Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Tips for the first half of life: For my sons

I've been meeting over the past few months with a group of men early (VERY early) on Friday mornings. It's a program about living life called "Men's Fraternity".  Last week we finished up the first semester before breaking until  after the new year, and the program leader, Robert Lewis, took the  opportunity to summarize the ground we've covered in the last few months. The resulting summary was "Practical 'Take Homes' for Two Halves of he Gread Adventure [Life]".  While I myself am will into what Lewis refers to as the "Second Half", I  could resonate with his advice for young men in the "First Half" of life.  In fact, I wondered how my life might have been different if I had  taken this advice to heart as a young man.

I have two sons, ages 30 and 28, who are definitely  in the  First Half.  So I pass on these tips to them... but also to any other young man who would care to read them.

1. Invest regularly in your marriage, and make your wife your best friend.

2. Learn who you ARE and who you ARE NOT.  Embrace who you are, and be you to the fullest, and don't try to be someone you are not, nor to live your life as though you were.

3. Always live within your means, stay out of debt, and learn to save and give away. [Dave Ramsey has a tremendous program for learning this.]

4. Go for  great EXPERIENCES over acquiring more STUFF.

5. Get to  know  God personally.

6. Never stop fighting for purity and  a life of integrity.  It's the foundation of a successful second half.

7. Learn to ask forgiveness... from God and others.

8.  Develop men friends you can love an be accountable to - make them your own personal "board of directors".

9.  Start developing and refining a long-range vision - a North Star for your life.


Sunday, November 28, 2010

Best Price on Quicken

I use Intuit's Quicken to keep track of my finances (in fact, I haven't kept a manual check register since 1991 when I started using it!) and TurboTax to do my taxes.  I don't succumb to Intuit's come-on's to get me to upgrade to the latest and greates version every year, but I do upgrade every couple or 3 years or so, primarily because they have a tendency to drop support for certain features from older versions.

So every couple years at this time of year, I go through this exercise of trying to find the best combination price on TurboTax and Quicken.  They (Intuit and the various retailers) play all kinds of games of promotional tie-ins and rebates between the two.  I'm going to use the Deluxe versions of both TurboTax and Quicken this year, and each has a retail list price of about $60 (although the Deluxe version without the included State tax return, which I don't need in Texas, appears to be about $50).  But then you can usually find a rebate of up to $30 on Quicken if you buy Turbotax. 

I looked around at different retailers, including Best Buy, Sam's, and Fry's Sam's had each of them for $38-$39 (can't remember the change), but no rebates, which put the total at $78 + tax.  Best Buy appeared to have a good deal Saturday night, with Quicken for $39.99, and the Premier version of Quicken bearing a sticker proclaiming a $25 instant rebate on Quicken Deluxe, Premier, or Home and Business if you bought Turbotax.  But the sticker wasn't on the Deluxe version, and they wouldn't honor the terms at the cash register, making the total with tax $91.  Thanks, but no.

I checked online today, including sites such as PriceGrabber who make it their mission to be able to find price online. BUZZZZ. Wrong answer.  They claimed $46 was the best price for Quicken Deluxe 2011.

I manually went to Amazon, and checked their, and their price was $35.98, with free shipping and no sales tax (at least in Texas).  Go here to check it out.   And, actually, you can get an instant download version for $3.00 less ($32.98).   And that was without a rebate, which leaves me able to purchase Turbotax a little later when Fry's starts running their  promotions to get 100's of dollars worth of software free with the purchase of Turbotax!

Anyway, just in case anybody else is looking.

Monday, September 6, 2010

1000 Days to Retirement!

A couple months ago, I sat down with my new bride to talk about some near-term and more distant goals.

And somewhere along the line, in thinking about where we wanted to be at any point in the future, the idea crossed my mind of a "thousand day goal".  So I looked at the calendar to figure out where 1,000 days out would put us, and realized, that's around the time I will turn 62.

That's sort of a magic number for a few reasons.  One, of course, is that 62 is the earliest age that you can retire and draw regular social security benefits.  Another is that we have a 3-year commitment to remain in the house that we bought just before our wedding, and that will be up about that time.

