Serve, Learn & Lead with Raymond Tay

Grow or Lose Your Wealth (Trading)

Today, we will discuss a very appealing method of growing wealth and that’s trading. There is a huge potential for making large profits but at the same time, it can make you lose more than your capital. Stock option is one of the famous derivatives and Warren Buffett termed them as “financial weapons of mass destruction”. You really need to think deeply before using such instruments. Option is a contract that gives the right, without the obligation, to buy or sell a specified asset on or before a specified date at a specified price. Each contract entitles you to buy 100 stocks. There are two types of options: Call option (betting on the increase of stock price) and Put option (similar to shorting a stock). Option premium is made up of intrinsic value and speculative value. Trading options is like investing in stocks but with leverage. When a stock price changes, the option price changes much more. An example from optionsXpress:

Purchase 100 shares stock @ $32 for a cost of $3,200.00. If the stock rises from $32 to $42 you would have a $1000 gain or a 31% increase.

OR

Control 100 shares of stock by purchasing the option at a premium of $3 per share for a cost of $300 (1 contract x 100 shares x $3 premium = $300). If the option premium rose from $3 to $11, the original cost was $300 and it is now worth $1100. You have an $800 profit, but a 266% return!

Day trading is another way of the buying and selling of various financial instruments like futures, options, currencies, and stocks and day traders are making use of large amounts of leverage to take advantage of small price movements in highly liquid stocks or indexes. Two important criteria for selecting the right stock for day trade are liquidity and volatility. Next, you need to identify the tools for analysis and determine the buy/sell stock option signals. The common tools are candlesticks, technical analaysis (e.g. MACD, stochastics) and volume. Lastly, news about the stock, sector or market is equally essential esp. for day traders.

Improve Your Credit

As many people aspire to own car, house and credit cards, these assets (or liabilities?) come along with never-ending payments. Thus it is important to assess your own capability whether you are able to pay off the long-term loans and still enjoy the lifestyle you want before getting one. There are many cases of young individuals who graduated with huge debts or even becoming bankrupt at young age.

Are you struggling with your monthly loan payments? Need professional help? Maybe you can consider to seek for credit restoration and education services like RMCN Credit Services. RMCN is started by Doug Parker who faced credit problems before but he managed to improve his credit intelligently. Thus he would like to help others who have similar difficulties and improve their credit rating. Proven results are found in rmcnresults.com. Or interested about some of their rmcnreviews.com? There are rmcntestimonials.com to share with new customers.

Getting Motivation to Exercise

Fortunately, I am well-conditioned from my previous army training to exercise regularly and always ensure part of my weekly schedule must include exercising. I’ve these beliefs to push myself: 

• “Without exercising, I’ll not have the energy to accomplish many things and I’ll feel restless.”
• “My level of confidence is equal to my level of fitness.”
• “I will be able to speak better when my high energy is maintained.”
• “The more we move, the more we feel. Emotions is made up of motions.”
• “Of course, most importantly, we’ll look good. Stay youthful as well.” =)

My normal exercising routine consists of 3 sets of 50-60 push-ups (legs are raised), weight lifting (ard 10-12kg), my “hand press” and finally running (close to 3km). Remember to focus on both upper and lower body.

Swimming is my other favourite form of exercising (esp. meeting my friend for a swim or sun tanning). Organising a night cycling can be a fun activity. Travelling around for sightseeing and eat. Another way to get your body moving is finding an exercising buddy. Build closer relationship too. If you still can’t get yourself to do anything, sign up for a gym membership or dance club (esp. those that need you to pay a fee) so that you will feel a bit painful when you don’t utilise the facilities.

Do you really need its help?

Are you looking for Information on Exercise Equipment? Or considering to have Tunturi treadmill or Tunturi elliptical in your house? When it’s raining outside, you’ll not have any excuse to say “Not a good weather to run”. 

Almost all Singaporean men needs to clear IPPT (Individual Physical Proficiency Test) every year and I think it is a good practice as it helps to keep Singaporean men fighting fit and reduce our country’s obesity level.

What’s Google Caching and Indexing?

Is cache something new for you? Yes, it does for me. From what I’ve discovered, it is actually very simple on the surface but in terms of the backend technology that is facilitating the caching, we might not be able to understand.

Google has web crawling robot which will find and retrieve pages on the web and then pass them to Google Indexer. Thus when the crawler finds any related pages, they will take a snapshot of the page & caches that version as a back-up. This allows readers to view the particular page in the Google site at a faster speed. The cached link can be found under the link of the page that relate to your query and it is useful when you can’t find/load the website (e.g. due to internet congestion or the owner has removed the site).

An interesting fact: Google cached links sometimes provide snapshots of stories/pages of some registration-only sites. Although this raises copyright issues, Google helps to drive traffic to the cached sites.

Search Engine Watch’s Sullivan said, “But most people are concerned about getting into Google, not getting out of it.”

