10 Rules for Investment - Part I

Do you know how to invest in stock? I don't really know. But do know discipline and follow the rules do help us a lot, in terms of consistent profitability. Yes, this is very true if you are one of them, including Warren Buffet.

Since Warren Buffet is the 'God of Stock' for many years, whatever he said or did, we will follow him. So for his followers, are you able to reap profit from the stock market already? Well for me, follow people's idea might not always a permanent solution. Perhaps at the beginning stage is still okay. Eventually we need to rely on our own analysis and insight.

Warren Buffet, the richest man in the world. If we don't listen to him, who can we listen to?

I read a very interesting Taiwan magazine, 'Cheers' this morning, and would like to share with you all here. According to the magazine author, if you want to trade like Warren Buffet, there are 10 rules you might really need to take into consideration.

Rule $10
If you think a good trader must know how to calculate in complication, then you might need be a waiter first.

Basically, what you need is only basic calculation and calculating percentage output. Most importantly, you need to gather information about the company you want to invest, visit the related company, understand the structure of the company and how it makes revenue etc. As simple as it is.

Rule $9
You won't able to reap much profit if you buy hot pick stock.

It should be the time for you to let go the stock in your hand, when the particular stock price is rising dramatically. It should be the time for you to pick a good price for entering, when the particular stock is falling dramatically.

Just like Warren Buffet, he managed to buy China Petrol and hold it for many years when it is just on board. China Petrol is hiked like crazy during 2007 and it is the time when many people investing into it. But Warren sold all his stock in hand for about HKD12.4 per unit. The stock did shoot up to HKD20 and above, but it falls significant back to single digit after a short while.

China Petrol made a history of making many investors lost their money, but not Warren. Don't be greedy.

Rule $8
Don't ever try to ask the barber whether it's time for you to cut your hair.

Normally we will ask our consultant or broker whether there is any problem in our investment. In fact, we can find out by ourselves easily. In short, financial consultant, bank investor, lawyer, mechanic, doctor are all the same, they are solving people's problem to keep them survive. For the sake to survive, they will try the best to find out 'any problem' from you. You got the point here?

Rule $7
You want to be the worst lover within people's eyes but you are the great lover in reality or, you want to be the great lover within people's eyes but you are the worst lover in reality?

The rule of thumb is to keep your own thinking. You don't need to follow other people (or so called expert) opinion or the market trend. Or you don't even need to see how people think of you. We only need to focus on the fact and reality without the interruption of others.

Great lover, anyone?

Rule $6
It's just like a baseball game, don't simply hit the ball when there is no confident.

To be a good player in baseball game, you must wait for an appropriate opportunity to hit the ball. It's the same as a trader, you must be patient to wait for an opportunity. If you cannot predict the company future, don't invest into it. If the company has not earn any single cent, it won't able to make any money for you either.

Okay, it's kinda tired to translate & summarize from a Chinese article to an English article due to my broken language. But I still do hope you can understand what am I translated. Anyway, I think it's too long for me to list out 10 rules in a post. So I'll leave the other half into my next post.

Have a nice weekend, folks.

Valentine Gift

Hah! It's Valentine Day again. Have you prepare your Valentine present to your love one?

As a male, most of the time the gift and surprise preparation does make us headache, as we have to think and do it repeatedly every year. In fact, what is actually the ideal gift for your girl friend or spouse for this year? How about make it creatives? Romantic? Expensive? Exclusive? Unique? Make it simple or perhaps avoid the celebration?

I believe chocolates and flowers are no longer in favor due to serious recession impact. In South Korea, the hottest gift is "cash". I'm not sure what's have in Malaysia and Singapore. The most common one I noticed is "dinner".

Chocolate used to be Valentine gifts, how about now?

In order to know what is the most 'efficient' Valentine gift, perhaps we can get some opinions from the gift receivers, females. Below are the opinions provided by3 Chinese females (Chinese translated).

A 20 years old undergraduate said: "Stuffs like flowers and chocolates, to be frank they are not attractive for me anymore, no matter from my boy friend, admirers. It's best if he can notice what I long looking for, and then buy it for me on that day. Then it will really touch me."

Will 'Valentine Cash' will be happening in the future? You better don't try.

A 28 lawyer said: "To be honest, no matter what present or where we celebrate, it doesn't matter to me. The most important is I can feel he is 'true' and care about me. As simple as that."

A 48 years married fashion designer said: "After married for so long and the kids are studying high school, I feel not reality to have romantic anymore. Therefore, I wish my husband can spend more time with me, talk to each other, enjoy together, the rests will just leave for the children."

I wonder why red wine comes into picture during Valentine dinner. Preparing for next activity?

Did you see that? Different age level of female looking for different objectives and satisfaction, so do men. The older elder we are, the lower requirements we looking ahead. In reality, perhaps we have to live in that way, unless we are pursuing something else. That's the deal. Okay, you should know what to prepare for the coming Valentine Day by now, right?

Even though I don't have a partner to celebrate Valentine Day at this moment, it's quite unique to me. Because most of my friends won't be available to accompany or let me accompany that day. I hope I won't face this problem again in next year. xp

Happy Valentine Day to all of you!

Never Ending Broadband Issue

I believe most of us are using broadband instead of dial-up or ISDN nowadays. We opted for broadband because it is supposedly affordable and offering better bandwidth speed to the consumer. Sounds great.

I read an article about "All Koreans to have 1Gbps broadband by 2012" recently. Koreans are currently enjoying bandwidth speed up to 100Mbps, which is too good to be true for us. I'm not sure about the actual quality of their bandwidth, it should be a good news for Koreans, especially Internet geek like us, and create job opportunities for the locals. I would say Koreans are aggressive and they want to be the top in technology, including information technology, LCD, automation etc. As what I posted before, Koreans are the most hardworking people around the world in overall.