But my thoughts around goals were motivated by the realization that I may not always be able to work and/or able to find work.  Don't get me wrong, I'm a diligent worker, and can't really picture myself "retired" in the conventional sense - sitting on the front porch in a rocker admiring the scenery.  I'm pretty sure that as long as I'm able, I'll be doing something that is, in some sense, productive.  But there are two issues. One is that I have no guarantees of how long my health will hold up.  God has blessed me in my recovery from cancer with very few lasting side effects of consequence, but I know that during the time I was sick and for a considerable time afterward, I was completely incapable of working.  And I realize now that, the older I get, the higher the probability that I may be in that state again someday.

The second consideration is that it's becoming more and more difficult to find someone that wants to hire me to do the work that I do well (software development). There are many reasons for that.  Partly, my years of experience are a double-edge sword.  I'm very good at what I do, but often employers would rather hire someone less experienced (read "younger") and cheaper.  Currently, I'm being well-paid on a contract.  And the expectation is that the contract will continue for a relatively long time.  But things change, and, especially in independent contracting, there are no guarantees.

So the goals that I wanted to set for the next 1000 days are to get myself in a position where I have sufficient income coming in to live comfortably, and have that income not be dependent on my working on an hourly or salaried basis for anybody else that can tell me I can't work for them anymore.  Contrary to what I had expected earlier in my life, that income probably won't come from investments, because most of my retirement "nest egg" was wiped out by the expenses of fighting my cancer.  But there are other avenues.

I'm looking at a couple different activities that will generate an on-going stream of income, not necessarily without my working, but without my "clocking in" on an hourly business with some one.  The thing that these activities have in common is that I can do them from just about anywhere that I can get consistent power and a reliable internet connection.  So we're free to move just about anywhere in the US, and most places in the world, if that's where we feel God is leading us.

Check back with me later, and I'll try to keep you posted on how it's going.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Online businesses

One thing that has drawn a lot of my interest recently is the idea of setting up some sort of online business that will generate a stream of income on auto-pilot.  The reason is simple: I won't be physically able to continue working indefinitely, and I don't have enough saved in order to retire.

Steven James, a guy who has come across my radar recently, has a strategy that seems like it has some significant potential: Don't shoot for the stars, i.e., a single website or business that will generate all the income you need, but rather, put together a collection of simple, tiny web-sites that will gather the "low-hanging fruit" - picking off onezy-twozy sales of $5-50 a day.  Just a relatively few of those, and you have enough income to live off of.

He talks about it in this link:Multiple Profit Streams

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

So much hype!

It seems like everyday I get at least half a dozen SPAM emails promoting the latest new forex robot. What is really disconcerting is that each one of them decries the seemingly endless hype about new robots, and how completely worthless they all are - and then goes on to hype their latest creation as the one that's different!

Take this one - Extreme Pip Poacher - for example. He spends most of a very long advertising copy describing the bad things people do to try to sell you worthless robots that aren't going to work - and then says "But I'm different."  And shows you  a video of "real, live footage showed a stunning $1454.96 profit from three consecutive winning trades – completely hands-free and on autopilot."  Implying, of course, that if you buy his robot, you'll do the same.

The thing is, some of these robots actually do make money.  Not as much as their advertising copy claims, but enough to be worthwhile, as I detailed in my earlier blog.  So how do you know which?

I've decided I'm going to start a new site dedicated to reviewing robots and letting you know what I find - without all the hype!  Stay tuned.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

A Forex Robot that HAS worked, at least for me

In yesterday's blog post, I talked about the very disappointing results of my experiment with the Forex Robot World Cup trading robot, Fusion. (To summarize, it turned a $400 trading account into $240 in about 3 weeks.)

But that doesn't mean that no forex robot can actually yield positive results.

When I first decided to dabble in foreign exchange (forex) trading, I also looked into a couple of the myriad of forex robots that are available, for two reasons. First, I knew I had no idea what the heck I was doing, and if I could buy a program at a reasonable price that did know how to do it, then I might be money ahead. And, secondly, I knew that, with a full time job, I really didn't have a whole lot of time to devote to it. Automated programs - robots - can trade for you night and day, while you sleep or are at work.

But not really having a lot of faith in them, I didn't want to spend a whole lot of money. So I bought the cheapest one I could find - a $67 program called Forex God Father. When I had it in operation for two and a half weeks and it had yet to make a trade, I decided that was not really the program I wanted. I requested - and received - a full refund of my money. (That's one good thing - since skepticism about these programs is so high, they almost all come with money back guarantees.)

