Double Journey

This blog post is completely off topic, but I’m going to do that every once in a while just to keep things interesting.

I talk a lot about this subject with Rick, who always is raving about how great these next generation disc look on his awesome TV. I of course have stayed out of the fray because I still have my ten year old TV so it won’t really matter if I pick up a next-generation player. But I follow the war with some interest only because I find these types of battles to be interesting.

As I shopped around this Black Weekend, one of the things I did look for was to see what types of deals were available for either type of player. I saw multiple places with a Toshiba HD DVD player for $199. Amazon has it for even less. I didn’t see a Blu-Ray player for less than $399. There were a few of those, along with of course the PS3, which can act as a Blu Ray player itself, and at this point is the best value if you are going to go down this path.

Despite the fact that I’m a bonafide geek, I am also extremely careful with my money (wouldn’t know it from what I’m doing here would you?). I am a “mainstream” consumer in the sense that I prefer to let technology come way down in price before I buy it. I generally don’t see a reason to be on the cutting-edge, because the premium you pay is so much greater than the actual benefit you receive from the new technology. No doubt that these next-generation formats look great, but when I can buy a DVD player for $20, and the quality look absolutely fine, am I really going to pay 8x or 16x more money? Am I really going to repurchase an entire DVD collection I spent years building? Doubtful.

Many tout that the Blu-Ray technology is better. It might also have the better stable of movies with all the Sony and Disney pictures exclusively on Blu-Ray. But in the end, it’s about price, it’s always about price. I’ve stated my position. The first format to break the $100 mark for a widely-available player wins. At the price, people stop trying to save up for the purchase, and just go buy it. It becomes a mainstream purchase. If I have a choice between a traditional DVD player at $70 (which is what I spent on my player) or a newer technology at $100, then I would likely choose the newer one, just to future proof myself.

Anecdotally, the Circuit City I went to was sold out of their Toshiba HD DVD players, but had plenty of the Blu Ray players. Best Buy had plenty of both.

So what do you think? Have you picked sides in the war yet and why? Or are you like me, just waiting it out until someone makes it cheap enough to be worthwhile?

I went out this weekend to some of the stores that really should have a lot of traffic, specifically Circuit City and Best Buy. To my surprise, it really wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I usually avoid shopping this weekend if I can, but decided to at least drop by and see how bad it was. I was not going to go in if I couldn’t find parking. When I got there, it was relatively easy to find parking spaces that were pretty close to the store.

I traveled to Circuit City on Friday, and while there were a number of people in the store, it wasn’t the madhouse that I imagined it would be. I got there around 11:00, so I may have just avoided the crowd. I went to Best Buy today expecting a large crowd. Certainly there were a lot of people in the store, but again, parking was easy. I was going to buy a few things, they had a great deal of $25 each for Bio-Shock, and The Orange Box, but hesitated because I didn’t want to wait in the line. But when I looked at where the queue should have been forming, it was pretty empty of people.

That can only mean a couple of things.

• People just aren’t shopping all that much. Definitely could be the case since I believe the economy is heading in the wrong direction with housing and gas prices where they are
• People are doing more shopping online - This is true for people like myself, but I still would think people would go and look at what bargains are out there
• They are getting really good at moving people through the line.

I kind of doubt the last one. I’ll be interested what they say about the weekend and how successful it was for retailers. Early results indicate that it may have been a success but I’ll wait to see what they say about it Monday. I post about this because this could have significant impact on my trading strategy. If numbers look weak, the whole market is in for a downward spike and I want to be on the right side of the trade. Trick is getting in ahead of any announcement, which is going to be hard to do.

So one of the things you have to do to make a blog popular is advertise and get other people to come visit your blog. To do that, you have to try things to raise awareness of your blog. That’s where services like rssHugger come in. rssHugger describes itself as:

“rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader.”