Koreans are not only hardworking, many of them are pretty as well.

Unfortunately, the situation is totally opposite in our country, perhaps due to single telco monopolization. I've to admit I hate this. We have about 512kbps to 2Mbps. I consider it as gift because it should be sufficient for us to perform daily routine like surfing, send and receive email, online chatting, software download, video streaming, or perhaps P2P download. Unfortunately, we are not getting what we have. For 1Mbps subscriber, we might getting less than 200kbps most of the time, and sometimes it is under maintenance or under very poor performance. This is totally unacceptable and under satisfaction. We always feel like the telco is sucking our money without deliver adequate quality to us.

Like what I posted before, complaints in this issue were like nothing or no longer a hot topic in our country, as they were immuned to it. You know what the technical manager stood out to reply us? As usual, she is blaming the boom of the unlimited bandwidth subscribers, temporary technical issue, user should upgrade to 1-2Mbps instead of smaller bandwidth, and the primary cause of this is the massive p2p download clog up the bandwidht pipes etc. Hey come on, that's your fault of promoting the 'unlimited bandwidth' package to the end-users. In user point of view, there is nothing wrong with it, and it should be telco's problem and to resolve it.

P2P traffics clogging the bandwidth pipe indeed an issue for all ISP around the world.

Finally, along these few years, the telco willing to spend minial efforts to 'try' to resolve the issue by increasing the allocated broadband bandwidth and implementing bandwidth controller 2 years ago. Bandwidth controller such as Allot and Packeteer able to categorize and limit how much the total bandwidth of certain service and protocol type consume. For example, the telco has about 1000Mbps total uplink bandwidth, and it only limits about 10% (100Mbps) to be cater for p2p download, regardless how many downloads and users it is. Sounds cool!

Bandwidth controller is good to control your bandwidth.

However, by the time they implemented it, p2p encryption is introduced to overcome this limitation. Haha! Millions of dollars were invested by the problem remain unsolved. So how?

From my point of view, they definitely need to continue to enlarge their existing bandwidth pipes by 200%, as more and more subscribers are coming in. As we have been stuck at 1-2Mbps range for too long, it's time to introduce new package of 5-10Mbps bandwidth to attract more revenue.

Bandwidth issue is something like traffic jam issue.

Apart from that, they should introduce and implement p2p caching soonest, such as PeerApp. P2p caching will try to function like a web proxy server, where it will cache p2p and video streaming traffics to the hard disks. This relatively affordable solution for ISP not only able to greatly save up the total bandwidth while reduce bandwidth costs, but also accelerate the p2p download and video streaming, thus improve user satisfaction and productivity. Sounds great to be true, and it is. However, I'm not sure about the mp3/video pattern infringement policy, but defintely it is not that strict in Asia country.

We hope our telco and the CEO will sincerely improve the broadband service for us and for the country other than continuing to reap revenue.

My Chinese New Year Version

Hi folks. Sorry for no update here for almost 2 weeks, as I've been falling sick for more than a week. I've yet to recover until today. It's very bad to fall sick but it's out of my control. Anyway, I would like to share with you on what is happening around my hometown in Malaysia lately.

I went back to my hometown during CNY. Before that, we all know the whole world is suffering from recession and some of them are under deflation, including my country. And the world fuel price has also dropped more than 70%, where Malaysia has dropped the retail petrol price about 33% (it's still expensive at RM1.8 per liter though). Great, I should expected some price drop for the stuffs and foods in my hometown too.

It's USD40 per barrel now. I don't understand why our fuel price is still very expensive!

However, I got the totally wrong opinion. The foods in my hometown are getting much more expensive, the price hike of the stuffs cannot escape too. Everything is getting much more expensive, what a disappointment! Imagine some Chinese restaurants without air-con selling a plate of small portion chicken/pork rice can cost us about RM5.50, is it too much? I've too add rice and it cost me another RM1. I personally think RM4.50 is already too much, after consider the portion given. I thought our consumer association is doing something for us. Both parties are money suckers. Wtf. Unfortunately, these restaurants still full with people, and it's very pack. I'm not sure how rich the consumers are, but definitely they are not eating what they paid for.

RM5.50 for a small plate of pork rice like this? Don't kidding me, my friend!

I'm not sure whether it is healthy to boycott their restaurant, or refuse to eat at their restaurant, until they force to drop the price to a satisfy level. Anyway, I think my hometown people won't going to do that, and they are just desperate of getting expensive food. Old Chinese used to say, 'if it's not expensive, you won't get good stuff/reward', I doubted.

I used to get RM10 per Ang Pow, now perhaps RM2 and RM5, sometimes 'none'.

Another thing is, I really felt that this Chinese New Year is very quiet, I mean not as happening as previous years, and the economy is slowing down where the buying power is greatly reduce compare to last few years, even on cheap sales. In view of many shopping malls and merchandise are going to open soon, I doubt many of them will be having good businesses. I think it's the same for many other countries, especially developed countries.

Well, if this is the case, why don't we borrow this opportunity to start to boost up and promote online business? I reserve my point here due to my hometown people's attitude and the conservative level. We have to try anyway.

I believe lion dance is getting less popular nowadays?

Of course, Ang Pow accumulation was greatly reduced as well, and I didn't see most of my old friends came back for celebration. The most important one for CNY event, lion dance also greatly reduced. To be honest there is not even ONE lion came to my house to collect Ang Pow. It was so pissed off.

In summary, I've an unhappy Chinese New Year this year. I hope I have a happier one on next year, and definitely it will. ;)