After reading quite a bit of ad copy and a number of reviews, I tried one called Forex MegaDroid that sells for $97$149. [Edit: After I posted this, my son checked my data and informed that the price has apparently risen to $149 - either that, or I have forgotten how much I actually spend. At any rate, he is correct, the current price is $149.] I set it up on a demo account and let it run, and it seemed to do pretty well. It didn't trade too often - usually once or twice a week was all, and it didn't make astounding gains, but it had very, very few losses. Now don't get me wrong - it didn't come anywhere close to the gains promised by its advertising copy - a couple thousand percent. But it did make consistent, positive gains with, seemingly very little risk.

After a few months, I realized I really couldn't track its performance, because I was interspersing my own (practice) trades in with those that it made. So, on the first of January, I set it up in a new demo account with a nice even $10,000 balance, and let it run without doing anything of my own in that account. Today, 6 1/2 months later, that demo account has a balance of $14,191.74. That's a gain of 41% in just a little over half a year. No, it's not 2500%, but it sure beats the heck out of the 1 1/2 % I get on my savings account, or even the 12%/year I might (optimistically) get on my mutual fund.

So I decided, let's try it with some real money and see what it does. When I got back from my trip to see my son in Morocco in February, I opened a live acccount with $100.

Now, MegaDroid has an astonishing percentage of winning trades, but it does very occasionally have a losing one. And, for the reasons I detailed in yesterday's post, when it has a losing trade, it's likely to be a doozy. As it happened, the very first trade it made in the live account was a losing trade - it lost 5%. So right off the bat, my $100 is down to $95.

But from then on, it just went up and up and up. By the beginning of June, it was up 26% - even including having started off down 5%.

I have control of some money that's not mine. I'm going to have to pay it back, I just don't know when. But until then, I have it sitting in a savings account. After seeing the track record MegaDroid had posted over 5 months, and only one other loss, I decided that, well, like I said, I could make a lot more money than having that sitting in a savings account. Granted, there is some risk to it (according to the disclaimers on my trading account "Margined Currency Trading is one of the riskiest forms of investment available in the financial markets"), but I felt like if I monitored it closely and determined to get out if MegaDroid lost any significant portion of the money, I could mitigate the risk. So a few weeks ago, I put a substantial part of that money into my forex account. It's actually only made a couple trades since then, but it's up close to $400 - more than I would have made leaving the money in the savings account for the next 10 years! [Edit: I came home from work last night to find that it was in the middle of two more trades that ended up netting an additional $175!] And that's real, actual, spendable greenbacks. That definitely more than covers the $97 I spent on buying MegaDroid!

So my point is this - yes, MegaDroid and most other trading robots are way over-hyped. But they can still be a very,very profitable opportunity.

Fulll-disclosure - if you should click on the link above and decide to try Forex MegaDroid out for yourself, I will earn a modest commission. I have not let that compromise the integrity of my comments here.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Forex Robot World Cup - results

It has been a long time since I blogged about the results of my experiment with Forex Robots, and I sort of left you hanging. The reason I stopped recording my results in real time was that I was about to say some pretty negative things about the sponsors of the Forex Robot World Cup, and they had a thousand dollars of my money that I wanted refunded.  They had guaranteed it, but I had no certainty that they would honor that guarantee in the face of negative publicity I might generate.  But they did.

Okay, here's what I found. The "Fusion" robot that they offered does not come anywhere close to living up to the gains that they implied that it would.  In the roughly three weeks that I was actively trading it, I lost about 40% of my original, real live, cash investment ($400 went to $240) - something they loudly proclaimed in their enticing ad copy wouldn't happen. But, when I fulfilled the terms of their guarantee, they did, indeed, refund my $999 purchase price without a hassle.

I started this series with the question "Forex Robots: Scam or Opportunity?".  So, was it a scam?  I think that all depends on your definition of "scam".  Did they deliver what they promised (or strongly implied)? No.  But did they take my money and run, or cheat me out of something to their gain? No.

If they had delivered a robot that was just trash and then disappeared or otherwise refused to honor their guarantee, that would be a scam.  Or if they had delivered the robot and used it to install a virus that could get access to my personal information (something I feared when I saw the virus warnings), that would be a scam.  Or if they used it to promote a Forex broker with whom I invested and then he ran off with my money, that would be a scam.  They didn't do any of these things.

