Chan's Personal Blog

The third International Bank of Chan Fund stock market challenge has finished and Adam has emerged as the victor. Congratulations!

The contest involved investing money in the stock market from January to April. Each contestant was given $10,000. Here are the final results:

Rank	Name	Networth	Return
1	add	$11,869.39	+18.69%
2	Pirate	$9,604.05	-3.96%
3	Chan	$7,439.32	-25.61%
4	Cwing	$2,616.11	-73.84%

We used the Dow Jones Industrial index as the benchmark. Between January to April, the Dow rose by 19.7%. This means if you bought every stock in the Dow, you would have made 19.7% return on your investment. So, congratulations are in order to Adam for pretty much matching the market's return. The rest of us didn't do so hot.

I interviewed the champion and asked what his strategy was for the game. The key to his success was holding stocks for the long term. His portfolio was resource heavy as he invested primarily in copper and concrete companies.

Those of us who actively traded stocks (ie buying and selling stocks rapidly) got absolutely hammered. I tried the active trader game this time around, and that strategy totally didn't work out. I strayed away from my traditional strategies and rules, and I lost quite a bit of money doing that.

The fourth International Bank of Chan Fund challenge starts again this Monday, and you can join us.

For this round, I'm going back to the basics:

1. Diversifying the portfolio, ie buying stocks in at least 5 different sectors.
2. Buy and hold for the long-term.
3. Only 20% of the portfolio can be high risk, speculative stocks.
4. Don't buy during before earnings reports because it's too unpredictable how a stock will react.

We'll see how it goes this time around.

On this week's episode of Futureweapons, they cover a remarkable new ray gun called the Active Denial System (ADS). It is a non-lethal weapon that is intended to disperse crowds. What's amazing is that there are no lasting effects from being shot by this ray gun. Contrast that with getting hit with tear gas, you'll feel the effects of that for 45 minutes after.

This gives the military a big advantage when dealing with mobs. They can't simply shoot into crowds since they're civilians. However, a lone gunman can hide in the crowd and use it as a human shield. This is where the ADS comes in handy.

Here's the clip from Futureweapons:

Ray guns! Pew pew!

Recently at church, we watched the film, "An Inconvenient Truth" as part of a discussion about the environment and global warming. Former Vice President Al Gore has been receiving a lot of good publicity for his film, especially now after that he bagged a bunch of academy awards for the film.

Obviously with such a hot topic, he's going to draw some flak for the film. What's interesting is that the flak isn't only coming from the political right, but also the left.

Al Gore gave his presentation on climate change at Concordia University, here in Canada, where he was going to receive an honourary degree for his work. However, he was heckled and booed. What I find even more amazing is that I didn't see this story being carried on any of the major American TV news networks.

Concordia's student newspaper carried this article entitled, "Al Gore Graduates From Concordia."

For the past few years, Russia has been slowly reverting back to its authoritarian rule, care of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. For example, last year we had Russian spies kill an critic of Putin in Britain with some exotic radioactive material.

Now, there are reports that freedom of the press is being severely restricted in Russia. There's an article in the New York Times entitled, "50% Good News Is the Bad News in Russian Radio."

Last week I went out to dinner with Myron for our end of term feast at The Wild Saffron Bistro located on Pandora (next to Swan's Pub). I saw that they had carried over their dine-around-town menu, and they were featuring a three course meal for $24.95. This restaurant interested me because it was another one of these higher-end restaurants that tried to use local and in-season ingredients whenever possible.

We get there, and the restaurant looks fairly modern. They had an open kitchen which allows you to see what's going on back there. Interestingly enough, they also had a closed-circuit TV that showed what the chefs were doing in the back.

The three course meal that they have changes every week, and it's the chef's recommendation. This week, they had an asian theme.

I started with an avocado roll as the appetizer, a teriyaki beef tenderloin as the entree, and some frilly ice-cream thing for dessert. Myron had the same except he had a fish tempura over Japanese soba noodles (aka buckwheat noodles) as an entree.

Today we're getting more information about the school shootings at Virginia Tech University. 31 dead, 15 injured. There is a story of heroism though where two students barricaded their classroom against the shooter. They were holding up tables against the door to prevent the shooter from coming in. When the shooter couldn't get through, he fired a few rounds at the door, and moved on. That act saved all of the students in that classroom.

I'm in the process of preparing my taxes and there's a new tax credit that university students in particular should find useful. When the Conservatives came into power, they introduced a new transit tax credit. If you buy monthly transit passes, you can get 15.25% of that money back. So, say you pay $60/month for transit, and you buy passes for a year, you will be getting $108 back from the government. That's like getting a free monthly pass for every six that you buy.

For a lot of universities in BC, students are given a U-PASS which is a transit pass. These can be claimed as well. UVic has confirmed this by saying:


So, if you went to university in 2006, there's a good chance you can take advantage of this tax credit. If you take the bus every day, you can claim this as well.

This message was brought to you by the Tax Preparation Division of the International Bank of Chan.