Review: DialAFlight

If you are thinking of taking weekend breaks, short breaks or even city breaks with your friends or family, why not pay DialAFlight a visit, as they got some awesome deals for you.

DialAFlight is filled with some Cheap Flights and Incredible Holiday Offers! For example, on the top right hand corner of the site, you will find that you can stay at the Serpent Hostel for only £24! If you doubt the quality or question the comfort of a 1 star hotel, you can just scroll down the list as the offers are arranged according to the number of (hotel related) stars.

Hmmm... Again, I'm itching to recommend some improvements to the site. I know this is a UK-based company, but why should everything be displayed in "£"? If the target audience is that of an international one, I recommend that the website implement a function which would allow its users to change the currency of the displayed prices. The available currencies should at the very least include the countries being featured on the website.

Another laudable feature of the site is the ability to hire a vehicle, and it offers a different set of wheels for different states of Australia. Hmmm... £144 for a one-week drive of the Hyundai Getz in Cairns - Nice!

Lastly, if you accept DialAFlight's bundle offer of booking both a Flight as well as a Hotel stay, you get to enjoy a preferential rate! As to how "preferential" this rate is, you gotta call/phone/dial them to find out. Put your negotiation skills to the test!

Are you a better investor? (Part 2)

This post is continued from Part 1.

2007: A simpler time
Fast-forward to 2007. Your stockbroker and your banker are a swirl of electrons. Adjusted for inflation, the average commission on a retail stock trade comes to about 3 percent of what it cost in 1972. You can choose from among more than 8,000 mutual funds and over 500 exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. You can buy a stock without getting out of your pajamas, and you've never had a trade fail to deliver. And you can watch the prices of your stocks change in real time from your office computer or your iPhone. (aC: Assuming you have already paid a premium for the live prices and dont mind the data charges on your iPhone)

Less cost, more choice and greater convenience: Investing has never been simpler. The birth of the index fund in 1976 enabled anybody with a couple thousand dollars to own every major U.S. stock for less than 0.2 percent in annual expenses. Critics scoffed when Vanguard rolled out the first index fund - "The name of the game is to be the best," said Fidelity chairman Ned Johnson, "and I can't conceive of investment managers not even trying to do better than average" - but year in and year out, indexing has beaten roughly three-quarters of all funds. The investor who minimizes costs maximizes returns. Period.

More recently, indexing has spread to other markets - bonds, foreign stocks, real estate - so you can minimize your costs and maximize your opportunities for profit by covering every base. Meanwhile, the electronic ease of dollar-cost averaging (automatically routing a fixed amount from your bank to your index funds once a month, every month) means you can be a committed investor without ever lifting a finger, second-guessing yourself or timing the market. Combine the two strategies of indexing and dollar-cost averaging and you an hold the entire planet in a single portfolio on permanent autopilot.

Nothing could be simpler.
One thing, however, hasn't changed over the past 35 years: human nature. In 1972, Benjamin Graham was finishing the revise of his seminal work, "The Intelligent Investor," in which he reminded readers that "the investor's chief obstacle - indeed, his worst enemy - is likely to be himself." (aC: I strongly recommend this book for all serious investors out there. Its 400 pages thick and most of the info is rather dry, though the tone of the author can become rather humourous at times, it is definitely a book you will learn a lot from. Best $25 I have invested!)

Then, as now, investors got in trouble by acting on impulse: either getting carried away by greed or being paralyzed by fear. And solutions like indexing have always seemed a little unsatisfying. You want investing to be more complex so you can feel special when you figure it out. And Wall Street wants it to be more complex so it can make more money off your attempts to figure it out.

Thus in the first seven months of 2007, more than 130 ETFs were created to invest in commodities, foreign currencies and single-industry sectors. You can bet on the Swedish krona, buy a basket of carbon-emissions trading credits or attempt to gain twice as much as mid-size stocks lose when they go down. There's now a fund for every conceivable need - and for plenty of inconceivable needs too.

Review: Coupon Chief

Well, Christmas is in 2 months time and with the recent Bull Run, everybody's got that extra cash to spend! So what's a great place to do your Christmas shopping?

If you are looking for Home Electronics, do check out these amazing BestBuy.com deals!

• 10% Off on all Maytag & Whirlpool major kitchen appliances
• $100 Off any Frigidaire front-loading laundry pair;
• $10 - $50 Off select MP3 players plus Free Shipping;
• $30 price drop on Sony T20 Cyber-shot 8.1MP digital camera; and
• $50 price drop on Casio S770 EXILIM 7.2MP digital camera.

Or, if you prefer some Computers related gizmos, check out these great Dell.com bargains!

• $20 off Viewsonic 19-inch Monitor with iPod Dock;
• $16 off Samsung 19-inch Monitor; and
• $584 off Inspiron E1405.

So what are you waiting for? Hurry on down to Coupon Chief to do your online shopping today!

Are You a Better Investor? (Part 1)

Over the past 35 years, investing has become simple, cheap and convenient. Now it's a snap to build your wealth - or destroy it.

By Jason Zweig, Money Magazine senior writer/columnist

It is Oct. 26, 1972. You turn on your transistor radio and the newscaster reads the closing-bell report from the New York Stock Exchange: The Dow Jones industrial average - led by stocks like Bethlehem Steel, International Harvester, Johns-Manville and Union Carbide - closed at 950.56 on an extremely heavy volume of 20.8 million shares.