At first, they were going to charge $20 for you to be added to their network. This fee could be reduced to $10 if you were to blog about them and provide a link like I am right now. After getting some feedback from people, they decided to drop the fee if you provide a link to them. I have to admit, this is a much better idea than the original one. If they were to keep even the $10 fee, I wouldn’t be writing about them now, because small up-and-coming sites like myself really have to watch where we spend our money and how we try to promote our sites. With services like Technorati and Facebook, there are many free alternatives to try out. Given that this is a new service, I’m willing to see how well it does. Since it’s free, I have very little risk involved as it only will cost me a link.

Overall I think it’s a decent idea. This space is kind of crowded, but now that they have dropped their fee, they at least have a chance to get some viral marketing. I tend to be the suspicious type, but if they can convince me to do it, they have a shot to convince others as well. The site is relatively well designed and I was able to find answers to my questions. The only thing I couldn’t easily find was a picture I could use of theirs that I could add to my post.

Do I think this site has a chance to be successful? I’m not so sure. This is a pretty crowded space. There are lots and lots of sites right now where people go to find other interesting sites. Most of them don’t focus on RSS feeds though so rssHugger might be able to carve out a niche of its own. Some problems I can see early on is that it will probably be tough to constantly send traffic to my rsshugger page (or it will be as soon as I get added) which means I likely won’t be able to crack the top 100 too often. To make matters worse, if I’m up against the likes of John Chow and other large players, my site will definitely get buried. I’m interested to see how the proprietor of the website, Collin LaHay, addresses this issue. Other than that, it will be a wait-and-see approach for me. I’m not sure how much traffic a link from this site will provide to me, but if it does any good, I’m more than willing to discuss it and promote the site.

I commend him for starting something. Like Rick always likes to point out to me, it’s better to do something, anything, rather than to do nothing. His goal of funding his college education is admirable, and hopefully this website will help him on that journey. We all have our Journeys, and I hope he is able to fulfill his.

I added a new plugin to track who was commenting on this blog. I want to thank everyone who has thus far left a comment for me. Only two weeks into this little adventure, I have done better in terms of comments than I would have originally thought. Comments are like crack to bloggers. It makes it worth coming in and spending some time, often a lot of time, to come up with something interesting and worthwhile. I enjoy interacting with other people on this blog, and so I encourage everyone to try and get to the top in terms of “Top Commenters”

So to all those who have commented thus far, thanks. For all those of you who haven’t commented yet, why haven’t you?

It dawned on me that not everyone has a perspective about how hard what I’m trying to do actually is so I thought I would give some perspective to my situation.

I am aiming for a 100% return on my money in one year. If I were to do this strictly through the market, it will take a small miracle or some plain dumb luck.  In a good year, the overall market might return anywhere from 12% to 20%.  On $20,000, a GREAT return would be $4,000, leaving me $16,000 short of my goal.  Over several years, it is next to impossible to average a return this high, so in reality it would take anywhere between seven or eight years for most good stock pickers to double their money.  I’m aiming to do it in one year.  To make the situation worse, I believe the market is in for a correction.  It has been very volatile as of late, and I think it has more to go on the downside than on the upside.  This means I have to be very shrewed when it comes to picking stocks, or I have to take a lot of risk by shorting stocks, which I’m not inclined to do.

Now, I’m going to try other methods as well.  I’m hoping that somehow I can find creative ways to make money other than picking great stocks but it is going to be very hard.   That’s why I started this site, to kind of get me some ideas and follow my own thoughts on what it will take to create a viable model for making money.   It’s easy to do research and come up with ideas, it is much harder to actually go and do something about it.

Have to do the obligatory Thanksgiving post. This one is particularly tough, because in my current situation, I have plenty to be thankful for. In no particular order.

• I have great friends who support me and read this blog
• I have a wonderful girlfriend who supports me in everything I do
• I don’t have to keep a job I hate
• I have a cat that doesn’t care what day it is, he always wants turkey!
• I live in a world where what I’m trying to do on this blog is even possible

Hopefully the next few weeks will give me even more to be thankful for. I have thus far not really tried to make any progress on my doubling journey. This has been on purpose because It has taken me some time to set this site up and to learn all the things I need to learn to even have a chance at doing this. The amount of information available on setting up a website and generating traffic is enormous. The only topic on the internet that might have more information is how to succeed in short-term trading! Trying to do both has been daunting but fun.

