LeeMobile

“If you’re not a socialist when you’re young, you don’t have a heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you don’t have a brain.”

I’m not sure where that quote comes from, but it stuck with me for a long time. I guess I do have a heart, as a younger Lee was quite the bleeding heart socialist at one point. Hell, I am still a lefty in a lot of ways. But lately, I’ve been dabbling on the financial side of things, reading up on stocks and bonds and things to do with money. Now that I’m out of school, I actually have a bit of money that can sit to the side. Yes, I feel like a scum sucking capitalist pig … but maybe I’m starting to see things differently.

Finances is something I never really took the time to learn while going through school. I had always felt that it was pointless, since I had no money to invest in. Sure I had a part time student job and went through internship and such, but why should I go through all the hassle to shove my paltry savings into an institution to only earn 1 or 2% in return over a year! Two percent on a thousand bucks isn’t worth all that hassle.

So I bought some books on it to get myself educated in the world of greed. I bought myself “Investing For Canadians For Dummies” and Jim Cramer’s latest book. I finally got plain English explanations of what a stock is, a mutual fund, a GIC, and what the hell the stock market is and how investors make money. Cutting through all the jargon, the rules of the game are pretty straightforward. Buying that For Dummies book will probably be my best investment ever.

Reading those books allowed me to see work and my career in a completely different light. Making money and being wealthy can be achieved not in some big bang, like winning the lottery. But for most people, becoming financially secure enough to retire early is a long drawn out process that starts out when you’re young, not when you’re old. And the sooner you plan for it, the bigger the reward at the end. By the simple power of compound interest, someone in their 20’s like me can input $1 and pull out $32 by the time I’m in my fifties, and that’s if you play the game conservatively.

However, it’s not just about becoming wealthier either. It’s also about protecting whatever savings you have from inflation. That 2-5% annual inflation also compounds over time too. So no matter how much you save, if you don’t invest it somewhere, you’ll be losing whatever money you save. If you’re not protecting your money somehow, then its better to just go out and blow your money right now… at least you’ll get more value out of it.

–

So anyways, Renata and I have started investing directly into some stocks. Being totally new to this, I find it hard to judge the value of a company. So I stuck with some companies that I fundamentally know will be solid winners. The two big stock purchases for us have been Visa and Google.

Visa for the simple fact that it just went public, and is an absolute no-brainer. It basically dominates the credit card market. And everyone already knows how mighty Google is. Some people say Google is too bloated and overpriced, but recently it dropped 40% from its all time high.

Google dominates online advertising, and their search engine is still the best out there. They’ve got a ton of cool web-applications, and though it hasn’t made them a ton of money yet, it just shows that they’re always innovating and pushing out interesting things. The fact that they hire the best and the brightest and have a wicked corporate culture that drives innovation will keep them in the top spot for a long time. Google is here to stay, and I think we’re really just starting to see the beginnings of what it can do.

So anyways, we bought quite a fair chunk of Google stocks within the past few weeks, seeing as how their price is low. Amidst all the rumors and negative speculation of its performance these past few weeks (which thankfully drove down its stock price), Google’s stock price jumped 20% within a few minutes after it announced its earnings for the quarter.

So far, our little venture has netted us some positive gains. Visa has performed pretty nicely since we bought it, up almost 5% in a little under 3 weeks. We also bought shares of DryShips, which gained 6% after we bought it that very day two days ago.

Hopefully things will continue the way they go

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.