Mission Impossible? Think Again…
2007-03-05 13:09:09
I was on my way home taking the MRT from Toa Payoh today. As usual, I walk the same old path from my office to the train station and down the same escalator, but things were a little different this time. Just when I was about halfway down the escalator, I heard the sounds ‘Doors Closing&hellip
;’ and I saw a train on the side I’m supposed to take. I happened to be on the phone with my brother at that time, so I just muttered into the phone “I just missed a train.” However, at this point in time, my legs just suddenly started moving by itself without me thinking.
I sped down the escalator, tripped but did not fall and headed towards the door. I could see a lot of surprised faces as if telling me that I won’t make it, since the doors, it’s an underground station so there are two doors, has started to close before i came close to it, but I just leaped forward suddenly and managed to get into the train. Everyone was startled and I could even see pe
Read more: Mission
, Again
, Mission Impossible
, Think Again
We Learn Useful Stuff in School
2007-03-04 13:31:27
Before I entered university, I used to think that in University, we will only be learning very academic theories and not gain any useful knowledge. In fact, I was still thinking in the same way after one semester, but I finally started to open up my mind to new possibilities this semester. The first instance was after I attended one of my marketing lectures, when I found out that the marketing process closely matches what’s being used by top internet marketers. Then, a thought struck me that perhaps we don’t learn useless stuff after all.
Just recently, when I was learning more about investing indicators, I was exposed to statistics in finance. Well… they do have more fanciful names for each of these indicators, but they are basically using Statistics. It shows that professional traders are out there putting what we learnt in University into practice and making money off them. Then again, I think back to other modules I have taken, such as Business Law, Informa
Read more: Useful
, School
Always Write Things Down
2007-03-02 09:18:18
I just realized that the past few posts are all about investing and stock markets, since there is some interesting happenings going on right now. However, the market is going into a mode of uncertainty as the bulls and bears fight out the war right now. Therefore, I’m writing something different for a change, I guess it’s more or less related to self improvement. Actually, everything I have to say is within the title already, but I would just like to reinforce the importance of writing things down.
Firstly, if you’re like me, you most probably have forgotten to do something once in a while. When that happens, we usually say that it’s not important, that’s why we forget. However, if it is really not important at all, why did we want to do it in the first place? Therefore, I believe in writing things down so that it seems to make the thing more important psychologically. Secondly, having it taken down somewhere means there’s a higher chance for us to
Read more: Write
Long Term Investing vs Short Term Trading
2007-03-01 11:40:38
The market had given many investors a bad belated Chinese New Year present and I’m one of those investors affected. In fact, bad is an understatement. Well… just these past 2 days, my overall portfolio had dropped over 6%, which is enough for most investors to declare the end of their investing journey. From a profit of over 5% to a current loss in just 2 days is not something that the faint-hearted can bear. While I’m currently a mid-term to long-term investor, it’s not a pleasant sight considering that it’s just 2 months into my investing journey.
This made me think of Short
Term trading, which I did pay top dollar to attend seminars and pick up bits of knowledge. It seems that in this current world where everything has been brought more closely together with technology and markets around the world being interconnected, facing global corrections in market is likely to happen at any time. For example, in these past few days, it seems that China led
Read more: Investing
, Trading
, Long Term
Global Economy Slowdown?
2007-02-28 17:07:50
I logged into my mutual fund accounts and saw a large 3% average drop today. This is the biggest change I had experienced in my investment so far, so I went off to read news, which I seldom did. As expected, the news did mention a drop in stock markets around the world, so all my funds were affected. I’m not satisfied with just learning that, so I went off to look at more research to see if there are any markets I should move my funds to. My verdict was that it seems like stock markets and consequently mutual funds are not the best thing to buy into at the moment and I’ll explain why. Before I do that, let’s just look at my portfolio, which had suffered the full impact.
