Thoughts From My Life

December 2006 Archives - Page 1

Dec
01
Written by Neil Galloway
 

Do any of you remember the Million Dollar Home Page? Well, he is at it again with Pixel Lotto. He is selling ad space on his site in 10 by 10 pixel chunks. There are 10,000 of them and they go for $200 a pop. That is 2 million dollars. He will then draw one person from the 10,000 to split half the money with him. This kid is genius and quite remarkable.

The site is currently preselling to customers of the first page, but on Dec. 5, 2006 it will go live to the public.

For any of you unfamiliar with the first million dollar page, it was a site with just a simple home page consisting of pictures all together. He sold a pixel of space in this page for $1. You get to put a picture in the space and link it to wherever you wanted. He promised to keep the site up for 5 years. Anyhow, he sold all 1 million spaces apparently. Companies would buy blocks up and pay him the cash.

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Dec
03
Written by Neil Galloway

When you are first buying camera equipment you see a lot of lenses that have the IS or VR designations on them. This is Image Stabilization or Vibration Reduction. They mean the same thing except Canon uses the first term and Nikon uses the second. These are mechanisms built into the camera lens to prevent "camera shake". I will discuss how to get rid of camera shake and why I purchased a VR lens for myself.

What is Camera Shake?

When you are holding your camera in your hands and looking through the view finder to take your photo, your body is making slight movements. This is a natural thing as your body is always correcting itself and your muscles move to help maintain your balance. However, it causes slight movements in your camera. When your camera is zoomed in on a subject that is a reasonable distance away, these slight movements become more noticeable.

For example. If your hand slightly shakes and turns your camera 1 degree off its line of direction and your subject is 15 feet away, this would correspond to 3.1 inches being added in the direction your camera turned. Now say that the movement of your hand happened when you took your picture and while the shutter was open. This would blur the image on film or on your digital image.

How Do I Prevent My Pictures From Blurring?

There are 3 ways to prevent this.

  1. Make sure you have a shutter speed fast enough so that your hand movements don't affect the picture.
  2. Use a tripod.
  3. Have a lens with vibration reduction or image stabilization.
Each of these methods have their pros and cons.

1. Have a Fast Enough Shutter Speed

Ideally, you would want this situation every time. The rule of thumb is that you need a shutter speed of 1 over the focal length your lens is set at. So if you are zoomed all the way in with your 300mm lens, you would want 1/300 second shutter speed or better (so 1/320 on the standard camera). This will usually guarantee (for the average user) the shutter won't be open long enough to make your hand movements noticeable on the final image If you have steady hands you will be able to get away with a slower speed. The catch here is will you have enough light to expose your picture. If it is the middle of a bright day you are fine. If it is darker you might have to use a more sensitive film, but this will cause your picture to be grainier.

Note: When you see expensive lenses with the same zoom capability as a cheaper lens, look at the maximum aperture for this lense. Chances are it will be a lot larger than the cheaper one. F/2.8 is a common one. The lower the number, the larger the aperture can go. This means a lot more light will get let in when you take the picture, so it will be able to have higher shutter speeds.

2. Use a Tri-pod

This will always work. Now you can have the shutter open as long as your want and the image won't have any blurring (this is assuming your subject isn't moving or is moving slowly). Tripods are cumbersome and annoying however. And they definitely don't work in a lot of circumstances, especially traveling.

3. Use a Lens With Image Stabilization or Vibration Reduction

This is "meet in the middle" approach as you still need a decent shutter speed, but you won't need a tripod and its cheaper than a fast lens. Inside the camera there is a mechanism to adjust the glass lenses slightly to compensate for the movements of your hand. IS and VR will give you a few shutter speed stops back. So if you can't quite get enough light to have 1/320 sec shutter speed as in the example above. VR will let you go down to 1/125 sec (4 full stops in ideal situations). A lot of times, this will give you enough light to properly expose your image.

VR and IS will make a lense cost extra, but they are still cheaper than buying the fast lenses I spoke of above. Fast lenses don't usually have much zoom capability either (a limitation of having such a large aperture).

Below I have an example of two images. One was taken without VR turned on and the other had VR on. This is a picture in my home taken with my Nikon D70s with the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens.

