Is stock investing really gambling in disguise?

I do remember vividly of one instance when I was discussing investment with a dear friend of mine.

When I mentioned the word ‘stock’, he straight away got a bit wary and defensive and commented, “Isn’t playing with stock no different from gambling? And not to mention it is a high risk game as well? If I make just one wrong move, I’ll be in deep shit right?”

Reflecting back then, I think there is still a perceived notion that dabbling in stock is equivalent to gambling. I don’t really blame my friend for that statement. He had a bad experience where his dad lost a pile in the stock market. Must be traumatizing for him.

Yes while I do admit, getting involved in stocks can be like gambling in certain cases, to equate both of them together will be to do injustice to all the careful and rational investors  who do their due diligence out there.

All too often, we hear of people losing a fortune in the stock market. When you really examine why is this so, the familiar old reasons come out. There are many, but I will just pick 1, which is

Finally I’m back again!

Sigh. It was an agonizing and testing period for the last 5 or 6 days. Ok nothing really dramatic or fatal here, but if you have noticed, there weren’t any postings by me in a while.

The reason was that I couldn’t access my site through my ISP’s connection. It all happened when my host faced a problem  at one of their datacentre which resulted in my site being temporarily down.

I discovered the problem at night and immediately inform my host. To their credit, the response was swift and got the site up and running again within a few hours, but the strange thing was that I still couldn’t get into my site over here even though the support staff were telling me that it was loading up fine and quickly over in the US.

The strange thing was that apparently my site could actually be accessed by other local ISPs over here by not my own! 

Finally it was revealed in a tcptraceroute test that my ISP’s DNS servers can not resolve my website’s IP address because it experienced a connection problem when it passes through the hop connection at The Planet, a big US-based private dedicated hosting server.

Small crazy personal reminiscence on Investment and a great tool I (and you should) use – ChartNexus charting software

Investing has always been an interest of mine. My investment journey started 2 years back when it dawned on me that I should be making my money in my savings work harder for me, instead of just leaving it there to gather dust.

The interest rate the bank was giving me then was really pathetically puny (and it still is). But what to do? It is supposedly risk free (but not entirely. If the bank is to go bust, your savings go down with it). Therefore to compensate for the near zero risk, I’ll have to live with a  low interest rate. Nothing I can really complain about.

Having enough of this, I embarked on a arduous journey where I locked myself in a dark cold room, determined not to come out until I mastered the art of investment. Years of sleepless night spent peering at investment sites and resources, as well as doing virtual and real trading has gone by, and I’m proud to announce that as of today, I’m still nowhere near ‘master yoda’ stage……YET.

It’s okay. No worries, I will reach there one day. Warren Buffett and George Soros, please watch your back!

Take consistent action daily – it adds up!

I was just reading a newsletter by Allan Gardyne, the founder of Associate Programs (top top affiliate marketing resource in my view), who is one of the best known affiliate marketers out there together with Ewen Chia.

So, there was this particular tip in his newsletter that really struck a chord with me.

It’s a very simple tip but one of the most important one for me. As you can infer already from the title of my post, it is to take consistent action daily.

Far too often, we are all pre-occupied of getting trying to get the latest information on how to keep ahead of the competition and maintaining the edge, and somehow, we forget the basics.

It really is the basics that get us going. The all important fundamentals.

It is not the constant planning and planning and planning that brings in the money.

It is the action to carry out the monetization plan that does.

I must admit I’m one that do get distracted easily at times. And also one that pays a lot of attention to planning. Sometimes too much, that leaves me little time for actually carrying it out.

Customer Support – Make or break with it!

I really can’t stressed enough how important customer support really is. Make it extremely super duper important!

Whether is it just a simple email follow up, an answer to a query or a thank you letter, plain little things like these go a long way in establishing a nice cosy relationship with your customer. The very people whom your business is relying on for survival.

Building up trust and credibility with your customer is to me, a vital key to long term business success. Customers like to feel important and wish that their needs are being taken of. For a service provider, it is of paramount importance that such expectations are being met.

You will want to constantly give value back to them. Overdeliver and basically keep them happy, leaving them wanting for more from you.

Needless to say, the last thing you want to do is to piss them off!

One sure way to get into your customer’s ‘good’ books is to ignore repeated query emails. I know. I’ve been there. And seriously, you really want to curse and swear like no tomorrow especially if the query is regarding an important issue.

Best Internet Marketing Community Bar None

When you are new to something, you will always want to look for support and successful people which you can model yourself after. In addition, you will like to hear from the experiences of others, make friends and even form possible joint ventures with. A community forum is usually the best place to do so.

You get the occasional crap ones, where posters just come on to talk and spout nothing but loads of BS. These forums are just a waste of time.

Thank god there do exist great ones out there.

When it comes to Internet Marketing, there is one forum community that stands out from the rest. No question about it. No doubts about it.

That honour belongs to The Warrior Forum.

I can’t really remember how and when I stumbled into this forum, but boy was I glad that I did.

This is really THE place where all the marketers from all over the world hang out. The best are in there. Just observing them discuss about Internet Marketing matters has allowed me to learn in bucketloads.

A unique feature of the forum is the WSO section or otherwise known as the Warrior Special Offer section.