Keepmore – a Xero lookalike targets eBay sellers

Keepmore is a US product in the same space as Xero – simplified accounting through the web. ‘Accounting for the rest of us’ is their slogan, and they offer a package so that you “don’t need to know accounting, where to find deductions or keep up with tax laws”.
Their costs are a lot more reasonable than Xero’s at $19.95 a month, or $199 for 12 months. (To me Xero’s prices are sky high, and they would do well to drop them down and increase the rate of customer acquisition.) Keepmore offer several add-on features at a fee, including tax services – a nice way to get some price discrimination.

Another cool thing KeepMore is doing is automatic import of eBay transactions. I’ll leave it to the reader to assess the chances of that happening between Xero and Trade Me.

Keepmore’s usability is ok – the application does not use much of my screen, the UI is not super slick and – well I imagine the Xero’s star studded team will do a lot better.

Auctionbytes has more

Ferrit – ‘quality not quantity’

A puff piece or PR – I’m not sure as this piece on Ferrit is hidden behind theline’s rather pricey subscription wall. You can Google the first phrase and see evidence, but no – I’m not going to link to a subscription wall.

“Ferrit focusing on quality, not quantity
Paul Clearwater

Ferrit still has over 100 retailers on its website, but it is concentrating on quality over quantity more than it did before.

General manager Ralph Brayham says the company is “far more discerning” about retailers than before. “We’re looking for high quality and high performing retailers … and for products that consumers want everyday.”

One can read between some rather large lines here, and ask is Ferrit losing retailers?

“Due to confidentiality agreements, Ferrit will not discuss retailers’ performances on the website, but Brayham says movies are the fastest growing category on the website, while consumer electronics, books and clothing are solid performers”

DVD’s are GamePlanet, NZInternet Store and Whitcoulls. The current winter sale deals are 20% off GamePlanet CD’s and 20% of Whitcoulls DVDs – both good deals.

Maestro better but still not functional

Good to see the Maestro home page redesigned after comments the other day. It now looks a lot better, and clearly we are expected to get one of the three quotes now.

maestro

However, there is still some work to do.

Try asking for a quote for $1m of Life Cover (you can’t – too many zeros).

Try asking for  Life Cover, Trauma Protection and Income Protection for any amount. You can’t – no response arrives.

Try clicking on the Step 1 Sorted link in mortgages (you can’t)

Try getting a mortgage quote – it asks you to register before getting a quote. (a big no no)

Try going back to the home page by clicking on the logo (you can’t)

All of this was in Safari on OSX, and half of in this was also in Firefox on Windows (I didn’t test the other half). This took about 4 minutes of ‘testing’.

So – lots of work to do, but if Maestro is dynamic enough then they may just tweak this thing enough to be interesting.

ACC, Benefits and 36,800 words

So you are in a giant battle with ACC, which has included you spending time in Prison for benefit fraud (something you are appealing). You profess that you cannot work because you cannot use a mouse or write, and have mild brain damage.

Then ACC (or is it WINZ?) cuts off your current benefit.

So – what do you do?

You start a thread, on March 16th, on the ACCforum site, contributing a series of lengthy and mostly articulate posts. Occasionally you will snarl at the other contributors, and you don’t really listen to their suggestions, but you keep the conversation about your case rolling.

After  36,800 words that you have personally written (via voice recognition apparently) you receive back pay of your benefits and a letter stating your reinstatement. You write about that on April 28th. Actually you keep writing well beyond that, but I just can’t be bothered reading (and counting) any more.

I have three comments on this:

1: Good on you Alan Thomas for going public like this – it has clearly helped your case.

2: But Mr. Thomas – if you can write over 36,800 coherent words in 43 days, why on earth are you still fighting ACC for $355 per week? Surely in the 18 years since your accident in 1989 you could have figured out a way to make that sort of money?

3: ACC – how did it ever come to this?

eBay and Google tussle

For the last few days eBay USA has pulled its Google ads, after Google planned a huge Google Checkout party during eBay’s annual seller conference. The party was eventually canceled (eBay owns PayPal of course, the main payments platform), but the ads have not reappeared yet.

I wonder (hope) whether eBay will actually look at the results of this and see whether the money saved exceeds the value of the transactions lost. I’ve felt for a long time that eBay spends far too much on promotions, on and offline, while Trade Me has a very lean approach and achieves better relative numbers.

Investing – the long and short of eBay and EQR

After the TM and Ford experience, I sent some more money over and went long on eBay and short on EQR. I extended my position in both positions through the last year and still hold them. Right now I am long eBay for 2 times the value that I am short EQR.

I like eBay as they own Auctions in many markets, have the dominant online payments system in PayPal, and have an interesting telecommunications option with Skype. Any one the these businesses can drive massive growth.

EQR is Equity Residential, which is into buying and managing residential rental accomodation. I saw it as a nice short on the housing market.

So – how did I do?

ebay vs eqr

Well I first sold EQR in aug 06, and kept selling until November – which, as it happened, was when it hit a little peak. I bought back half of them on late February, which was not too bad a move, but not that slick either. The price of EQR rose after a sister commerical property company was bought out by a private equity firm, so I considered the early sale to be a prudent risk-reducing maneuver.

Overall I am 6.77% up on EQR, before costs.