Now that you have seen how hard my portfolio had been hit, let me go on to explain my rationale. First of all, I looked through the news on various websites and they said that they are expecting the medium-term to look good. It’s basically just a good way to say that in the short-term, the stoc
Read more: Global
, Slowdown
Investing in Bonds
2007-02-27 17:09:23
My friend left a comment and said that there was a trend in bond investing, therefore I’m blogging specifically about bonds in this post. Bonds
are basically fixed income instruments, but it does not mean that there are no risks involved. Basically, you are taking some form of risk even when putting your money in fixed deposits, because even a bank can go bankrupt. Yes, you didn’t see wrongly. Note that just because we rarely see banks go bankrupt does not mean that it can’t happen. Returning to our topic… Bonds is basically a way for companies to borrow money from the public.
Bonds are first issued and then traded on the exchanges. When it’s first issued, the company gets a sum of money in return for the promise to pay either yearly or semi-annually coupon payments. To illustrate this, bonds are normally denominated in $1,000. Therefore, you will invest $1,000 upfront and the company will give you a sum of money every year or every 6 months, ranging f
Read more: Investing
Financial Instruments You Can Invest In
2007-02-21 19:19:38
As promised in my last post, I will introduce the common financial instruments that investors use to build their wealth. Before I go on, let’s just have a disclaimer… I make no representation that I’m an expert in investing and my purpose is only in opening up your mindset. Investing is subjected to risks and I do not assume any responsibilities, even if I was negligent in providing information, if you make any decisions after reading this blog. You are 100% responsible for your own decisions. Haha, I just got to put my Business Law knowledge into use, hence this disclaimer. With that said, I expect everyone to study what they are investing in as thoroughly as the level of risk requires. Let’s move on
About Stocks
Buying stocks is basically buying a part of a company. A company might issue different classes of stocks and give different privileges to each class, such as different voting rights. There are also two types of Stocks, namely Preferred Stocks and
Read more: Financial
, Instruments
Why Is Investing Necessary?
2007-02-20 16:38:52
Like many others, I didn’t see the point in investing until a few months ago, so I’m writing this post to encourage investing. I remember that I was only 16 when I was first fascinated by stocks, bonds and derivatives, but I never put a single cent into investing until recently. Looking back, I have wasted 6 precious years of compounding returns, which could mean an additional $1,300 per $1000 invested, if the rate of return I got was 15% per annum.
Now that I have invested my first sum of money into Mutual Funds, my only regret was not starting earlier. Of course, there are risks involved and there are times when I felt fearful that my fund prices will drop, but I have gotten over that phase now. I’m now pretty immune to price movements, since I know that I’m investing for the long-term. I would just say that the earlier you start, the more financial literate you become, because nothing beats hands-on experience. For me, I procrastinated for six long years,
Read more: Investing
, Necessary
Bringing This Blog To The Next Level
2007-02-17 17:21:36
I noticed that quite a lot of my friends read my blog, although they do not leave any comments behind. Nowadays, I find myself telling my friends some stuff that I blogged about and they just simply said “Yeah I know, I read your blog.” It happened on many different friends, so I can safely conclude that my blog is being read by them. Apart from my friends, the number of visitors to this blog is also increasing gradually, albeit at a slow pace. I think that there might be a chance for the number of unique visitors to this blog for this month to fly past the 1,000 mark.
With the increasing readership, my blog needs to be improved constantly. Therefore, I have taken some time to browse around this blog and see if there are any features I can add to enhance the browsing experience. The first change is adding page numbers at the bottom, even for categories and monthly archives. The second improvement I made was by adding the next and previous posts link after any full post pag
2 Presentations, 1 Quiz and Valentine’s Day
2007-02-14 14:35:12
First off… Happy Valentine
’s Day to everyone.
I just got to blog about what an amazing day I have on Valentine’s Day, but it’s not because I received tons of chocolates from hot university classmates. If you are looking for something juicy or even raunchy, then my blog is obviously not the best place to come to. Sooooo… as you might have guessed from the title, it’s once again about my university/work life. However, this week was really special for me because I have so many things to do, all of which requires my immediate attention.
