Hello all you Blogspot browsers and the like. As of today, 06/09/08, I remain a 17 year old who continues to leech off my parents for 99% of my expenditure, the 1% being the times that I work for my parents.
Right now, i.e at 10:31 pm, I should be studying for my HSC, an Australian equivalent of UK's A-Levels and USA's SAT's. Basically, with my school career ending in a month, it means that my exams will be in a month. That however has been clouded by the hype of university courses and careers. For example, UNSW's Open Day today.
Technically, I have finished 50% of my final exams, but due to Australia's lack of nationwide accredited tests, that 50% means next to nothing.
Luckily, I am a student of one of the few schools that have 'imba' scaling due to relatively harder internal exams. More like extremely hard. Thus, it means that if I can study hard and do well in my final exams, the bad marks I got in the internal exams will be pulled up. Note the word IF.
I'll be honest here. This blog won't be very good. It's more like a place for me to rant about Finance, Economics and the last parts of my HSC. It's probably going to be like the marshmallow that you tried to cook perfectly with the campfire, only to be rewarded by a useless conglomerate of over-charred glucose and fat.
Books
Recently, I bought 3 books for a decent price of $64.80 incl. post and handling.
They are:
Little Book of Big Ideas: Economics by Matthew Forstater
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Microtrends by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne
Normally, I usually opt to read the smallest book I can find, but, not judging a book by its cover, Microtrends looked most interesting.
Just an hour ago, I was up to page 44 of the 400 page long book [excluding the index] It's a little [BIG] book of statistics and new microtrends that have emerged in the society but more specifically American society. It's got bits and pieces about Love, Sex, Work, Religion, Health, Family, Politics, Teens, Diet, Lifestyle, Money, Fashion, Techonology, Entertainment, Education, International....the list goes on. [Thus the appropriateness of an index.]
Microtrends basically identifies new trends that have happened within American society. One funny/interesting fact I found was that, given America's population is 305 million and that 5% of these people are gay, it means that 15.25 million people are gay, which also means that America almost has an "Australian population of gay people." I'm not prejudiced or anything, I'm just saying. "That's a lot of gay people!" relative to the population of the "sh*thole country of criminals"[One youtuber's depiction of Australia]
Fellow Australians, can you imagine 70% of Australia being Gay? I'm having a hard time trying.
I'll post more fun facts from Microtrends later into next week.
Finance and Economics.
Recently, the Reserve Bank of Australia cut the cash rates by 0.25 points,meaning that cash rate fell from 7.25 back the 7.00 and although theoretically, the effects of interest rates take between 6-18 months to have full effect, it was also observed that the ASX has continued to fall over the past 3 business days. As a participant of the ASX stockexchange competition, it means that buying new stocks becomes a risky business, especially since I don't have much virtual cash left to spend. My rank fell from 803 to 1400 out of the possible 5259 places.[ This is the public division, not the schools division.]
The little bear with its brother, the bearish market. How appropriate...
The little bear with its brother, the bearish market. How appropriate...My own understanding is that, with oil prices falling in the short term, as well as the falling of the Australian dollar, demands for Australian metals and other minerals will still be high but taking into account the weakness of the global economy right now, this increase may be a really slow process. Green stocks on the other hand i.e Environmentally friendly stocks such as Metal Recycling Sims group or Wind Farmers Downer EDI have not been affected as much.
I myself have bought BHP, Sims Group, Fortescue, Bluescope, Brambles shares and sold my Ramsay Healthcare shares at a meaty $11, taking in $1400 in profits. Apart from Brambles and Sims, the other stocks have fallen below the prices at which I bought them. Which then wasted all the effort of short-trading the RHC shares.
Please comment if you have any views on the Finance or Economy.
Do NOT comment if you have thoughts on any of the 3 books cause I haven't read them yet.
Just to finish of this blog, I just feel like showing you how much of an avid Smart Investor reader I am
Thanks for reading.
Jonathan Li, Will be Class of '08 Sydney Grammar
Bears-It's a Love/Hate relationship
