, as they managed to get in a F1 simulator to let the vistors to try on. The F1 itself will vibrate, move left, right, forward & backward according to the racing track, just like you driving a real F1. I didn't manage to try it due to long queue. Anyway, it looks fun and good experience.

The most impressive game of the exhibition - F1 Simulator

2) Yahoo! Booth - Nothing surprising me
Yahoo! joined the exhibition for the 1st time, and they have a private party on the 1st day, which I was not invited. They offer light foods, alcohol & beverages but it looks like nothing suprising me. Perhaps this booth is the shortest time I spent in overall.

Yahoo! Booth. Sorry, there was no promoters found.

3) Blackberry
Blackberry was having a short seminar and party on the 2nd day. The booth is displaying the latest Blackberry models, which I'm not really into it, including the Blackberry girls.

Blackberry, very big version of model walking around the exhibition.

4) LG and Samsung - Impressive mobile models & promoter uniform
LG and Samsung, as usual, displaying the latest mobile models to the visitors. Their booths are very big and most of the new models look cool. They hired many sexy promoters with nice looking uniform to explain the features of every new models. The most impressive part was LG hired a professional team of Korean street dancers to perform dancing twice a day. Thumbs up.

Outlook of LG booth.

Outlook of Samsung booth.

Street dancer from LG.

5) Telekom Malaysia (TM) - Lousiest booth compared to the booths above
Not to say I'm not supporting my own country's booth, but it's really sucks. The promoters they hired are sucks and unprofessional. They look like the teenagers on the streets and most of the time sit there and not doing their works. And the only game TM offered is the lousy soccer game. Well, may be I'm wrong. Move on, please!

This is the soccer game, my friend.

6) CBoss - Impressive promoters
Perhaps CBoss is nothing much to display on it's technology, but the promoters. In fact, I don't really understand why they setup a stage just for a few Russian promoters carrying the Cboss board and stand there for the whole day. Perhaps they want to promote the name of CBoss? I don't manage to ask their Boss anyway.

CBoss promoters posting on the stage.

Overall the exhibition is successful, many exhibitors but the crowds seem a bit weak this year, perhaps due to economy recession. I'm looking forward the coming CommunicAsia and hope they will do it even better. Cheers.

How to Look for New Blogging Topic?

I know, I know. I was missing in action for 2 weeks, due to I was on vacation in the 1st week, and I was lazy of blogging on the 2nd week. Very sorry about that, as I'm running out of interesting topic to be posted here to share with you all at this moment. I believe it should be the hardest time that blogger running out of topic? Perhaps it's related to my lousy lifestyle I have at this moment.

Whatever it is, topic is always there, but depends whether we want to spend time and effort to write the topic out. So how do we find source of topics in order to keep our blog running with new post? There are a few ways perhaps we can look into. Before that, it is important that what category we are blogging about, and then we will find the right source from there. For me, I write about anything I'm interested. So I'll based on my own suggestions for the following ways.

This is the blogging topic statistic generated at 2007.

If you are a social person and always attending certain events, campaign, functions etc, you won't have much problem in updating your blog, because the event itself will drive you to your topic. Perhaps the best candidate would be Kennysia, as he is always invited to attend certain events and on vacation. Sometimes, he also asked to write an advertisement blog from advertisors. He is a pretty success blogger with interesting topics sometimes.

If you are non-social person or prefer to stay at home, a hot and fresh topic can always find out from the Internet, such as online newspaper, magazine, youtube and other people's blogs. For example, swine flu, or perhaps the latest celebrity news of Paris Hilton vs Cristiano Ronaldo.

This is my favorite latest news.

If both are none of our business, perhaps we can look into sharing of what we know or expertise in. For example, an IT engineer will has a lot to share and talk about IT outlook and technologies. Or a salesman has a lot to talk about the value of the product & services. That would be even easier when there is a news related your field or expertise is coming out, you may comment about it according to your opinion. Sometimes, it is good to insert some golden story or jokes, we all love to story and jokes, don't we?

Anyway, whatever we write, it doesn't mean there is a reader. So identify readers need, monitoring and marketing our blog is vital. But seriously I don't have much time to do so at this moment, so I wish you all bloggers good luck and have a nice weekend. ;)