No Vibration Reduction
Photo Taken Without Image Stabilization or Vibration Reduction

Vibration Reduction Turned On
Photo Taken With Image Stabilization and Vibration Reduction

To summarize. The cheapest solution is to buy a tripod, the second is to buy a lens with IS or VR, and the most expensive is to buy "fast" lenses. I am a casual photographer and use it more for traveling so VR has been the best option for myself. If you find yourself with similar needs and want to eliminate camera shake from more of your photos, then I would definitely recommened looking at VR and IS lenses.

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Dec
03
Written by Neil Galloway

My wife gave me the Nikon SB-600 as a birthday present the other day. I have to say, I wasn't sure I wanted a flash at this point in my photography career (or lack of one), but I am quite impressed with this little device.

Check out the product page at Nikon.

Check out the review on dpreview.com.

I wasn't overly impressed with my built-in flash on the camera and I'm really not a fan of the "flash" look in my photos, so I try as much as possible to not use it. The built in Nikon flash is a bit "hot" as well. Subjects can look a little white and bright if you know what I mean. This new flash works awesome though. It can swivel 360 degrees on the horizontal plane and up to 90 degrees in the vertical. It lets me bounce the flash off the ceiling and the walls for a way more natural look.

Here is a picture of the SB-600.

The other handy feature to this flash is the little diffuser piece that pulls out and covers the flash. It spreads the light out even more giving you super wide coverage. My 10-20mm wide angle lens always had a dark shadow on the bottom of my pictures and now this flash can hit that spot so it will let me use it in so many more situations.

Probably the coolest feature to show off is how I can trigger the flash remotely. You can set the flash to be triggered by the flash on your camera (has to be D70s and above, not the D50 or D70). So I can hold the flash in my hand or set it up on a tripod away from me and when I have the flash on my camera up, it will trigger the SB-600 to flash as well. Gives two sources of lighting if you want it for portrait or tricky shot situations.

Something else that is cool. When it is set to TTL mode, it will automatically adjust according to the camera's settings. If I zoom in with my lense, the flash itself will move the bulb configuration inside to adjust so the light is more focused on the actual photo area.

I have yet to change the batteries in it, but I understand it can eat them up pretty quick. I'll have to decide if I need one of those AA recargeable battery kits for when I travel or if I can get away with a couple sets of regular batteries.

The flash costs around $275, so I will definitely need to get some use out of it before it pays for itself. It was the perfect gift though, because it is one of those things I might not have bought for myself anyways.

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Dec
04
Written by Neil Galloway
 

I found the site meta cafe the other day. It is a lot like youtube except you can make money on this one. You can create a user account and then upload a video file to the site. This video will be categorized and viewed by whomever.

How You Can Make Money

If you publish the video under the Producer Rewards Program you will be eligible for financial compensation. The only criteria is that the video is not copyrighted already, you have permission from everyone in the video to put it on the site, the video has an average rating of at least 3/5, and it has been viewed a minimum of 20,000 times. After this point, every 1,000 views is worth US$5. The site has ads on the site as both text ads and video ads they play before you clip.

I'm not sure what I'm going to put on. I have already put one clip on there from my trip to Africa this summer. It has a poor rating though. I notice the stupid stunts and magic tricks really score high. I have a couple magic ones I will try in the near future and will let you know the results.

If you know of anyone who has actually been paid from this site, let me know. I still find it a bit hard to believe. There is a martial arts one that says it has earned over $20,000 in Producer Rewards.

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Dec
05
Written by Neil Galloway

I learned my first big lesson yesterday about how search engines work (at least how Google works). I was all happy because Google had finally indexed my site. Unfortunately, when I searched for it and did some google statistics, it appeared like there was only one page.

The link thoughtsfrommylife.com/index.php was the only one showing up. There were no direct links to any of my articles, even if a did really specific google search string, it will still only show the home page link. So I had to do some investigation.

Google and Dynamic Links

So I find out that Google (along with other search engines) does not index dynamic links. What is a dynamic link? It a link to a web page that includes request parameters at the end of the url which the page uses to do something special with (thus called dynamic). For example, my website was using urls like this:

http://thoughtsfrommylife.com/viewarticle.php?articleid=5&title=My Favorite Article

So you can see from my link that the file viewarticle.php was being given the request parameter articleid. I was then using the articleid (in this case "5") to load up article number 5 and display it. I also through the title of the article in there because I thought this would improve my PageRank with Google. It did anything but.

Dynamic links make for simple programming. You just have to create one page and then add a bit of code to load up the different text each time it loads to make it look likes it own page. Unfortunately these links do not work well with Google.

Let me clarify as well. Google indexed the pages behind these links, but it did not index the links themselves. So my site was showing up in searches, but the google link would only go to the homepage and not the pages beneath.

Solution

The solution to this is to rename the pages to not have dynamic links, but I still wanted to use my viewarticle.php file. The solution is a module called mod_rewrite. It allows you to interpret a link that someone is trying to access on your server and apply some rules to it to change it to the link you want to handle. For example, my site now converts a link like this.

http://thoughtsfrommylife.com/article-5-My_Favorite_Article/
to
http://thoughtsfrommylife.com/viewarticle.php?articleid=5&title=My Favorite Article

As you can see, the links on my site now look like they are accessing a folder (with the title so nicely there), but when someone clicks that link it turns it into the original urls I was using. I really have one page that displays all the pages for my site, but now it looks like there are 50 different pages.

How Do I Do This?

First, make sure mod_rewrite is available from your hosting provider. It is a package for Apache Web Server, so make sure they are running that. If they are using IIS there are other solutions I believe (but I'm not sure).

Click here to see Apache's page for the mod_rewrite module.

Second, add the the following line into the .htaccess file in the root web directory of your site.

RewriteEngine On

Third, create a rule to rewrite your links. It uses a form of regular expressions to do the matching for your urls. Basically just write out the pattern you want having text that will never change and putting text that will change inside round brackets and use a regular expression on the inside to define what can be seen. Here is an example from the links I used above.

RewriteRule ^article-([0-9]*)-([A-Z|a-z|0-9|-|_]*)viewarticle.php?articleid=$1&title=$2 [L,NC]

This looks confusing but bear with me. So we are defining a rewrite rule (you can have as many of these as you want). They use a form of regular expression. You can read up on it at the mod_rewrite page at Apache's website.

  • The ^ at the beginning, means "at the beginning of the line".
  • article- will show up at the front of all matching urls. This means after the hostname (http://thoughtsfrommylife.com/article-...).
  • ([0-9]*) This expression is in round brackets so we are defining a regular expression here. The square brackets means I'm defining a range for a single character. So I am saying any number between 0 and 9. The * immediately after means this can happen as many times as necessary. Basically, this expression means any number will match (postive, integer number that is).
  • At the end of the line there is -([A-Z|a-z|0-9|-|_]*). This means there will be a hyphen (-) followed by the the matching regular expression. This regular expression uses square brackets and inside defines multiple ranges. The | between them means OR. So you can read it as saying, "match anything that is between uppercase A and Z, lowercase a and z, 0 and 9, -, or _". And the * at the end means as many of these that are strung together. Basically I was just trying to cover off whatever kind of titles I would have for my articles.
  • You will also notice $1 and $2. This means, rewrite out the first and second pattern matches. So it writes out the article id and the title for me.
  • The L and NC on the end are extra directives the tell mod_rewrite how to process this. L means this the "last" rule if it matches. Don't try to match any more. NC means "no case" or case insensitive. Uppercase and lowercase do not matter.
Test your new links to make sure they are getting rewritten correctly.

Last, you need to make sure the links on your web page are correct. Remove any of the dynamic links and use your new replacement link instead.

You should be done. Just regenerate your Google sitemap and wait for Google to reindex now.

I'll post an update in a couple days letting you know my own results.

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Dec
06
Written by Neil Galloway

Wow, this is incredible. This article on CNN talks about the money involved in operating the U.S. prison system. In 1985, it states that the U.S. had over 700,000 inmates. Today, this is over 2 million. That is astounding. The prison system is growing faster than the population and the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the western world (which it has had for years anyways).

When I see numbers like this though, I ask myself, how many people must be employed by this system? I would assume hundreds of thousands. If you ever wanted to get into an industry that has potential, this would be it. Will the market ever crash on people being bad? I doubt it. It looks like most of these companies are well established and some have been around a long time, but this could be good area to invent some neat product that could be used in prison systems everywhere. Also, programs for reforming criminals and introducing them back into society will definitely need to expand if there is this kind of growth in incarcerations.

Not that I think people should try and profit off of something bad, but it is an opportunity for those who could do a good job at it. Preventing crime in the first place is the most important step and crime deterrent products and programs are also very valuable.

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Dec
06
Written by Neil Galloway

When you are looking at properties it is often hard to decide what to look for. Establishing your own set of criteria is the best bet. No worries, its not set in stone. You can adjust them however you need as you learn more. But to determine if it is good or not you have to also know whats bad. You can do this by comparing to other ones that are bad.

When my wife and I were looking for our first house we had the following criteria:

  • It must have a suite for rental income
  • Seperate laundries (a demand from the wife)
  • Enough available parking
  • Suitable interior in both living spaces
From this you can see a few things that were important to us. The financial return and suitable appeal to renters and ourselves.

Since then I have learned so much more about rental houses I am embarrassed at how much I did not know at the time. This will probably be even more true in another year.

Comparing Financials

This is the biggest thing I have learned to compare houses. You can look at a hundred houses without ever leaving your computer and doing a comparison of the financials on them. Create your own spreadsheet (or use mine below) to punch in the numbers for each house you look at and see what type of returns you are looking at. There are two main components to house analysis. What will the cash flow be and what is the overall return.

Cash Flow

This is what cash will be coming in and out of your pocket every month. Rent cheques are the income and then your expenses are mortgage, insurance, utilities, maintenance costs, and any other services you provide.

It is important that you have decent cash flow. If it is negative by a lot, that means you will be paying out of your own pocket every month and this will be hard to sustain. Slight negative and even positive (you are making money) is a good sign.

Overall Return

This is composed of the cash flow, but also takes into account the appreciation/depreciation of the house value and the fact that part of your mortgage payment actually goes to the principle amount on the house (money you are actually retaining).

Positive return is a must otherwise you are wasting your time. You also want it to be reasonably high for the risk you are taking. Anything less than what you can get from the bank or other secure investments is too much risk for not enough reward.

Simple Analysis

Download House Analyzer

Try my house analyzer spreadsheet to get a look at a house. This is a quick litmus test for any property you look at. Basically it takes into account the following:

  • Mortgage (expected interest rate and house value)
  • Rental Income
  • Expected House Appreciation
  • Expected Maintenance Costs (1% of the house value)
  • Taxes

You can see a screenshot of it below. It might look a bit complicated but just look at it and try to understand at first. This will be too simple for any of you who have did this already. Any of the grey boxes you should fill in and the yellow boxes are the important ones. Punch in these values

  • Value of the House: What you think you can get it for.
  • Yearly Taxes: This should be available from the listing or on a municipal web site.
  • Mortgage Rate: If you have been pre-approved you know this for sure, otherwise just ball-park it based on the current rates.
  • Appreciation Rate: How much have houses on average increased in this city. Take a guess but be conservative.
  • Rental Income: What can you rent it for? What are other houses renting for in the area?
  • Gas, Water & Sewage, and Power: How much do you expect to pay for these? If you plan on the tenants paying these bills then put in zero. Make sure to reflect that in your rent though.
Now if you look at the yellow values, it will roughly tell you your monthly cash flow which will tell you how much money you will make or be out every month. The ROI is the return on investment. This tells you what you are actually making on this whole venture at the end of the day. If this is negative, walk away. If it is less than 10% and this won't be a personal residence then walk away. Any higher and you should probably be alright.

Bottom line: Look for positive cash flow and over 10% rate of return. This is hard to find trust me. My example shows it, but this was after looking for a long time on my part. This is an actual house I have seen in the past.

Note that I have 3 sets of calculations for the returns. One is in the situation you have no vacancies and no management (you do it yourself), the second is just 1 month of vacancy and no management, and the third is 1 month of vacancy and you have to pay someone 10% of your gross rent to manage. These are just for comparison and if you want to take the worst case scenario than do so. I have always kept no vacancy and self manage so I accept more risk and use the more favorable numbers for myself.

Screenshot of the Investment Property Analyzer

Download House Analyzer.

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Dec
06
Written by Neil Galloway
 

Options are an investment vehicle that offer a bit more sophistication for the average investor. They can be hard to understand and I will try to explain it in more detail here.

What Is An Option?

An option is the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a set number of shares of a stock at a specified price (called the strike price) during a specific period of time.

A call option is the right to "buy" and the put option is the right to "sell".

Here is an example. I looked on the exchange today (Dec. 6, 2006). Nortel Networks (NT) was trading in Canada for $25.20/share. There was a call option selling on the options exchange for January 2007 with a $25.00 strike price for $1.60/share. What does this mean? If you buy this option contract it will cost you $1.60/share. One contract is 100 shares so you will have to pay $160.00 plus commissions to your brokerage. You then have the option to buy Nortel shares for $26.00/share between now and the the 3rd Friday of January (because it is a January contract).

Now you would ask, "Why would I want to do that? It is only $25.20 right now anyways." That is true, but what will it go to by the time it expires? You could buy the stock right now, but you would have to pay 100 X $25.20 or $2,520. That is a lot of upfront cash. The cost of the option is only $160. If the stock doesn't do anything or goes down, you are only aout $160. But if the stock goes up, you will have the option of buying the stock for the lower amount and then reselling it for the higher amount with only having to put down $160.

This illustrates the leverage your money has with options investing. With little money you can make quite a bit of money.

Please keep in mind that options have a value associated to them based on how much they are worth if you did exercise them. There are two components that make up the value of an option.

  • Intrinsic Value

    This is the current value of the stock minus the strike price of the option. This represents how much you would make per share if you were to exercise you buy the shares at the strike price and sell them back onto the open market.

  • Time Value

    This gives value to how much time is left before the option expires. The more time left, the more time value there is, because there is more time left for the stock to make a significant price move.

So since these options have a value before they expire, they can be sold to other buyers for their value. 99% of all option contracts are never exercised. If they go up or down you just sell/buy them, because it is more of a pain to then buy or sell the stock that goes with them. You can just do them both separately if you want to. I just explain them the way I do because it is easier to understand.

Call Options

If you purchase a call option, you are guaranteeing you will be able to buy a stock from someone at a specified price between now and the end of the option contract.

Put Options

If you purchase put option, you are guaranteeing you will be able to sell a stock to someone at a specified price between now and the end of the option contract.

Insurance?

You can also think of options as a type of insurance on stock prices. You are paying a fee to have the option to buy and sell you stock at a specific price. If you are holding a volatile stock or you are uncertain of the future, you can purchase options to guarntee your price in the future.

The Downside

The negative point about options is that you are buying something that isn't worth anything, really. You don't own the stock, you just own a time sensitive contract between someone else and yourself. If the stock price moves significantly higher (for a call) you will be in the money and the option will be worth something at that point, but before then it is nothing. Stocks rarely ever go to 0 and you can always hold on to them forever. They actually mean something tangible.

When Would I Want to Buy an Option?

There are lot of scenarios and some of them are very complex. There is also the topic of "selling" options. I will cover this more later and you can read about it in my article Making Money Writing Covered Calls. The scenarios I have seen for buying options are:

  • You believe that the stock in a specific company is going to go up significantly, but you are lacking the funds or margin to buy the stock outright for yourself and you want to buy quite a bit of it. For a smaller price you can purchase call options. If the stock goes up, you can purchase the stock later for the more favorable price or you can even just sell the option contract because its value will go up.
  • You currently own a ton of stock in a company. You are scared to hold onto the stock because it has become extremely volatile or bad news has come out, yet the price is still quite reasonable. You don't want to sell right now because it is the end of the tax year or you want to wait a few months for other reasons. You can buy enough puts to match the amount of stock you have. If the stock goes down significantly, it won't be a big deal, because you have locked in a price to sell it at.
  • You think a stock will go up in the short term and you don't want to own the stock because you can buy 10 times more options with the same amount of money and have more leverage. You purchase call options
  • You think a stock will go down in the short term and you don't own any anyways. You can buy put options which will go up in value if the stock price decreases significantly.
There are lots of other strategies and techniques, but I won't go into them here.

Another item to look at is technical investing. This is a huge strategy used by options investors. You can read volumes on these strategies so I won't even go near them right now.

Look for more options strategies in my blog in the future.

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Dec
07
Written by Neil Galloway

I learned of this technique a couple years ago. It involves writing covered calls. A call is an option or derivative. If you don't understand what an option or derivative is, then do some more research online and/or read my article on options investing.

When someone says they are "writing a call", this means they are creating an call option contract and selling it to someone else who wants it. It is a contract between the writer and the buyer that guarantees the buyer, that the writer will sell him a set number of shares (100 shares per option) at a fixed price up until a specified expiry date if he chooses.

For example:

I can write/sell 1 March $25.00 call on Nortel shares for $0.15 a share. Since there are 100 shares in call that means the buyer would have to pay me $15 for it. I am guaranteeing him, that I will sell him 100 Nortel shares at $25.00 a share at any point until the end of March if he wants me to. If he never does, then the option expires at that point. So he is paying me $15 for that option.

