Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Answering questions

I try to predict everything. Which way a car is about to change lanes on the road before it turns on its blinkers to how the stock market is performing. Unfortunately, I've taken this to the max.

Something that I do these days is that I try to answer people's questions before they finish their sentences. For example:

[at the library, holding a book in hand]

Librarian: Are you
Me: yes [hands book over]

But the problem is that this is not entirely perfect. While unlikely the librarian could have been asking me "Are you gay", or "Are you a terrorist" or, God forbid "Are you Ben? I know all about you and read your inspirational blog..." The system breaks down pretty quickly.

I'm trying really hard to answer people's questions after they finish their sentence. Its just I feel like I'm wasting time waiting for them to finish whatever redundant thing they were about to say.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Merits of taking a day off

It seems like everything is becoming more and more busy by the minute, but I really think that there are good reasons to take a day off from everything and relax.

Let's see the benefits of taking a day off:
  • Taking a break  - people are busy, they need time off
  • Improving productivity on other days - Taking a day off means more motivation to get things done sooner, rather than just pushing it off to the next day.
  • Finding time to do low priority items - the problem with doing things based on priority is that there are always going to be higher priority items, but that doesn't mean that low priority items can be just pushed aside.

I really had no good post ideas. Maybe the next post will be better.

Friday, January 31, 2014

2008 revisited

Happy new year! Hopefully everyone is doing well.

I was looking through some old blog posts when I found my 3 stock recommendations from 2008. Lets see how I did (disclosure: I did not trade stocks back then, but I really with I did)

AMZN: 600% gain! :D Yeah. I made a good call here.
GM: dead. 100% loss. Bankrupt. Oh well.
B: 200% gain! Not as good as AMZN but much better then GM...

Basically, if you allocated 1/3 to each stock, you'd be doing pretty well right now.

So what to do now??

Sell AMZN. This news probably would have come in more handy a few days ago (recently dropped a bit)
Buy SLV. Silver demand is at an all time high, but the price hasn't gone up. Unlike gold, silver has industrial uses making it somewhat more useful.
Buy AMD. Great turnaround tech company. AMD has a somewhat large load of debt but they had a wide array of intellectual property and their graphics unit is solid.
Buy KS. They make cardboard boxes. Funny yes, useful for e-commerce, totally.
Buy MSFT. It doesn't matter which CEO they choose to replace Ballmer, as long as Ballmer is gone.

I own AMD and SLV and I may buy or sell any stock at any time. Don't take this as investment advice. This is my way of keeping records of how well I can predict market movements.