Quite simple. Get the railroads and milk them, then the Orange properties – Bow, Marlbourough and Vine street in the UK edition. After that buy the light blue, and so on.
alternatively buy something in the first two rows, put 3 houses on there, and then use the profit to buy something in the last 2 rows. Dark Green is the biggest earner – but it’s expensive to house.
Avoid the dark blue Mayfair/Park Lane.
Interestingly enough my brother and I sorted these strategies out pretty quickly.
Way to go – accuse Trade Me of not following good business practise, then be forced to cringingly back down in the face of overwhelming evidence. I’m not sure how this one played out, but is sure is amusing reading the resulting article.
(Auctioneers).. Association chief executive John Ward had said Trade Me did not help its customers with complaints, that its customers had no right of dispute and that Trade Me did not follow good business practice. Now he has written to Trade Me apologising and withdrawing his remarks.
He said the association understood that such statements and allegations about online trading sites did not apply to Trade Me.
and fair enough. Trade Me has 24/7 customer service these days, and if things are dire you can at all times get someone on the phone with the 0900 number. If you are dodgy then you can expect the police will get interested pretty rapidly.
Meanwhile my limited experience with offline Auctions was very much cavaet emptor and bugger off with it.
I’d hazard that the total number of sucessful Trade Me listings in the last 7 years would dwarf the entire number of items ever auctioned offline in New Zealand.
If you cannot afford a Wii for your loved ones, consider a sheep:
Oxfam will let you “buy a sheep” as a gift, and they’ll send a postcard with a photo to your lucky gift recipient. They’ll in turn no doubt cherish the valueless photo, knowing that you’ve meanwhile donated the value of that sheep (or other animal or object) to Oxfam.
and no – your money is not really that likely to go to actually buying a sheep – but hey, the thought is nice.
It’s worth checking out, if only to see the Amazon-like:
It seems Wii’s are running out of stores in the US as soon as they arrive, as it appears that the Wii is the Christmas item of choice.
Actually that makes sense – at US$250 or so the Wii is not too expensive versus the Xbox and PS3. And let’s face it – everyone loves the Wii out of the box. It’s the long term playability that is at issue, and that’s just for hard core gamers. There are a lot more parents looking for gifts that will give a genuine smile than hard core gamers.
Anyway, even Amazon doesn’t have any Wiis in stock (they refer you to other sellers).
What is interesting is when you compare the Amazon review ratings of the three main consoles. Look at the percentage of reviewers giving the highest score of Five/Five for each of the consoles:
Sources: Nintendo Wii, Sony PS3, XBox 360 Core, XBox 360 20Gb as at 26 Nov.
Anything that gets 87% maximum rating has to be incredible, and even 57% is excellent. Scouting around for other great products, I see that the awesome iPod Nano black (super sexy 8Gb version) gets just 58%, and the cool MacBook just 63%. Tough crowd.
In NZ the Wiis seem to still be in stock – Dick Smith has them both online and in numerous stores. They are relatively more expensive in NZ, but if you are thinking of getting one for Christmas, then you’d be wise to hurry.
Not bad. eBay’s new site let’s you combine with the masses to vote on popular auctions – and thus drive more traffic to those auctions and eBay in general.
It seems good on first appearance – there is the obligatory eye-candy – in this case the classic Web 2.0 rounded corners and Digg-like voting buttons with strange creatures attached:
The site feels cool – with a great, if greenish, look. (can you feel the however coming?)
However. Firstly if you want to vote you need to login, and after you login you are confronted with this:
It’s asking whether it is OK if I share my information with “another company”. But sadly and strangely there is absolutely no indication of what or whom that other company actually is. Perhaps it is just another eBay legal entity, or maybe this is a stealthy way for my eBay purchasing and browsing information to be passed to dodgy marketing companies. I declined the opportunity.
The other issue with the site, for those less paranoid than me, is that Auctions are ethereal, lasting only 7 days (usually). While rumour sites like Truemors can cope with that (they uses editors), other sites like Digg take time to identify hot items and them promote them to the masses. A new Auction listing may take 3 or 4 days to be discovered, and by then it is essentially too late as it is gone. It also remains to be seen whether old auctions will be visible – that would change the paradigm a bit.
