Saturday, 9 March 2013

On the Road

I will be travelling during the next two weeks. One business trip to the East coast and the other our annual Myrtle Beach golf trip.  looking forward to both trips. After the East coast business obligations, I am staying an extra day to experience St. Patrick's Day celebrations in an area with a large population of Irish descendants and an healthy pub culture.

In preparation for my trip I spent 75 minutes on the treadmill today. I will be back in the gym Sunday lifting weights.

I have entered two year long golf pools, in both pools I spent a large amount of my imaginary budget on Tiger Woods. I'm in 71st out of 74 players in one of the pools, but Tiger appears to have found his game. I expect to make a big move up the standings.  

I was pleased to see all the progress on my investment property this week. I call it an investment property, but really it will be where I will live in 3-years. But they really ratcheted up the construction this week.

Our rookie investor found out the hard way about the perils of the stock market. This is real life gambling. There was a minor market correction on some key TSX stocks. To the new investor it seems like a big deal, but the move represented only 1% of their holdings and will easily bounce back. Plus all the stocks pay healthy and steady dividends. I lost $70,000 on the market during the last crisis in a matter of days. I didn't panic and made all of the money back and then some when the market bounced back, as it always does. All of our friends stocks were carefully selected. There is no guarantee you will make money on stocks, but if you are a long term investor and pick blue chip, dividend paying stocks, you will likely do quite well. The people that panic in tough times, are the people that lose.

In my job I handled files that involved people that panic sold their stocks as soon as the market reopened after 9/11. The worst possible time to sell. You don't lose anything until you sell your stocks. Our friend will do fine in the long run.

No comments:

Post a Comment