How to beat the S&P 500

Heres the latest update of my portfolio. Made a nice gain on McDonalds so thought it was time to reap the profits. I am also happy to see that the price of Coinstar CSTR has dropped since I sold it. McDonalds is near an all time high so I would expect a similar drop. In both cases, I believe I got out at the right time because I wasn't too greedy, and it's paid off, my portfolio is outperforming the S&P 500!

Top 10 Things to Consider When Attempting to Make a Move in Your Career

My voracious reading has continued unabated in recent weeks and will easily complete my 2010 goal. I have finished "Paper Tiger" by Tom Coyne, "Losing My Virginity" by Richard Branson (review coming soon) and I am currently reading Chris Evans autobiography "It's not what you think".

The title is apt, because while i was never a fan of his, the book is excellent, one of the best aspects of the book is that each chapter starts with a sometimes humourous, some times serious but always interesting top ten list.

This is Chris Evan's Top 10 Career Move Advice

10. Make sure you really want it in the first place

9. Really make sure you really want it in the first place

8.Think if it's going to help you get to where you want to be next

7. Think where you want to be ultimately and if it will help you get there

6. Imagine if you had achieved it and how it would affect your life as a result

5. Don't consider the financial cost, as long as you can afford to carry on living it's irrelevant

4. Do consider how much of the next few years of your life it will take up and remember you can never get those years back

3. Have an exit strategy

2. Never let your nut rule your gut- ever.... the brain is not all it's cracked up to be

1. For goodness sake, get out there and do something about it!

Behavioural Economics Simplified

I stumbled across the following youtube video and it reminded me of a book I read last year called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, it was a modern version by Tim Phillips but is based on the 1841 market psychology, describing famous financial 'bubbles', including the infamous Dutch tulip mania and the South Sea Company bubble, this title presents an interpretation of Charles Mackay's work that illustrates the nature of these insights through modern business and political case studies.

It is an astonishing example of herd behaviour. just imagine these people are buying a particular asset (tech stocks, property etc) instead of dancing

My Portfolio

*Click to enlarge

Screenshot taken before the market opened this morning. I subsequently sold my Coinstar shares, happy with my 80% return. I bought Coinstar shares because of their ownership of RedBox, who are a rapidly expanding and very profitable company (2/3 of Coinstars profits came from RedBox this year).

Get Rich in College (Scheme 2)

I generally like to adhere to Henry Ford's advice, as such, my blog posts will always focus on things I've done rather than my plans.

Henry Ford "You can't build a reputation on what your going to do"

The blog was quiet for a while as I have been busy in what I'm going to call money making scheme 2. This scheme was entirely different to scheme 1 (Kanye Glasses) and what's brilliant is scheme 3 which i will be implementing shortly combines both (I know, I said I wouldn't talk about things I haven't done, but just felt it was relevant). Scheme 2 came about after a very positive reaction to the response I got for my "Top 5 Tips for College Exam Success". I realised that I had managed to get good results in college even though I didn't work as hard as my peers. Is it because I'm a legendary genius? maybe, but most likely it's because I studied incredibly efficiently. I created a system for learning off answers that allowed me to reproduce them in exams the exact way I'd learned them off. This meant that my answers always were really well structured and had great examples (also lots of big words!). What I only discovered after beginning scheme 2 was that most students did not do this. So I enlisted the help of another great speaker (and recent graduate) from my Toastmasters club and we created a 45 minute seminar to improve study efficiency.

Now there is a wealth of information about studying and exam technique out there. one book in particular had fantastic reviews. So I went to the college bookshop and looked at it....it was about an inch thick, and right there and then I decided that our seminar would be a different approach. Students are trying to get good grades without reading the book, so what are the chances their going to read a book about studying before their assigned material? A very small amount will, and will probably do very well, but the vast majority will not be willing to put in the time and effort of reading a study book. They just hit the books hard day and night for a few weeks before exams. So I wanted to create a study seminar that would actually help the majority of students (not just the top tier) and would be easy to implement. That is why the seminar is so short, we give the students a few ideas to try out and then let them off. We finish each seminar with a little motivational pep talk as well because motivation to study is crucial.

Once we created our seminar we ran a few trial seminars in colleges for free and got a great response. Doesn't everyone say that? The difference is we KNOW the students thought it was great because we got each of them to fill out an anonymous feedback form which asked them to rate each section out of 10. IMPORTANT NOTE for any business or service provider, feedback is what it's all about, it's not about the service (in our case seminar) you provide and how good it is, it's about what the students/customers get out of it. Getting the students to rate us, was incredibly beneficial. After every seminar we would input data into a spreadsheet and work out our averages, anytime one section scored poorly we analysed delivery and content and how to improve it. Likewise when we got a very high average score we also analysed performance and learned from it. The result was that after a month we had given 5 seminars for free to college students witch crowds varying from 7 to 80 students!