First of all, my boss has a long list of stuff for me to do, but I won’t really blog about them. Just an interesting thing at my workplace… One of my colleagues remarked that I have a very good life, because she claims that when everyone is pressurized over an issue, it doesn’t affect me. It makes me think that people sometimes associate others as being in a better position just because they are
Replacing My Meals With Vegetables and Fruits
2007-03-08 14:42:37
I was listening to a recorded teleseminar and the topic of the seminar was about having more energy. In the seminar, there were some very interesting conversations between the host and the invited guest. One of the points that came to me strongly was about eating the right food, which by their definition, I’m basically eating all the wrong foods. I was quite receptive to their recommendations because of the way they laid them out.
In short, they recommended a majority of fruits and vegetables. Their reasoning was that to digest rice or meats, it takes up more energy, perhaps even more than the amount that we gain from them. This was something quite new to me, since although I had heard it before, I hadn’t heard it from someone I knew and respected. It was more convincing and I thought “What if that was true? Won’t I be sabotaging myself by always shunning fruits and vegetables? Was that the reason why I always feel sleepy after having my meals? Should I cha
Read more: Meals
, Vegetables
, Fruits
Second Presentation on Scams
2007-03-11 05:53:57
Haha, I’m always very excited whenever I get videotaped when presenting. This is the fun part with my ‘Communication Management Fundamentals’ module and there is still one more coming up for a total of three presentation recordings. I’m posting this second recorded presentation to share the fun and my excitement. The topic of this presentation is on scams and frauds. For this topic, we are supposed to be representing one of the agencies fighting any form of scams and give an educational talk to a company.
The thing about this module is that their presentations are always of a random topic, so if you don’t bother to research, you won’t have much information to present. This case was especially true for me since I have only 4 content slides and my friends all have 9 or more slides. Knowing the number of slides my friends have and having no time to change my slides since the lesson have started, I decided to think of a story. When it was my turn
Read more: Second
Results of My Meal Replacement Program
2007-03-14 11:50:46
After 6 days of eating purely vegetables and fruits, I have a conclusion. They are good for health and it boosts your energy. The first two days that I tried out this diet, I felt constantly hungry and suffered a bit of a headache. However, I look at my energy levels for the past few days and noticed that I can sleep like just 3 to 4 hours and still wake up before my alarm rings. Well… I do lay in bed to laze even after I wake up, but waking up before my alarm rings with just a few hours of sleep is amazing by itself already. Some day, you should try it for yourself.
I also experienced detoxification effects, which basically just meant I kept having bouts of diarrhoea. I believed most of the toxins in my body were flushed out, since my output was much darker than usual. All in all, I believe that eating vegetables and fruits seems to be a good way to stay healthy and I overcame some negative perception towards vegetables. For example, I used to puke when tomatoes just bare
Read more: Program
, Meal Replacement
Your Views on Relationships
2007-03-17 17:40:29
This post is going to be special, because I’m not going to say anything much. All I will do is post a simple question and I hope to receive comments to build onto it. I don’t really want to write that much today and would just like to do some reading, so here’s my question:
If you are in relationship, what are your greatest joys and fears?
If you are not in a relationship, what is stopping you from going into one?
That’s it. Go ahead and leave some comments. I really look forward to knowing how you feel.
Read more: Relationships
Removed Google Adsense From This Blog
2007-03-19 18:11:58
After some meddling around with my layout, I have removed Google
Adsense
, so this blog will consistently have a revenue of $0. Well… I initially added those Adsense advertisements there just to fill up space, but now that I found some other stuff to put, I have removed all Adsense from this blog. Anyway, since I don’t earn much from those Adsense, I might as well remove them. Last month, this blog’s adsense revenue was quite close to breaking even with the expenses of $4 a month, but it didn’t. Although I believe it would at least break even if I leave the adsense units in place, I decided to remove them to put the email feed subscription box.
