The Blog of Xangis

I’ve never been particularly interested in forex trading, always focusing more on stocks and options, but it seems to be about time to become an expert.  Don’t be surprised if in the near future you see me posting about books I’ve read, resources I’ve found, and the huge sums of money that I’ve acquired and lost in the span of five minutes.  I may never trade a penny in foreign exchange markets, but I should at least teach myself how they work.

I am a cryophobe.  Winter is a debilitating time for me.  If there’s snow on the grown I practically shut down.

After doing hundreds of hours of research I’ve found that the best future destination for me is going to be San Jose and the Silicon Valley area.  After all, I’m a computer programmer and a finance enthusiast and that’s a great place for both.  Since it lacks a winter (its winter could be considered more of a mild fall season), which is ideal.

It’s an expensive place to live, but seeing as I didn’t major in art history I’m sure I’ll do OK.

I’ve tentatively scheduled this as a three-year process.  After all, I have two houses that I’ll have to sell, a book collection that is far too massive to transport across the country, and a huge amount of other stuff to wrap up or take care of.  Even though I’ll probably find work before I move out, I’ll want to build up a financial cushion before going.  To do otherwise would be dumb.

I’m reading the book “Bear Market Investing Strategies“by Harry D. Schultz.  It’s a few years old (written in 2002), but there’s a wonderful quote in the book that definitely applies to current governmental tinkering with the economy:

“Economics can be government influenced in a mild way, without huge damage.  But if governments try to control them in a major way, and thus defy the tides of a free, dynamic society, the net result will be more dramatic fluctuation.  Instead of a quick sharp bear market to squeeze out excesses, of the sort we saw in 1981 when government for once did the right thing, we will see a steady deterioration, where not only the economy suffers but the dynamism of society is eroded.”

It certainly makes sense, but it’s scary to think how much more broken things are going to get economically thanks to the various ham-handed band-aid fixes going on right now.

Because one wasn’t enough…

I’ve filed the papers and now have a new company: Champion Analytics, Inc.

It will primarily be a company focused on investment analysis, publishing investment guides, and developing software for data analysis.  I have a lot of ideas in the works, and filing the papers to make it real is a significant motivator, even though it’s only been a few days.

I already have 32 pages done in my options cashflow investment strategy guide.  It’s turning out to be pretty good — I certainly wish I would have been able to read something like it when I first started investing a little over 10 years ago.

There’s not much on the website yet, but it does have a pretty handy financial news aggregator.

There are certain words that have definite associations with me.  For instance, I’ve always had trouble using the word ‘asshat’ because, for whatever reason, I can’t say or think the word without thinking of Moby.

I can’t name any specific incident that caused this association.  It may just be that I don’t care for his music.  Still odd, though.

So, there ended up being no bids on my eBid auction, so I grabbed my ankles and listed the books on eBay.  It’s a shame, too, because I wanted eBid to get my business.  eBay needs a good competitor, and they seemed like a good one.

So, for now I’m putting up with the steaming pile that is the ‘bay.  May it die a horrible death, sooner rather than later.

FindMUD.com just turned one year old today.

It’s not exactly the biggest of my sites, but it does get about 3700 pageviews a month and is growing slowly but steadily. It also just recently topped 350 MUD listings.

I’ve been sick to death of eBay for a long time, but since they were pretty much “the only game in town”, I put up with their bullshit.  Today was the last straw when I found that they restricted shipping charges in the “lots of 101 to 500 books” category to a maximum of $20.00.  They’re obviously clueless idiots — after all, how in the HELL are you going to ship 500 books for $20 or less?  Not possible.

I’ve listed my lot of 129 Star Trek books on eBid, hopefully I’ll get some takers.  The audience is smaller, the site is smaller, but they’re a lot more user-friendly and the site doesn’t fill me with rage like eBay does.

Here’s the link

Today I posted the 200th work of fiction on fictionclassics.com, thanks mainly to Jack London’s short stories.

On August 7th, I posted about how Washington Mutual was trying to fail. It looks like they did, and in a hurry:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080926/ap_on_bi_ge/washington_mutual_future