So I am not holding my breath on this one. But nice eye candy nonetheless.
Looks like Telecom’s xtra debacle of a migration to Yahoo! mail is not alone. News Corp owns an ISP called Sky in the UK, and they are migrating customers to the Google Apps.
Well trying to. To start with there’s a 10 page pdf on how to change your POP settings over.
Slashdot has more .
It’s been a great year for my US portfolio, which sadly is relatively small as most of my investments go into small private companies, with some to GMI.
Here’s the return to date (green) versus the S&P500 (Blue).
That green bar hits 72%, though I’m fairly sure there is an error in eTrade’s calculations, and it is closer to 65%. Regardless – it is a great result to date versus the S&P500, which shows a return of just 1.58% for the calendar year.
What is pleasing is that all of my picks have worked out in both directions.
With a long/short portfolio you expect that losses in one stock are more than compenated by gains in the other stock. So MSFT and AAPL may both go up, but I’m betting that AAPL goes up more.
Well this year all my bets have worked – AAPL, eBay and eTrade went up, and EQR and MSFT went down. There was, of course, also some market timing (which in theory doesn’t work:-) involved.
This chart shows where the portfolio return came from. As you can see Apple and eBay contributed the most, but every stock, long and short, played a part. The top four were about equal in dollar commitment, while eTrade is a late addition, and doing very well.
Of course I’m still waiting for the hammer to fall. For that reason I’m about 30% in cash right now, which means that even if some of the more volitile options go valueless that I’m not going to lose everything.
It’s been a fun year so far – stay tuned for the next update. Will it be up or down??
<update: I couldn’t stand the ETFC volatility – and their portfolio of mortgages and mortgage backed securities was just far too high for me to be a part of. So I sold all the ETFC shares pre-market on Monday for $5.05-$5.10 Last Friday afternoon they were $5.33, now they are $4.60.>
Call it Sub Prime Crisis, but when mortgage financiers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae show signs of distress, the entire US housing market is in trouble. Freddie dropped $2 billion in losses in the last quarter, which is scary – as they hold over $700 billion in mortgage assets, at last some of which are of dubious quality..
So I’ve been betting on the housing crisis occurring for a while now. I first shorted Equity Residential (EQR) back in August last year, when it was about $45, and continued to pile on as it rose.
It’s been a nice ride – I moved into buying put options earlier this year, and so have magnified my gains. EQR represents about a fifth of my overall realised and unrealised portfolio return this year.
But I missed the best opportunity – eTrade, it appears that those high interest earning accounts where I can put my trading cash were actually driven by mortgage backed securities. That is, eTrade and eTrade Bank own a ton of dodgy mortgages, and those securities have started to default. They released the news to the market the other day, and their share price crashed.
Now I’ve always been a fan of eTrade, and believe their messages saying that investor’s money is safe. I also believe that their fundamental business model is strong. So why not make some more money by buying some eTrade?
I put in an order to buy ETFC at market open at a limit of just over $5, but chickened out a little and halved the order size 2 minutes before open. However, the original order went through and the price promptly plummeted again down to somewhere in the $3 range:
Once again I backed myself, and bought a bunch more eTrade shares at around the $3.40 mark.
And what do you know – on Friday is emerges that eTrade is retaining investment bankers to look at a possible sale. The market reacted by sending the shares zooming up again, and so not only have I cleared out the loss, but I also made a tidy 40% profit on the shares I bought at the bottom.
Here’s an update on how my US share portfolio is going. Previously I was afraid that the tide was going to turn, and my 43% gain for the calendar year to September would be wiped out.
First – Apple, Microsoft and eBay.
I sold down 70% of my eBay holding the other week, as I saw too many negative events and emerging signs in the Auction monster.
First, there were signs of panic around pricing and the user experience, with extended free gallery days and strange shakeups. These are perhaps justifiable, but a note of desperation seemed to form part of the changes, making it seem to me that the management team is reacting, and not really sure how to do so.
Secondly a huge write-down of the value of Skype sent the indication that the option value of capturing the Telecomms market has dropped.
and Thirdly, the price was at a recent high – as a result of a overly strong market I felt.
It’s so nice to be right.