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving! Get some turkey, watch some football, and think of ideas for me.

Admittedly, I have a distinct advantage over most people when it comes to this particular challenge. Most people, probably don’t have $20,000 just sitting around waiting to be doubled. So how did I come up with this money?

I did it the old-fashion way. Actually, inheriting the money is the old-fashion way. I did it the second-to-oldest-fashion way. I saved. I saved every cent I could and didn’t buy things that I didn’t need. My obsession with saving almost borders on the ridiculous. There were times I literally had to develop a SPENDING PLAN, so that I would loosen up the purse strings and actually spend some of my money. I earn a very good living, and I live very modestly. This has allowed me to save a tremendous amount of money over the past few years. Enough so that I could probably take five years off of work, and still be in OK shape. I wouldn’t do that, because I actually like working, but it is feasible.

As Rick points out in his post about this site, I love to talk about money. I especially like to help my friends realize how important it is to save money, and not get into a cycle of constantly buying what you want whenever you want it. Through hard work and discipline you can get to a point where you can either quit your job or start a crazy idea like trying to double your money. If you are lucky, you can do both I have gotten to the point where I have zero debt of any sort. I don’t have any credit card debt, student loans, or car payments. Since I don’t own a home, I don’t have a mortgage. It is times like this, when I don’t have any income, that it really pays off.

I can’t talk about saving money without posting my all-time favorite SNL skit on the subject, Don’t Buy Stuff You Can Not Afford. I laugh every time I see it. The sad thing is, there are lots of people just like this couple.

Steve Martin says it best when he ask, “I think I got it. I buy something I want, and then hope I can pay for it, right?” You would be surprised how many times I have had a conversation with someone just like this.

I had someone ask me if it was OK to link to my site. The simple answer is Yes!

I could use all the link love I can get right now. It’s hard when you are first starting out a website because you can feel kind of alone out here sometimes. That’s why the comments are always appreciated, and the links back to my site are always welcome. If I really wanted to keep this a secret, I wouldn’t put it out on the web for the world to see. In fact, the very point of me starting up a website and blogging about it is to solicit others feedback, and get ideas on what to do next. The more ideas and comments that come my way the better. So please, publicize my website. Talk and link all you want. And of course, please keep the comments coming

As I wrote this post, I started thinking about how I could encourage people to link to this site and to leave comments behind. One easy way would be to run a contest. I need to think about this a little bit more and fully develop the idea, but you can be sure it will be coming soon. If you want to get a head start though, please link to my site, or leave some comments. I’ll count any link or comment now toward that contest

Anyone else have any bright ideas on how best to increase traffic and participation?

Etrade is back down another 20%. It is now where it was when it originally did it’s swoon. Back then, I said I would have gotten in because the stock would bounce? Would I get back on now? Not a chance.

There were technical reasons to get in before. the chances for a quick rebound were pretty high. But at this point, you should probably stay away from this stock. The volatility is unbelievable, and nobody knows where it will be going. The original bounce was predictable, as many shorts were going to run for cover and people were going to think it was overdone. Tim Sykes, who coincidentally is doing something similar to myself, named Etrade one of his “unpicks”. Right here, I absolutely agree with him. If you think the mortgage problems are overblown and Etrade will stay in business, I still would wait at this point until the stock finds a base and trades much more normally. Right now, as a trade, Etrade is scary and everybody should stay away from it.

If it so inclines you, feel free to donate any money toward my cause. I’m not sure how effective it will be to try and raise money this way, but I suppose every little bit counts. I’m not opposed to either begging or manipulation. Like I said, anything that is legal is fair game. To that end, if it helps persuade you, here is a picture of my cat. Your donations will help pay for his very expensive food (he is on a strict diet because he has some health conditions). Remember, I’m out of work, so your donation can help put food pellets in this poor cat’s bowl. You can see just how hungry he is because he is searching in my shoe, which believe me doesn’t smell all that great, for some food. Do you really want this cat to go hungry? Do you realize by not giving money, you are killing this cat? You can help save this cat by clicking the “donate” button in the right column. or by clicking this button: