I have been trying to get my wife to set up a blog. All of my web site’s and blogs make money. Some more than others. But it all adds up. I love the residual/passive income!
Here idea was to set up a blog for our dog, and and write posts from the dog’s view. Okay. I don’t think it will be a huge money maker, but it is a start. So I registered the domain PuppysLife.com. I set up the blog for her. She has done some posts, and I have written a couple. There hasn’t been much in the way of traffic yet, but it is still really new. Search engines have crawled it. It only needs to make about $85/year to break even.
I bought my wife a new computer, as her old computer (Pentium II/266). had a lot of problems. Now that she has a solid computer, and one blog set up, I am hoping she will learn more about running a profitable blog. Next, I want to teach her about keywords and phrases, so she can work a few into her posts. This will generate more traffic. I am hoping also that I can get her to make a blog on a more profitable subject. But if I can get her to make a post a every couple days, that will be a start. I think once she sees it starting to make a little money, she may be more motivated.
Anyway, visit my wife’s new blog Puppys Life!
My wife has been using an old Pentium II computer that used to belong to me. I works, but is relatively slow these days. It often comes up with the blue screen of death saying memory low, forcing her to reboot. If she turns the computer off, and on, she has to re-adjust the monitor as the horizontal and vertical borders of the screen will have moved. I have another Pentium II computer that is a little faster, and a little more solid. I had set that up, but never got around to moving all of her stuff over. It was installed with Windows 98 as I don’t think it was good enough to run Windows XP.
My machine is an eMachines computer that I bought at Best Buy a couple years ago, and have been pretty happy with. The only hardware problem that I have had was a hard drive that died. I bought a new hard drive, and was surprised how easy it was to install. The stuff inside the case was easily accessible, and it took me on a couple minutes to replace the drive. And then with the Norton Ghost created CD’s that came with the eMachines computer, it was so easy to reinstall the software to that exact state the machine came new.
So instead of setting up the other slow machine for my wife, I decided that it would be better to buy a new computer. I am trying to get her to set up a blog or two of her own that will make money. She has been unhappy with her job, and I think if she spent the same amount of time she does at work (about 70hours/week), working on websites, should be making far more money.
I have been watching the sales. There was one about a month ago, where I could have bought her a machine for about $300 after rebates. I almost bought it, but I hadn’t fully decided yet. But I have been watching the ads. I thought about waiting till Black Friday. But I saw yesterday’s ad for a eMachines computer at Best Buy for $349 after instant savings. It seemed like a good deal. There was a similar Compaq computer at one of the office supply stores for $299, but I decided that I have been pretty happy with my eMachines computer. A Compaq may be more proprietary inside, or not come with the back up CDs, or whatever.
So I stopped at Best Buy about 3pm. I was told they didn’t have any more. He said people lined up in the morning, and said it happened every weekend. How the heck do they know what will be on sale? Do they drive to the grocery store, and buy a paper in the hopes that Best Buy will have something good on sale, just so they can line up an hour before the store opens? I’d expect on Black Friday, but not just a regular Sunday. I asked for a rain check, and was told they didn’t do them for computers. He said that another nearby store had some in stock, but that didn’t help as I had to be somewhere else at 4pm, and the store was way out of my way. I got pissed off, and left.
Last night I got the idea, to see if I could order the computer online on Best Buy’s website for in-store pickup. I found the ad, and clicked on the computer. I was able to order the computer for in-store pickup. So tonight after my class, I will head up and pickup the computer. Then will begin the process of moving stuff from my wife’s old computer to the new one.
I went to my company’s annual employee meeting this last week, and found out that we are going to recieve another round of broad based stock options. Funny, the grant price is about 40 cent cheaper than the broad based stock options that were granted 2 years ago. The vesting schedule is 20% per year until fully vested after 5 years. This is I think the 5th round of stock option grants. I don’t think any of them will be nearly as valuable as the first round which netted me over $20,000. There was a time when it didn’t seem unreasonable that the stock options would climb to well over $100,000. But that was when the stock price had climbed to over $60 a share. But then we joined the S&P 500, and then 9/11, and Enron, etc. The stock price tanked. It is slowly climbing back up. We’ll see if these things end up being worth much. I have 10 years to cash em in.
continued from part 1…
Now he got into how to make money by Forex trading using the 4X Made Easy software. The 4x Made Easy software measures buying and selling pressure. It uses easy to follow signals of when to buy and when to sell. On the first page, there are red and green arrows. There are seven different arrows for each major pair, in time periods of 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month. First you look at the day/week/month arrows. Day traders want the day arrow to be green. Mid term investors want the day and week arrows to be green. And long term investors want the day/week/month arrows to be green. The you look at the other arrows (minutes for current pressure). You want them to be green too.
Then you would click on the day/week/month arrow that fits your trading style. You will now get a chart. There are a red line (selling pressure) and a green line (buying pressure). You analyze this chart using the FAST method. FAST is short for (Fresh cross, Angle, Separation, Timing). Look for the green line to have move above the red line. Then look for the green line to be at an angle of 12 o’clock to 2 o’clock. Space will appear between the red line and the green line. Wait for the red line to move to a parallel angle to the green line. Then it will be time to buy. When the red line crosses the green line, then it is time to sell.
You will need to have a brokerage account. And you pay for trades when you buy, but not when you sell. The brokers take their money in PIPs. So buying would cost 1-5 PIPs.
He then ran the software and did some demo trades. Of course it looked easy, and there were already a couple previously purchased currencies in there that appeared to have made money already.
The market is open 6 days a week, 24 hours day. He discussed the best times to trade (when the forex market is active), such as 8-10pm (EDT), 2-4am (EDT), and 7-9am (EDT). This is morning in various international timezones.
Then he discussed the software. It is only for Windows, and not Mac. You need an internet connection, preferably high speed. You will need to subscribe to a data feed. eSignal is $250/month, or you can get 4xFeed for $99.95/month, with the first 30 days free.
There were other various things such as 4X Talk live audio broadcast, free support, and upgrades.
The software cost $3,995, but if you bought at the workshop, you would get it for $2,995, plus the training class, and the free month of data feed, and the 6 DVD training series all thrown in.
Some things that weren’t addressed were that leverage works both ways. I am guessing that if you invest $1000 to control $100,000, that it is possible to lose more than the $1000 if things go terribly wrong.
And if it is so easy to make money such as in their examples, and they can turn $1000 into $6000 in a month. Why are they selling the software, and teaching classes? If I could multiply my money by 6 every month, I’d own the frigging world in no time. Let’s look at this progression:
Month 1. $1,000
Month 2. $6,000
Month 3. $36,000
Month 4. $216,000
Month 5. $1,296,000
Month 6. $7,776,000
Month 7. $46,656,000
Month 8… My calculator won’t go that high.
In about a half year by reinvesting the money over and over, you would have almost $50 million. In a couple more months you would have over a billion dollars. If it is so easy, why are they not just raking in the bucks themselves?
Over the weekend as I was channel surfing, I saw an infomercial for a free 4X Made Easy workshop. I have read a little about Forex (short for Foreign Exchange). Basically it involves the trading of currencies. You know how when you go to Canada, or some other country, there is an exchange rate. Forex trading is buying foreign currency when it is cheap versus the dollar, and selling it when it goes up.
So I decided to go to one of the free workshop. They had four of them. One of them was Tuesday evening, but I didn’t want to skip karate class. I have a bunch of vacation time at my work saved up, and my wife has none, so I decided to use half a day PTO, and go to one of the morning seminars. They did do registrations, but would fit as many people as they could. So I showed up early. Way earlier than I needed to. The seminar was scheduled for 9am, and they didn’t start doing registration until 8:30. So I waited till 8:30, signed up, then waited some more. They had software boxes on the table with price stickers of $3,995. (I guessed that this would be reduced) At 9am, the doors opened.
Of course, there were the usual warnings about no recording, though this time they said without written authorization.
The presenter spoke at a hyperactive pace. He also liked to use call & response audience participation techniques. The slide behind him displayed various stuff that looked like credentials, but I am not sure what they were. One was a NASD Ser., follow by a bunch of numbers.
At the beginning of the workshop there were about 16 people, but a few more showed along the way.
He briefly discussed the history of the Forex market. About how Nixon took the US off of the gold standard. And how some 1998 act opened the forex market to small individual investors.
4x Made Easy deals with 7 major currencies, and 6 major pairs. The currencies it tracks are Canada (CAD), European (EUR), Britain (GBP), Suisse (CHF), Japan (JPY), Australia (AUD), and USA (USD). The 6 major pairs are USD/CAD, EUD/USD, GBP/USD, USD/CHF, USD/JPY, and AUD/USD. The two sides of the pairs are called the base, and the cross. The base is the one that is bought and sold.
Then he talked about PIPs. A PIP is a Price Interest Point. So if the exchange rate of two currencies goes from 1.1500 to 1.1501, the change is 1 PIP. Currency is traded in lots of of $100,000. so a lot is $100,000. So 1 lot times 1 PIP works out to $10.
Then he talked about leverage. Leverage is basically borrowed money. In the Forex market, $1000 controls one lot. So that works out to 100:1 leverage. He then showed us an example of a trade the previous week that made $800 from an investment of $1000, just over 4 hours.
If $1000 was too much, there are mini-lots. There are 1/10th the size of a lot, or $10,000. So $100 controls a $10,000 lot.
Continued…