I sold down my shares at around $39 – just after that peak there, and even backed it up by buying a handful of puts. The shares have now subsided about 18% to $32, so that’s $7 of value in the bank (before tax) plus I realised the gain on the puts.
I still think eBay is a long term play – hence I’ve kept some shares, and I will rebuy if the price keeps dropping.
So – great market timing there.
However.
I also sold 60% of my Apple shares, driven by the feeling that the market valuation was getting a bit too crazy, but not driven by fundamental business dynamics – as I feel Apple is on a strong path.
Not such good timing, but not too bad:
I sold them on the 15th of October, at $163.90. The ramp up continued, peaking at about $190, before subsiding back to under $160, and now it is up over $170 again.
For a while there I was feeling pretty stupid, but that sharp drop in late early Nov helped the ego.
My basic philosophy is that I buy shares of great companies, and sell short shares in lousy ones. The stock I short to counter Apple is, of course Microsoft. I’m not only short the MSFT stock, but I also have options betting on MSFT falling over time.
Not so good:
Microsoft’s earnings were well above analyst expectations when released in early November, and the price went up by well over 20%. Ouch.
So I did the only right thing, and stood behind my convictions. I bought a bunch of MSFT put options when the price was around $35 – betting that the price would fall. It didn’t, so I bet again, borrowing more MSFT shares at $37 and selling them short. $37 was at the top of the chart, so finally my timing was right.
I sold down a few of those options a week later, making 50%, and covered some of the new shorted shares at $33, making $4 per share.
Overall I remain heavily short Microsoft, and reasonably long on Apple. That is. I’m still betting that Apple shares will keep going up, and Microsoft shares will go down.
That approach is vindicated by their relative performance over the last 1 year:
More to come.
It appears, from the numerous excellent comments to the FreeRice article, that I made, well, a formula error in counting grains of rice, and it also appears that my estimate of cheapo CPM rates is perhaps, well, far too high.
I really should have done a proper spreadsheet rather than use the calculator on OSX. So I’ve just done that.
Luckily those errors are both in the same direction, so Mr John Breen is still in the money, though just not as much.
New Rice weight: 1.2 billion grains = 31.2 tonnes = which at $350 per tonne costs $10,900
New CPM rate: is $1, so income is $130,000 (double for CPM of $2 obviously)
Profit: $120,000 odd. Not a bad little earner. But let’s get the latest data..There are now 3.25 billion grains of rice given out, so let’s call that 350 million page views. Just pause and think of that – from launch on the 7th of October until the 21st of November there have been 350 million page views on this brand new site.
The web is still amazing.
Now 350 million pageviews = at CPM of $1 (per the comments) is $350,000 in income. Not bad, and it could well be double that or more.
Meanwhile those 3.25 billion grains of rice weigh 84.7 tonnes, which costs arond $30,000.
So a net income of $320,000 for Mr Breen. Very nice income for a month and a bit.
Via Freakanomics, it seems that for men US$222, and for woman US$94, is the true cost of a packet of cigarettes, when you add in the net preent value of the damage to your health and lifespan.
The public sector economist in me says that you should step in when there is a big disparity between the price of something and its full externality-loaded value.
That means charging a tax on Carbon emissions so we can slow global warming, taxing petrol to ensure there are less cars and less fuel used, and, yes, charging nearer to the real cost of those cigarettes.
While $222 is too high – people will just grow their own – why not change the paradigm, and make the cost $20 or $40 per pack? That’s really sending a strong message. Sure it will reduce tax income as we’d expect use to drop right off, but we are serious about health right?
Very clever
Will this will be the overlanding bike of choice for the next few years? he question is whether the F800GS combines the best or the worst features of the dependable but heavy R1200GSA and the light but underpowered F650GS.
Either way I want one. The photo above is a snippet from one of several over at Touratech.
More information at MCN
Over the months I’ve occasionally said one or two negative things about a few companies.
Did I say occasionally? Sorry – I meant constantly.
Their range of responses has been interesting, and piqued the interest of Bullet PR‘s Nicholas O’Flaherty, who used the BNZ series of rants, along with Mauricio’s Slingshot posts as examples, in a speech, of how not to manage online reputation.
Nicholas asked me a few questions for an upcoming article, so I thought I’d cross post the rather long answer to one of them here:
As a blogger do you have any advice for PR practitioners?