They DID way over-promise and under-deliver, and after seeing the details and analyzing their strategy, I believe they did it deliberately.  I don't think they lied about the results they achieved. But I don't think they have told the whole story.  I think they manipulated the results to achieve one purpose: being able to quote a return number so astronomical (356% return in 19 days) that it would be compelling. And they did this by trading the robots with a risk factor that no sane trader using his own real money would ever do.

The Fusion robot was actually made up of 5 robots that performed well in their 2 month competition. (Note - successful traders say that 2 months is far too short a time to adequately judge any track record - robot or manual). The one that traded most frequently and with the best success was called High-Rider.  It's strategy appeared to be fairly simple - take small gains, referred to as scalping, with very few losses. 

One of the things people look at in evaluating a robot is its won/lost percentage - how many of its trades end up as profitable, vs. how many lose money.

It turns out that it is actually fairly simple to have an astoundingly high won-lost percentage.  All you have to do is set the stop-loss point so high that it is almost certain not to be hit. (The stop-loss point is the price point that you select when entering a trade such that, if the trade goes against you and hits that price point, you will "stop your losses" and get out.)

Trading the forex market is different than trading the stock market.  In the stock market, if you're buying individual stocks, you're buying ownership in a company whose value can go up or down by large amounts, depending on their success in the business - and can keep going.  In forex, you're trading one form of a commodity - money - for another form.  And there will be small differences and changes in the relative value of the currencies you're trading, but in the end, it's all money.  And so you're making money on the very, very small changes - changes in the 4th decimal place of the relative valuation, equivalent to 1/100th of a cent.

The result of this is that prices of one currency in terms of another tend to move up and down in relatively small ranges.  Even when there is a relatively large change in valuation, it occurs somewhat gradually, over longer periods of time.

So, if I enter a trade believing that the relative price of a currency is going to go up, and I'm willing to take a small gain,  it's very likely that the price will move to give me that small gain before it moves against me in a big way - even if it moves somewhat against me at first.  So if I'm willing to exit the trade on a gain of 12 pips (which High-Rider was using), and I set a stop-loss point of 200 pips, it's much more likely that the price will move up 12 pips before it moves down 200 pips, even if it might initially move down by 50 or 100 pips before it does. [A pip is the smallest price change that  will be quoted - usually the 4th decimal point of the price.)

And this is what High-Rider was doing.  It had a VERY high success rate during the competition. But here's the downside - if it DOES have a loss (and, eventually, every trading system will have a loss), the loss will be huge.

The promoters advised that you set your trading size  for High-Rider to one-tenth of a mini-lot (one-one hundredth of  a full lot) for each thousand dollars of account valuation.  At that point,  if the trade went against you, you would have lost 200 pips times $.10/pip, or $20, out of a $1000 account.  That's two percent, which is what I have read is the best standard for limiting your risk on each trade.  So that sounds reasonable.

EXCEPT that, as part of its strategy, when High-Rider found a trade, it would trade it up to 10 times, usually within a few minutes of each other.  And if the price moves against it, ALL of those trades are going to go down.  Which means that now your 2% risk is actually a 20% risk. In fact, that was what happened in my live account - a trade did go against it, and it wiped out $80 of my original $400 account in one day.

Now, all of that explanation was to get this:  When the promoters built their 356% return in 19 days, they were trading High-Rider with not one tenth of a mini-lot, but a full mini-lot.  That means each trade was risking 20% of the account balance, and the ten trades that High-Rider entered were risking 200% of the account balance! If the very first set of trades that was entered had gone against it (something that MIGHT happen), the account would have been  wiped  out.  That is why I say that no sane trader using his own real money would have traded the robot that way. In fact, in their case, it worked out, and, if I remember right,  the account gained in excess of 10% the very first day.

But they weren't using "real" money. Yes, it was a live account (supposedly) with real money, but if that trade had gone against them, they would have simply started over with a new investment of $1000, until they got an account record that they could advertise, and never tell you about the attempts that they had made that had lost money. In fact, it would surprise me if, behind the scenes, there weren't multiple attempts to get a good track record, and they only used the best one in the advertising copy.

So, was it a scam? No, I still wouldn't say it was a scam.  Was the advertising misleading? Definitely.  Was it false to the point of being fraudulent? Probably not.  A lot of the conclusions they wanted  you to come to were implied rather than stated.

Just because this robot did not represent a real opportunity doesn't mean that none of them do.  Tomorrow (I hope!) I'll tell you about one that I have been using that, while  not living up to its advertising copy, nevertheless has given me some very solid gains in a real-money account.  Stay tuned!