*feedback form, click to enlarge

We got our first corporate gig up the country and were required to give two seminars in two days.....to be continued

Dream On...

It's been a while since I sat down and read a book right through. My closest experience recently was "The Secret Billionaire, The Chuck Feeney Story" by Conor O'Clery but that was a larger book and so took a few days of intense reading. But yesterday I received the first of 16 books I recently bought off amazon.co.uk, (what an amazing service, 16 books with a mixture of second hand and new for €110, including delivery).

It is called "Dream On" by John Richardson. I spent so long on amazon adding and removing books from my basket that I honestly can't remembered which ones I've ordered. So when I started reading it I didn't really know what to expect. The book is a bout John, a regular bloke who enjoys a round of golf in his spare time. That is until he sets himself the challenge of playing a level par round within a year. Needless to say almost everyone John meets says it's not possible to improve that fast while maintaining his job and family life. But John purues his goal with incredible passion and a ridiculous work ethic. This book is not just for golfers though, this book is about a 37 year old man, who looked back to his teenage dreams and aspirations and decided that it wasn't too late to fulfill them. He proves the fact that with enough determination, effort and persistence you can achieve more than you ever thought possible. Needless to say it was a very inspiring book and John writes in a very easily accessible style even for the non golfer.

He ends the book in the following fashion, wish think is pretty powerful...

"Most of us allow the daily grind of life and circumstances to trample on our dreams. But please don't let your final living thought on this earth be: "I wish I had...." Far better that it was, "I'm so glad I did....." And be sure to ignore anyone who says it isn't possible. Just go for it"

As a side note I was delighted with the speed in which I read this book. I think it took me around 3 hours, and while short enough and written in basic language there is still over 70,000 words in it. So my reading 5 nights a week is paying off!

It's Halftime in 2010

On the recommendation of a friend I recently got a goalbook. What is that you ask?

Well, it's just a word I made up to describe a small notebook to keep track of my goals. I've tried to keep track of my goals before, many times, in fact it is something that I consider very important and I am always trying to discover the best way to track goals and develop better time management. Over the years I've tried writing in an a4 pad, a small notebook, on my phone, in macjournal, in iCal, using producteev.com and rememberthemilk.com. Has anyone else had a similar experience? None of the above mentioned worked because I would always either forget to write something down or fail to review it in time to complete a goal. So why does my new goalbook work? The simple answer is because it's incredible small and handy, you might say so yours phone, which is true, but I use my phone for so many other things that I often simply forgot to check my to do lists. But with my goalbook, it is always just in my pocket so I can add a goal quickly and I'm also very aware of my goals due to its physical presence and the fact the only reason it's in my pocket is to track goals, unlike phone.

So I am crediting my next blogpost thanks to goalbook! Also the goalbook cost 50 cents. One of the first goals I wrote in my goal book was to review my 2010 goals, which were posted on this blog. We're almost half way though the year, and amazingly despite all my work on my blog, or maybe because of it, I never reviewed my New Years Resolution/2010 goals until just this week when I put it on my To Do List. I had honestly forgotten much of my goals, but to my delight was well on my way to accomplishing many of them, so this post will now analyse each goal and it's progress to date.

1. Post at least one new Blog Post per week

2. Read a book 5 nights a week

3. Summarise key points from each book

4. Complete Toastmasters Competent Communicator Manual

5. Study a foreign language

6. Have a letter printed in the Irish Times newspaper

7. Conduct the role of Toastmaster at at Toastmasters meeting

8. Have read at least 15 books by years end

9. Invest in 2 companies

10. Launch my new website venture

11. Create new look for blog

12. Triple total number of blog readers for 2009

1. Nope, not even close, disappointed at myself

2. +Amazingly (at least I think it is) yes, I have read consistently in 2010 strangely for me, most of them were about war

3. Nope, but in defence a lot of books not that relevant for this blog (thankfully!)

4. +Well on my way, doing speech number 6 in 2 weeks and that doesn't include my competition entry speech

5. Damn! my friend started spanish classes in January, I was meant to join but didn't, totally forgot about this

6. Nope but have sent three

7. +Boom! done and dusted, great experience going to do again

8.+ On track for this, so far this year I've read "One Bullet Away", "Band of Brothers" "Generation Kill" How to Win Friends & Influence People" "10 Rules For Revolutionaries" "The Innovators Solution" "Dream On"

9. No but more annoyingly haven't done the sufficient research

10. + Done & dusted, although a different one to the one I planned when written

11.+ Mission Accomplished, hope readers enjoy it as much as me, such an improvement imho

12.+ Very possible, getting terrific response on StumbleUpon

Result 7/12 = 58% success rate in Goal Completion

I'm half way through the year and I have over half of my goals either accomplished or on track, so I am pretty pleased with that, especially since I haven't actively been tracking them. However that will change now thanks to my goalbook so I am confident I can have all 12 come next Christmas! Go me!