I bought the bulk of the eBay stick in late June-August, 2006 – which turned out to be a great time to buy.  I’m in eBay for the long term (baring craziness). The weighted average purchase date is almost exactly a year ago, so I am happy with my 14.56% (net) return to date.

So between the two I am 10.8% up.

Before leveraging.

You see when I sold those EQR shares, I was able to use some of the proceeds to buy the eBay shares. I can’t see exactly how the leveraging worked as the entire portfolio is leveraged, but overall at the moment I am long 83% and short 75% of my total portfolio worth. That would imply a return of about 15.7% for the long-short combination – before dividends (negative EQR ones) and costs. I’m very happy with that.

Investments – the long and short of Toyota and Ford

As mentioned a couple of times previously, I like to go long and short for some of my investing. I also invest in private companies, and with GMI who have a nicely diversified portfolio.

Going long and short means you are neutral versus the market, and you are bascially placing matched bets of one company against other.

My first trade in the most recent series was to go long (buy)  Toyota and short (borrow the shares and sell) Ford. This happened between March and May last year, and the results were impressive.

TM vs F

While the chart shows a 26.8% gain, my actual gain was 44% – as I managed to time the exit well. Should I have held for longer?

TM vs F - longer

Well – no. The incredible march of Toyota continued, but Ford recovered somewhat. Perhaps I should have sold the Ford and doubled up on the Toyota.

At the time I shorted Ford rather than GM as I felt that GM’s stream of negative press and results had depressed its share price too far. Meanwhile, while generally ugly, the quality of GM cars had been improving. Lucky I didn’t short GM then:

TM vs F vs GM

Turns out GM, after a short period of underperformance, has outperformed even Toyota over the last year. So what I should have done was to buy back the Ford, and double up on both GM and Toyota. Hindsight is always perfect, and it was also a shame that the money involved in this trade was trivial.

The ultimate home setup

An impressive all-mac based home entertainment set up. I want this. Actually I want this is a much smaller form – with a macbook pro, external 500GB drive and projector. That is also a lot cheaper than the $13k he dropped on this system.

mactalk

Meanwhile I’m struggling with the playing and ripping of DVD’s as Apple Powerbooks use region-locked DVD drives that you cannot game. It’s as if Apple is telling me to rip allo f my DVD’s and carry them around on a hard drive (or two). OK then.

AdWords Business pages

Google now lets kiwi businesses create a simple webpage to serve as a landing point for Google ads. It’s a clever idea, as it means businesses can go from zero to a fully enabled Google adwords driven campaign in no time at all. It’s called.. well here’s the blurb:

“AdWords Business Pages are a feature of the AdWords Starter Edition advertising platform aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that want to try online marketing. They enable these advertisers to create a simple, basic landing page containing a description of their business, phone number, address, operating hours, location, and accepted payment methods. The pages can be customised with the logo and photos of the business.”

Of course if you are a business without a webpage, you may not even know what google is… and you certainly wouldn’t be reading this or Geekzone, where I found the report.

Gareth Morgan’s Kiwisaver calculater

What a weapon – Gareth Morgan Investments (GMI) have built a Kiwisaver fee calculator. Check it out. Plug in your portfolio sizze, and investment strategy, and the calculator will show how much the 6 ‘official’ and GMK’s Kiwisaver products will charge per year.

The calculator lets you adjust the unitization factor, which Gareth claims is buried cost the industry charges, made possible by funds converting holdings into units. This is something the industry has been in trouble for in the past. You can adjust it to zero, however, if you trust the other providers. I wouldn’t trust them, and in fact I’d never trust a bank or insurance company with my non-cash investments as they have too many overheads and not enough smart people. Moreover investments made by my parents for me when I was born are essentially valueless now, as AMP apparently didn’t know what inflation was. That’s not a great incentive for me to invest.
gmi
GMI’s Kiwisaver is not always the cheapest option in the calculator – especially if you want a conservative (low return) approach. Also for larger portfolios (over say $30,000) it seems Westpac is the cheapest, but then if I had a $100,000 Kiwisaver portfolio I would be far more concerned with portfolio performance than the $243 difference in fees (GMI $963, Westpac $720 with no unitisation mispricing factor. If you add in a mispricing factor then things swing back GMI’s way.)

Bad rep on the net? it can be fixed – maybe

It seems, says the WSJ, that we already seeing companies spring up to help you defend your online reputation. Or maybe that is to remove your online reputation.

ReputationDefender was founded by a Harvard Law grad in October, and they will politely (then not so politely) ask websites to take down references to you. Sometimes this backfires of course, creating more publicity than there was already, especially when websites publish the takedown notices.

These guys run a continuous search (for $10-16 per month) and send notices to remove any references for another $30 per reference. This sounds pretty simple to do yourself frankly.

DefendMyName is another, and they were started two years ago by QED Media group, a marketing firm. Defendmyname tries to bury the negative comments below blogs, promotional sites and forum postings. I think this is a much better way to go – after all who is going to wade through 1000’s of blog postings to find those one or two nasty references.

Again, it is probably better to do this yourself, by, for instance, starting an eponymous blog.

Trade Me too cheap at $700m+$50m?

Apparently Sam thinks so – and so do (and did) I, but $700m guaranteed in the hand is much more interesting than maybe a billion in a year.

That $700m got invested remember, and the 12 shareholders were either going to be really wealthy, or, well – really wealthy. What would you have done? especially after the experiences of 2001?