The concept of how options works is sometimes confusing. I basically think of it as buying and selling a type of insurance on stocks. You may be willing to pay the price to buy the option of getting a stock at the price you want sometime in the future. A put is similar, but for selling.

The "covered" part of a call means that you already own the shares you are writing the call for. Not covered, or naked, means that you don't own the shares. If the buyer wishes to exercise his option, you will be forced to buy the stock at market price and then sell it to him at the option strike price ($25 in the example above). You also need to have "margin" available to cover the difference you might be out if the stock price goes higher and you will be forced to buy the stock at a higher price then you will be selling it to him. When you are covered you don't have this risk.

How Do I Make Money On This?

Your goal is this: you want the stock's price to not go higher than the strike price of you option. If it doesn't go higher than this, no one will exercise the option because it won't be worth any money. They can buy the stock for cheaper off the open market. This way, you pocket the money you sold the option for and you can then sell a new one.

The trick here is to sell an option that is in your comfort zone. If you are scared the whole time that the buyer will exercise on you because the strike price is too low, then don't bother. You will have sold it for more money, but if you don't want to be exercised than you shouldn't run that risk.

Why Would I Want to Do This?

You own a stock, you don't want to sell it right now, but you don't see it going up in the short term. Options can expire anywhere from 1 month to 6 months in the future. If some bad news has come out or for some reason you think the stock will stay flat or go down (like oil companies in the summer can sometimes do) then selling a call might be a good choice.

What Are The Risks

If the stock decides to go on a run then you will be forced to sell the stock or buy back your option for more money. You will be out either the appreciation in the stock minus what you sold your call for or you will be out the amount you had to buy your option back for minus what your call for.

My Thoughts On It

I have tried this technique and to tell you the truth, I haven't made any money on it overall. I had some Nortel shares I bought in 2001 that had gone down and look they would never go up so I was just selling covered calls on them. I would make money on most of them, but then Nortel would take a run and I would buy them back at a loss. Unfortunately that one loss was enough to offset the 4 gains I had before that.

I still believe this is a useful technique though, but there are few things to note.

  • It requires that you pay very close attention and watch the markets frequently. If your stock takes a run and you don't notice for a few days you could be hurting.
  • Don't be afraid to get out as soon as you are sitting at a small loss. Too many times people let their emotions get in the way and hold on because they don't want to take a loss on a option (or a stock for that matter).
  • Don't mess around with volatile stocks unless you have the nerve. These are the ones that pay really well, but there is a reason for that. They are volatile, the risk and rewards are greater. This being said, if you do the math, these are usually the only stocks that give you decent returns if you want to use covered calls for a high rate of return. I would just be happy to make my $100 every couple months on a slow mover and be safe, but that is my opinion.
  • If you think the stock is going to tank, just leave your call and sell your stock (if your trading account won't let you have uncovered calls you will need to buy it back). Most of your money is tied up in the stock and this is where your biggest loss will be, so sell it if you need to.

How Should I Start?

Read up some more. Here are some useful links.

Paper trade for the first while. Pick a stock you own, look up the current price to sell a call for it, and write that number down. Also write down what your commissions would have been (check your brokerage's rates). Keep an eye on it to see how it moves. It will decrease in value as time decreases, but will also go up and down with the price of the stock. If the value of the option becomes worth less than what you sold it for by quite a bit then "pretend" to buy it back or you can let it expire if the stock price never goes above the strike price.

After you can paper trade and make money 4 out of 5 times. Think about getting an account approved for covered calls and try your hand on small amounts for awhile. After that, its up to you.

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Dec
07
Written by Neil Galloway

I attended a performance of the Christmas Carol tonite. Simply fantastic. I have always enjoyed theatre and live performance of almost any type, but this year has been even better. Why? I purchased a season pack for Theatre Calgary. They are moderately priced plays ($20-$25/each if you buy a season pack). I used to only ever go to the cheap university type productions and then spend a boat load on the big ones when they came through town. They are good in their own right, but the Theatre Calgary plays are very high quality.

I am almost of the opinion now that these plays are the best value for your money. They have the extra quality of good stage setup and props and they also feature plays that are on tour, so they are very honed productions. I saw "Of Mice and Men" in September and "Glorious" in October.

If you are thinking of getting out more to do the arts scene, definitely check out some of their dates or subscriptions packages in whatever city you live in. Here, for a $100 you can have the 30 and under rate, which books you in for the 3rd Tuesday performance of each play's run. It sets all your dates for you and you can plan around the play that week.

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