If you want to have your website to be shown in the Google search engine when people keyed in the related words, you can add your site url into Google index. However, Google doesn’t guarantee your site to be appear in their search results. Nevertheless, you should do it (it’s free anyway). Another way is Google will find links by crawling websites. As for SEO, you will need to put in many similar keywords that keep appearing in your site and you want to focus on (esp. your theme/topics you love to write about).

Still do not have your own website? Looking for any web hosting? Or want to look into web hosting reviews first?

Increase Your Financial Literacy

When we talk about insurance, what’s your first impression? Is it the financial advisor, “just want my money”, scam, “waste my time” or no value at all? I believe majority of us have this mentality and I think it was due to the aggressiveness of the industry or advisors in the market. As we know, there are many advisors on the street doing these things: approaching you, asking you to do a financial check-up survey or hard selling. Thus these actions might push us away. However, if insurance is really not a valuable product, it would have disappeared long ago in the market.

In a layman’s term, insurance is like buying a protection for ourselves. When we feel that we do not have the financial capacity to handle big crisis or major accident’s expenses, then it’ll be good for us to own an insurance so as to give us a sense of security/ peace. There are many different types of insurance such as life insurance, term insurance, health insurance, investment-linked products and business insurance.

A typical whole life policy will cover death and total permanent disability (TPD), has premiums that are payable for certain periods (e.g. 20 years or up till 65 years old) and has death benefits that consist of sum assured and accumulated bonuses.

If you want to have your medical expenses paid, receive cash when you are hospitalised, reduce your financial burden when you are diagnosed with a major illness (e.g. cancer) or protect your income when you are unable to work, a comprehensive health insurance can take care of it.

Be sure to work out an insurance plan to quantify the amount of insurance needed and focus on term policies rather than more expensive types of policies (if you have a lesser budget). You’ll have different needs at different life stages such as single, just married and have children.

A total financial plan will have 4 pillars: savings, wealth accumulation, retirement planning and insurance. 

For business owner, getting insurance is also an important aspect for planning. Here are the types of business insurance:

• Keyman Insurance: to offset the potential financial loss caused by the premature death or disability of the key executive(s) 
• Business Succession (e.g. biz partner taking up a life policy on the life of other partner(s) so that can use the proceeds to buy the deceased partner’s share)
• Guarantor Insurance (to protect against biz liabilities and uncertainties)
• Executive Retention: to stretch and maximise your compensation dollars and offer your key executives more monetary benefits
• Employee Benefits (e.g. group term life with critical illness, group hospitalisation & surgical plan, group outpatient and group personal accident)

Can get the business insurance quote here and an example will be Illinois business insurance.

Is Internet Making Us Clever or Stupid?

Recently, I have come across a research on “The Future of the Internet” in 2020 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet. It was an online survey that consisted of 895 technology stakeholders’ and critics’ expectations of the evolving Internet in 10 years’ time.

Most of the respondents were hand-picked and invited through email, Twitter or Facebook. They were experts, representatives from institutions like Microsoft, Yahoo!, IBM, researchers and professors from many universities.

The survey discovered that 76% of the respondents felt that Internet will enhance human intelligence and people will become smarter and make better decisions as more information is accessible.

65% of the respondents agreed that Internet will improve our reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge and 80% will think that the hot gadgets and applications will often come “out of the blue” and surprise the many of today’s savviest innovators.

This research also compared with another article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr and he wrote about how massive information has changed people from reading and understanding a lengthy article in depth to skimming through numerous sources and browsing a couple of pages of an article.

Over-reliance of search engines and Internet for everything from doing a project to finding a date will make us stupid. The author indicated that Google is treating information as commodity and showing our human brain as an outdated computer that requires a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Only 21% of respondents agreed with Carr and replied that Internet might lower the IQs of people who used it frequently.

As I am a heavy user of Internet (so as many people I believe), it is interesting to know how it has been changing our lives especially our human intelligence. Are we becoming smarter, more stupid or lazier? I was born in the middle of Generation X & Y and thus I had experienced a couple of years without computer & Internet during my childhood.

In the past, I would visit library frequently to look for information but now information is at our fingertips. Internet is like a mega virtual library where anyone can access and contribute. With social networking, we can communicate in many different ways to anyone in the world.

My idea of Internet is only a medium or tool that we make use to find information. I believe it make us more knowledgeable in the fields that we consistently seek out (be it good or not; entertainment, gaming, education or personal development). I like this sentence that stated in the “The Future of the Internet” report, “If they are motivated to learn and shrewd, they will use new tools to explore in exciting new ways. If they are lazy or incapable of concentrating, they will find new ways to be distracted and goof off.” It is not about the technology but our personalities.

Do you still write a journal? Nowadays, I think it is outdated and instead people will ask, “Do you blog?” Blogging has become a phenomenal and according to Technorati, it is tracking more than 112 million blogs as of December 2007.