If you didn’t already noticed, you can now subscribe to receive updates to this blog via email. Feedburner will automatically send updates right to your emails at predefined times. Just to assure some of those people who are very concerned with privacy issues, I will not use your email for other purposes. You ma
Responsibilities Pouring Down
2007-03-22 11:40:08
My exam time is near and I have to fulfill my responsibilities of a student… to do well in my exams. I have fallen way behind in my studies since taking on my job and would need to find some time to catch up before my exams in April. Despite thinking that I can succeed in life even without a degree, I still intend to get a good piece of paper as insurance. After all, things can either go like I expected or not go as well as I expected and a degree will definitely be useful if I have to look for a job some day. I liken a degree to getting insurance, the more coverage the better for insurance and likewise for a degree, a better degree will put you in better stead for a job hunt.
Of course, a good degree is not the only thing that matters when seeking employment. Factors like diligence, adaptability, human relations, work efficiency and other factors come into play to determine your career prospects. However, I believe that the more we maximize each factor, the better chan
Intelligence is a Result of Past Diligence
2007-03-26 19:26:25
Everytime I get real busy, I will somehow have a lot of thoughts stirring in my mind. I will think about life and ask myself questions like ’why did something turn out this way’. Although these thoughts aren’t new and most people have thought of it at least once, I still think that I should blog about it. There’s a simple reason for blogging about it: Sometimes we humans are just so oblivious to the most obvious.
Anyway, I think the topic of whether some people are born smarter than others is an interesting one. When it comes to my thoughts on this, I stand pretty firmly with the notion that, apart from the mentally-impaired, anyone can become more ‘intelligent’ than others. It’s all a matter of diligence. I’m probably going to get shot and criticized for even thinking about this, but it’s sincerely what I believe. Think about it, have you ever seen anyone who is smart but have never been diligent in any point of his/her life? If y
Read more: Result
, Diligence
Approving Comment Spam To Get Traffic?
2007-03-30 05:20:30
Recently, my blog has been getting a lot of comment spam, averaging more than 20 everyday. I noticed a change in the type of comment spam nowadays. It used to be full of those wonder pills advertisements, but the general trend is more towards adult-themed sites nowadays. Additionally, they are all pointing to different sites, so there must be a lot of such content available online.
Although we hate to admit it, such content attracts quite a lot of attention, maybe especially among hot-blooded males. Normally, I will just blindly mark all comments as spam in my control panel, then scroll through to see if there are any real comments and unmark those. However, today a thought flashed past me. I suddenly wondered if there were bloggers who would intentionally allow such comment spam, just so that they could increase their traffic. After all, having links to those content could significantly boost readership and they can simply claim that they were victims of comment spam.
Of course, ther
Read more: Comment
Last Presentation on More Fruits and Vegetables
2007-03-31 12:59:15
This marks the last of my presentations for my Communication Management Fundamentals module. After having three presentations in this module, I think that I present very differently, as compared to other modules.
First difference: I think I’m more nervous for this module, since I’m always just throwing crap, instead of really knowing the topic well. Last minute and sloppy work contributes to this anxiety.
Second Difference: I think that I’m more assertive for other presentations, as compared to this module, where I’m usually smiling and having fun. Think the difference is attributed to the fact that this module is more like a play-play module and there’s a camera in front of me, so I gotta smile more.
Of course, there’s nothing for me to compare to, since the other presentations are not recorded. Maybe next time I should ask my friends to record my presentations in other modules, that might be fun. For now, you might want to watch this video, n
Read more: Fruits
, Vegetables
Comfort Zones Limit Achievements
2007-04-04 20:24:26
Few months ago, I reflected on myself and think that I tend to be easily contented and that seems to be stopping my achievements. When I look at it, I don’t think I’m the only person in the world that limits achievement by staying in a comfort zone. It’s not that I’m super rich or anything, but rather the fact that there is no immediate need that I am reaching out for. It seems like I’m comfortable with what I have… well, I just need a computer and food to survive and have fun. I’m just too easily satisfied and it seems pretty ironically for a person living in Singapore, where we’re famous for being involved in the rat race, for saying that.
Anyway, identifying this character, I started this blog to get out of my comfort zone and to make becoming a millionaire a need. Recently, I have been thinking of quitting my job and quitting school to make this need stronger. Well… quitting school is unlikely, but tentatively, I’ll
Read more: Zones
, Limit
Finances In April 2007
2007-04-10 19:23:22
It’s been some time since I last reported on my finances, how my funds are doing and how much income I’m getting. Well… my mutual funds have pretty much gone back to the pre-correction levels, so it’s pretty good that I’m still having a little bit of profits, somewhere within the region of 3-4%. It’s quite troublesome to give off the exact figures, but I’m still holding onto the same funds and here’s the list.