Encourage and facilitate clients and their staff to follow, respond to, and join the online conversation.
Follow
Someone needs to continuously scan the internet, and put blog posts that matter into those daily press clippings for the top management team to see. The traditional media no longer has a monopoly on sound opinion and commentary, and that unsound stuff can also trip you up. A basic first step is to set up a simple Google news/blog search with their company name, while a few people should be following the major blogs along with other media.
Respond
Secondly, respond as quickly as possible to both positive and negative blog posts from reputable or popular blogs. Respond rationally, honestly and credibly. Ferrit (of all companies) responded to several of my negative posts about their troubled times, and the credible person responding was the head of Marketing, Peter Wogan. He joined the conversation, and the result was better for everyone. An exemplary example recently was in Perth where an employee of ISP iiNet responded to my complementary post within an hour or two of the original post – that’s proactive, and they’ll have a loyal customer now. Can we even imagine Telecom or Vodaphone doing this?
Join
Thirdly, join the conversation by blogging, but only do so if you can do it right. Doing it right means the voices are genuine and unrestricted. Genuine voices are those of senior and interesting staff. Unrestricted means that they do the writing themselves with no editing before release. Give guidelines, coach in the right tone for blogging, keep it simple and focused and unleash the talent. The blogoshere’s BS detector is stunningly efficient – so tell the truth and tell it often and well. Xero and Google do this well.
Starting a blog is technically easy, but it does require work on the part of the writer along with continuous reinvention. I encourage individuals and companies to give it a go – experience is the best teacher.
Additionally set client staff free – allow staff to blog about their experiences at their work and about anything that isn’t illegal or unethical to disclose. Trade Me and Fairfax have shown huge tolerance for several bloggers, but we see very little from any of the other major companies online or offline in NZ. Let staff’s negative as well as positive comments come out – and think of it as a continuous survey of staff morale. We do care if staff are unhappy don’t we?
Finally, have fun and be human. Blogging is an engaging medium, and while there are serious and light blogs they all have a conversational and personal tone. But remember – the blogosphere is increasingly influential and read, and what goes up there stays up there forever.
Michael Carney is a marketer that sends out an occasional newsletter to the community. It’s quite good (the last one even quoted my father :-). Michael is a influential guy on the NZ scene – he even wrote an excellent book on Trade Me.
I do recommend that you subscribe t0 the newsletter if you are in the advertising game in NZ.
However for an advertising newsletter the marketing is woeful.
Firstly the newsletters are not posted online, so Michael has not ‘joined the conversation’, and we bloggers cannot link to or comment on his content.
Secondly, Michael is part of the Grey Group, who are:
“a subsidiary of WPP, a global communications organisation with 568 offices in 152 cities across 87 countries.”
GreyGroup recently redesigned their website. Can you see the link to the newsletter?
It’s not there. In fact there are only 4 working links on that page – “more about us“, “check out our work“, and links to website creators “Cactuslab” and “Supermodel” (not a good look guys).
Thirdly – there is actually a blog – well hidden though.
Micheal already had a blog – in fact it was one of the ones I follow(ed), though posting has been on hold for a while. That old blog is a fairly traditional WordPress number – simple but clear in design.
The new blog – well, it sucks.
Here are some faults:
The blog is hidden behind two links from the homepage and a crazy url: http://www.greygroup.co.nz/default,34,blog.sm . Greygroup.co.nz/blog would be better – and no – it does not work.
If you click in a post, you must click on the ‘blog‘ text to get back. That’s the text not the big ‘blog’ graphic on the top.
The posts are all clipped, so you have to click ‘read more’ to see the whole thing. This may initially drive pageviews, but not for long – we don’t have time to click everything.
You can comment, but there is no indication that there is a comment on a post.
The colours, design – it just feels bland, drab – uninteresting. There is no personality.
Indeed – that’s the missing link here. Where is Michael? The star writer? The driver of traffic? The respected voice of marketing in New Zealand? Michael should be front and center, not just on the blog, but on the front page of the GreyGroup website. The stellar newsletter should be placed as a series of articles on the blog.
For now the website is saying that GreyGroup are pretty clueless about this interweb thing. Please change it.
Lance Wiggs 