As a regular blogger myself, I have learnt to design, reflect, write, research, compile, format, interact with my visitors, add links and place ads. Most importantly, it gives me an opportunity to share my knowledge with people and document all my learning experience. I believe my reading and writing skills have improved greatly.

Our creativity and analytical skills have been enhanced too as we can see many amazing websites (e.g. facebook, youtube) are evolving to facilitate communication and information sharing.

Our intelligence level lies on our hands, not technology.

Starting Your Biz Website

Nowadays, if you want to start a business, I think one of the very first steps is to create a website and look for a web hosting. Why do you need a website? The primary aim is to build awareness about your products/services. Other objectives include creating a sales channel like direct selling (e.g. Dell, Amazon, eBay), updating customers on your latest products or events and even generating discussions in the website.

Having no clue about designing a website?

There is no need to learn about sophisticated designing tools as many website templates are easily available for downloading. Of course, more professional & attractive website templates come with a price. Thus you can just search for an appropriate template that matches your business. For my biz website, I’m doing it too and make my own adjustments like adding pictures, adding links and changing the texts. Fortunately, I’ve learnt about basic html in school and therefore I’m able to do that easily. 

Finding a web hosting?

Next, once you are done with your biz website, you need a “place” to continuously show (host) your website unless you own a server and let it turn on for 24hrs, 7 days a week. There are endless webhosting sites that you can find and this might confuse some people. You don’t know which one to choose? How I choose the web host? First, I need to ensure the webhost is safe and reliable. Look for their awards (e.g. Editor’s Choice Award, Hosting Code Of Ethics Verified) and testimonials that they received. Secondly, I will naturally compare the packages in terms of price, domain name, number of e-mail addresses, disk space, bandwidth, etc. You can check their ranking too such as a web hosting directory. Can also consider drupal web hosting. You need to know what is important for your biz website. Sometimes it is not necessary to purchase the most expensive package with all the unlimited features for your simple biz website. Lowering the bottomline is as important as increasing the topline for your business.

Need to have a blog too?

I will recommend you to have a blog too if you have the time and resources or information to share constantly. So far I think wordpress is a good blog platform to use as it’s user-friendly and most of all, free for anyone (with regular updates too). You can also look into wordpress web hosting. There are also many blog shops around, which is using a blog to promote & sell your products.

Curious about LASIK?

I believe many of us have some degree of myopia and I need to wear spectacles or contact lenses daily. A couple of months ago, my sister actually went for LASIK (Laser In-situ Keratomileusis) to correct her eyesight (like 500 to 700 degrees) and she commented that it was really fast (less than 5 minutes) and did not feel much pain during the surgery.

Within the first few days of the LASIK, she experienced a bit of mild discomfort and tearing but shortly, she recovered and can see very clearly (almost perfect eyesight). Now, she is free of the trouble of cleaning/wearing contact lenses and saves the cost of maintaining the lenses. Still it is important to understand the risk involved and always seek doctor’s advice.

Watch & learn about LASIK by Singapore National Eye Centre.

For people who situated in U.S, you might consider Stahl Eye Center, which has been serving patients for more than 35 years and has three locations in New York including Manhattan and Long Island.

Owning Car in S’pore & Car Accessories

Should one own a car in S’pore? It’s very expensive to own a car in S’pore and you’ll need to spend at least S$1,000 a month for petrol, road tax, ERP, parking, servicing, etc. If you would just take public transport, you will only spend about S$150/month. Nevertheless, I believe all of us aspire to own a car as it’ll show your financial well-being. But when you are just surviving, then you should not let yourself struggling to pay your bills every month for the sake of having a car. Although S’pore’s public transport system is very comprehensive, we should strive to own a car and increase our income to live a comfortable life.

For car owners,

What car accessories are you are looking for?
Here are the Top 10 Car Accessories for you:

#1 Auto Seat Cover: Sitting comfortably and protect your seat from burns, stains, wear and tear.

#2 Car Cover: Especially if you always park outdoor or under trees, protecting your car from scratches or dents.

#3 Floor Mats: There’ll always be times when your shoes are dirty esp. raining day. Find the right floor mat to match your car interior’s motif.

#4 Steering Wheel Cover: Do you eat while driving? Improving your grip.

#5 Hands-Free Mobile Phone Connector: Not advisable to talk on phone while driving but there might be emergency situations that you need to answer/use the phone.

#6 Mobile Phone Charger: You can eliminate the chance of forgetting to charge your phone at home.

#7 A Handheld Vacuum Cleaner: Come in handy when you need to clean up the crumbs and dirt.

#8 Battery Charger: Allow you to kick-start or re-charge your car battery easily. 

#9 Safety Seat(s) for Children: Very important if you’ve babies/kids.

#10 Safety Harness for your Pet: Prevent your pet from unfortunate mishaps when you accelerate/ break.