Fidelity Latin America USD
Henderson European Property Securities
HSBC AM Chinese Growth
UOBAM United Asian Growth Opportunities
DBS Shenton Thrift
Aberdeen Thailand Equity
Fidelity Korea USD
It’s very likely that I won’t be making any changes to the funds that I chose, because I think that all funds are about the same. By that, I mean that if you picked funds that target the same geographic region, it’s likely that their performance will be around the same, with maybe a few percentage points in difference. I&rsqu
Read more: April
I Passed My Statistics Quiz
2007-04-12 10:52:30
Yesterday, I blogged and said that I failed my first quiz since my polytechnic days, but I was wrong. I managed to just pass my quiz and I’m incredibly happy. Although I scored way lower than the class average, I was indeed quite happy that I didn’t perform as badly as I thought I would. This brought me back confidence for this coming examinations and I believe I still have a chance to get A for the module, provided I work extremely hard to make up for the bad coursework grades. I foresee that I will be spending 70% of the time that I allocate for studying on Statistics
alone, 20% on economics, 5% on Organisational Behaviour and 5% for Marketing.
It’s not gonna be easy to rise from the depths of a well back to the surface, but I believe there is still a chance. If I just spend three days focusing on statistics, I’m sure I will make up for lost time and become proficient at the module. My worst enemy so far is still myself, being lazy and unfocused when it co
Downgrading Wordpress Is a Chore
2007-04-15 12:29:30
Somehow, I suddenly decided to upgrade my Wordpress
to the 2.1 series today and it was the first wrong move I made. I thought at that time how long can it take, since Wordpress had always made things very easy to upgrade. Therefore, I downloaded and plan to spend 30minutes to set up Wordpress 2.1 on my blog before starting to study. Since Wordpress had always made things so easy, I didn’t think of making any backups and this was my second wrong move.
One thing led to another and I managed to install Wordpress 2.1 quite easily. As promised, it’s just a few clicks and viola, it’s up. The longest time spent is on uploading the files to the server. However, the trouble started from this point on, when I find the later version slower. Although it was stated that the new version had combed through their databases and made it more efficient, I found the new version quite significantly slower. Additionally, their functionality of dictionary checker isn’t really workin
Read more: Chore
2 Exam Papers Over
2007-04-21 15:41:38
I have finished 2 exam papers and have 2 other papers left, which are the ones that I think is most difficult. I had originally planned to spend more time on Statistics and Economics, but laziness got over me. The moment I reached home on Friday, I slept till close midnight and slacked in front of the television until 4 AM. I planned to start studying for statistics today, but instead I went shopping and just reached home. I have wasted another day of my life, like how I have wasted my days for the past week, completing a full 35 episodes drama series and 2 series of 26 episodes anime.
At this moment, I still maintain quite a positive attitude towards my examinations, but I’m certain that I need to spend more effort on Economics and Statistics. Competition is going to be real tough for these two modules, but I still want to do well, especially in Statistics. I can’t afford to waste anymore days, so I’ll definitely do all the tutorials for Statistics that I misse
Two Internet Marketers I Respect
2007-05-02 19:29:40
As promised in my last post, I will be blogging about the two Internet
Marketers
that I respect most. I don’t respect them more because they make more money than all the other gurus, but rather a combination of several factors make me see them in a different light. Of course, I will be detailing exactly why I respect these two specific Internet Marketers more than the rest. I do not attempt to convince anyone that they are the best in the field, since the contents of this post is just a reflection of my thoughts. If you think someone else deserves to be respected as well, feel free to voice it out. I think it’s always a good thing to acknowledge the efforts of others in making this world a better place.
