weissblog

In an effort to encourage everyone (myself included) to learn more about the stock market I have setup a fantasy
investing game on Investopedia’s Investing Simulator and invited all my friends. So, why am I posting this? Well, if you’re reading my blog, then I consider you a friend (yes, I am that desperate for friends, but that’s the topic of another post).

The competition will begin on March 1st and last until March 31st. Everyone starts off with $100K in fantasy money and whomever has the most at the end of the month wins. Yes, options, shorts, and margins will be allowed.

Click here to join the competition

For those who aren’t familiar with The Investopedia Simulator, it is a stock market simulation where you
can manage a fantasy portfolio and learn to invest without risking your hard-earned money.

Over the last month I’ve been carefully evaluating the use of blogs by professionals. It’s my opinion that were a financial adviser with no knowledge of blogs be presented with the idea he or she would have no single place to go to learn about blogging. Granted, there are tons of sites that pitch blogging. But most are targeted toward businesses. And the few that do offer advise for those who ‘work alone’, they leave many areas untouched it seems. So, for a financial adviser to learn to blog, he or she would have to go to do one search to determine which software option is best for them, wordpress, movable type, blogger, etc. Then they would need to do another search to learn about SEO, and another search to learn about writing, etc.

What I’m going to attempt to do, is build a ‘how to’ blog to help professionals such as financial consultants, real estate agents, loan originators, consultants and anyone else who fits this mold.

So what’s your point?

I can’t write all this alone, so I’m asking for two or three other bloggers to step up and partner with me on this. Granted, I will be selective on who I give access to, and what articles I allow so as to maintain the quality of the blog. But in doing so, this will make sure that we’re seen as an authority on the topic.

For more information, please contact me.

Nearly a year ago I did a post about Prosper where I proclaimed the greatness of the concept and was really excited about the company.

Today I received an email marking the one year anniversary of the company. After reading the email I must say that my fears did hold true. In my original post I had asked one of the founders, John Witchel, if the company what measures they were going to take to ensure the site was not overrun with requests from people with poor credit. To which Mr. Witchel responded saying that every lender has their own tolerance of risk and how that wouldn’t be a problem and so on so forth. However, in today’s email Prosper announced that borrowers with a “credit score below 520, and borrowers with an NC (No Credit) rating, will no longer be able to borrow on Prosper given their low appeal to lenders relative to the costs and resources required to process their listings.” To this I ask with tounge in cheek, “What happened John?”

In addition to excluding the really bad credit loans, they go on to say “Not surprisingly, it costs more to list and service loans from borrowers with lower credit grades. To better align our fees with these costs, we are raising the closing fee for E and HR borrowers and the servicing fee for lenders on loans made to B, C, D, E and HR borrowers.” Thus everyone with a credit score below 720 will have to pay more. This change here brings back bad memories of the predatory lending practices I saw when I used to work in the mortgage industry.

I’m sure these changes will help get rid of a large percentage of the loans listed on Prosper making it easier for lenders to find loans suitable to their tastes. And I’m sure it will lower load on their servers and decrease bandwidth usage. But, in the end, seems the the old saying about banks applies here as well; in order to borrow money you have to first prove you don’t need it.

I know this is really coming out of left field, but have you ever noticed how many commercials have someone trying to steal the cereal from someone? I don’t watch much TV, but I sat down a couple days ago and watched an hour or so of some cartoons with my daughters. During this time I saw several commercials for breakfast cereals and realized this trend. Think about it:

• Trix: the rabbit is trying to steal from the kids
• Lucky Charms: the kids are trying to steal from Lucky
• Fruity & Coco Pebbles: Barney stealing from his best friend, Fred
• Honey nut Cheerios: Some of the commercials show one bee trying to steal the hive’s honey

These are just a few that I noticed the other day. I’m sure there are more and that other brands have run similar ads in the past.

So what’s the point?

Well, it just bothers me that the only way these companies think they can market these brands of cereal is through theft / attempted theft. Now, am I saying that this is the mother of all evils and that we should boycott these companies? No, I’m quite fond of Coco Pebbles. I’m just saying that since many of these cereals is $3 to $5 a box, you’d think they could use part of that money to come up with better ad campaigns, that’s all.

Today Wired posted an article letting folks know about the Virgin Earth Challenge. Over all I’d have to say that it’s a good thing, though I have some reservations about it. To quote the challenge website:

The Virgin Earth Challenge is a prize of $25m for whoever can demonstrate to the judges’ satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate.

Now, I have my own opinion and point of views about the whole global warming issue, namely I have not seen proof that the cause of the rise in temperatures is caused by CO2 emissions. However I have seen a correlation between the rise of CO2 and the rise of the average temperature. So, it seems to me that lowering CO2 would, at the very least, be a good thing.

However, rather than trying to create a machine that attempts to vacuum the greenhouse gases out of the air, the same gases that were put there mostly by other machines, I’d like to see the reforestation of the rain forest and many of the forests here in the USA and an increase in the use of recycled materials.

It seems to me that developing such a machine would only encourage the human race to continue to take the planet for granted. But to work together to cut the CO2 emissions and to re-plant trees (and not just fast growing softwood tress, but rather to plant and oak for every oak that’s cut down, and so on and so forth).

These is just a brief overview of the issue, one which I’m likely to elaborate on further at a later date.