First Internet Marketer I Respect: Corey Rudl
This name has gone into obsolescence for some time now, since it was very unfortunate that he met with an accident at a young age that cause his demise. He was previously known as the Godfather of Internet Marketing and he des
Post Examinations Reflections
2007-04-30 20:11:10
My Examinations finished last Friday, but I was sick and delayed blogging until today. Anyway, for my examinations… I did so badly in my Statistics and Economics examinations that my friends did not even believe me when I told them honestly that I’m going to flunk my examinations real badly. Although I was sick when taking the examinations, I have never thought for a moment that being sick was the reason that I did so badly. In fact, I believe that my body came up with this secondary gain of having something to blame on when I do badly in the two Examinations. For someone new to this concept of Secondary gain, it basically means that our body tends to give us a pain if there is a resulting gain for the pain, like falling sick so that you don’t have to go to school.
I don’t really like to look back and reflect, since it’s obvious that I should have spent my time studying, instead of going out or watching drama series and anime. I have to admit that I do
Read more: Reflections
Saving Habits For Better Finances
2007-05-04 23:53:10
To begin with, let’s start with a quote from someone that I forgot: “When unmanaged, expenses always rise to income levels”. I think it’s a very meaningful quote, because it’s quite common to see rich executives spending lavishly, even to the extent that their savings can’t sustain their living expenses for a month. Coming to this, I read a definition of wealth from somewhere that says it’s a measure of how long you can continue your way of life if you stop having income or lose your job. While it’s not the traditional definition in the pure English sense, I do like the way the writer had put the concept of wealth into perspective.
I acknowledge that someone more highly paid can afford more material goods, but I feel that sometimes these material goods turn out to be a liability. Instead of supposingly fulfilling our needs and wants in a society that demands higher standards of living, it seems like the regular upkeep for these goods
Read more: Saving
The Internet Gold Mine Story
2007-05-10 13:44:08
I’m suddenly in the mood to write a story and all stories should end with a moral of the story. Stories make words come alive, so this post should logically draw more interest than the rest of my posts. However, humans are seldom logical beings, which is why we are particularly interested in stories, which triggers emotions. While this story will not trigger much emotion, it serves to sum up my opinions of the internet, few years ago and now. Let’s move on to the Internet
story.
In the year ADxxxx (only Mensa members know when Internet came into our lives), computers were networked together and hooked up to form the Internet. Little was known about this new land, except that it promised widespread communication. It was an age where technogeeks rule this land; they spoke a language that few understood and tackled problems that would cause heart attacks for the faint-hearted. We call them geeks, but deep inside, they were highly respected beings and charged high prices teac
Goal Setting For Increased Productivity
2007-05-08 15:21:51
Yesterday, I began to keep a log or diary of my activities. This diary is slightly different, since I jot down the activities before I carry them out instead of after. Therefore, when I reach home after work, I filled in the activities I wished to complete by the day in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s basically just a few basic columns stating the activity and whether the task has been completed. However, the psychological effect is clearly noticeable as I sped through the 2 tasks that I planned for and completed them in less than an hour. Normally, I used to take around 3 hours and wander around to other websites, not focusing on the task at all.
I’m now using a backward planning process to come up with my daily activities, meaning I focus on my longest-term goal, then move backwards to plan my shorter term goals. Finally, from these goals, I come up with the daily activities that I think will bring me to my goals and everything just seems more focused this way. Instead of do
Read more: Setting
, Productivity
, Goal Setting
Areas of Profitability
2007-05-15 15:32:18
I saw a survey on an exclusive membership website that basically asked its members what activities have been the most profitable to them. I thought that the results might be of some interest, especially to those people who are thinking of venturing into Internet Marketing. While it does provide a general overview of what’s profitable for these Internet Marketers, I would just like to add that whatever the activity, there are people profiting from it. It’s not a good idea to just jump onto an opportunity because the most number of people are making money from it. We are all made different and might excel in different areas or fields. Anyway, here’s the results:
Number 1: Product Selling
Basically, this is pretty straight forward, meaning you sell your own product. It’s not surprising that this ranks the most profitable, since you have your own product and will be able to form joint ventures and stuff like that. Additionally, most people who venture into Product S
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