The next morning you drive over to see George, your stockbroker. He recommends the Fidelity Trend Fund, which charges a sales commission, or load, of only 8.5 percent; most of the 400 or so load funds in existence charge 8.75 percent. Whenever you buy and sell a stock, George's commission will average about 1.3 percent of the transaction. But so would any other broker's.

In 1972 "the investing world was much easier to comprehend," says Joel Seligman, a financial historian and president of the University of Rochester. You knew your broker, and he sold stocks, not funds of hedge funds. Your bank took deposits, not mutual-fund commissions. Your insurance agent didn't come at you swinging a variable annuity like a meat ax. During a typical week in 1972, the total of all trades on the New York Stock Exchange was less than the trading volume of Microsoft shares on a typical day in 2007.

Road map to a rich life
But the investing world of 1972 was also low in choice, high in cost and short on convenience and information. Nasdaq and money-market funds were less than a year old. There was no such thing as a discount broker, an index fund or a municipal bond fund, not to mention an IRA or a 401(k).

If you wanted a no-load fund, "first you had to find it," recalls fund expert Michael Lipper of Lipper Advisory Services. That meant watching for an ad, making a toll call, waiting for the prospectus, then mailing in the check - a process that could take weeks.

And 7 percent of all stock trades in 1972 "failed to deliver," meaning that the paper certificates for the shares did not change hands within five days, potentially voiding the transaction. To check on your investments, you waited for tomorrow's newspaper, or next week's - or the maiden issue of Money Magazine that October, which many charter subscribers signed up for as the only convenient way to track their mutual funds.

(aC: So which do you prefer? The 1970s or the 2007s? The cost of a trade transaction is definitely cheaper now, but the cost have been transferred to other avenues. If you want "Live Prices" - you gotta pay. If you want daily corporate news update - you gotta pay. Why? Because if you don't, you will be at a disadvantage. The speed of information is so important nowadays that news out in this morning's papers are already considered old news. There should be an update on the word "newspaper" to "oldpaper")

Continue to Part 2...

Car Guy Garage

What do you do with your garage? Is it still a place for your car to sleep in? After I have sold my car off last year (as I live a mere 10 mins away from my workplace), my garage has become my storeroom. I really dread going in there as I fear my old junk may just fall on me if they are not stacked properly, haha!

If you, like me, are thinking of "pimping up" your garages, why not pay carguygarage.com a visit? They cabinets, workbenches, tool boxes, garage flooring, garage storage, garage cabinets, garage door openers, organization, garage heaters, garage floor tile, floor mats, garage floor paint, storage systems, laundry room cabinets and other garage packages. You should be able to find something to spruce up your garage.

Why stocks can shake off mortgage meltdown (Part 2)

This post is continued from Part 1.

(3) Economy still fundamentally strong Turmoil in the credit markets is being caused by a repricing of risk, and not from problems stemming from the broader economy, many say.

"In our opinion this is a financial market event rather than a real economy event," said John Ip, senior economist for Morley Fund Management in London.

As a result, highly leveraged companies and financial firms are likely to feel the pain. But so far, it doesn't look like the upheaval is affecting the ability of companies on sound footing to get credit, he said.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said Wednesday that the fallout from subprime problems was contained and that the global economy remains strong, Reuters reported.

In a sign of the strength of the worldwide economy, the International Monetary Fund last week revised its global growth forecast for 2007 and 2008 to 5.2 percent, up from a previous forecast of 4.9 percent.

(4) Plenty of cash out there Despite problems roiling the debt markets, liquidity - or the amount of money available for investing - remains plentiful worldwide.

China and Russia, for example, have accumulated massive reserves. The global economic boom has also helped drive corporate profits, and many companies are sitting on loads of cash.

"Liquidity is quite abundant and it will cushion the world's economy and the financial markets against the current turmoil," Tony Crescenzi, chief bond market strategist at Miller Tabak and Co. in New York, wrote in a note this week

The tumult in the credit market may persist for some time, but it's likely that "credit formation will return to levels sufficient to power a continuation of the global economic expansion," he wrote.

Review: Hotel Reservations

How does Hotel Reservations stand out among its peers and competitors?

Here's what I think. Because of my background, I will be coming mostly from an Usability point of view and I do hope that the website owner will find my criticisms constructive enough to actually implement some of my recommendations to further enhance its website.

Homepage: Upon entering the homepage, I am bombarded by tons of information. Tons! The Homepage is too cluttered, just like most other online websites. Online surfers are impatient people with short attention spans, so they are easily put off when an encyclopedia wealth of information is being thrown in their face.

Recommendation Sub-page: I have problems getting started or even knowing how/where to get started; If I happen to be brought to the homepage without a destination in mind, will I know what to do next or will I just look for the exit? I hope the website can design a "Recommendations" page for those who were stung by the travelling bug but are clueless as to where they wanna go in the meantime.

Book Online: If you guys notice, there's a "Book online" tab near the top right hand corner of the screen. It would be useful to turn this plain text into a hyperlink to direct potential customers straight to the "Hotel Reservations" page.

Hotel Filter: At the Hotels sub-page, you can sort the Hotels according to "Best Value", "Quality", "Price" and "A-Z". Here's a breakdown of what this means:-

"Quality" - Hotels are arranged from 5 stars to 0 stars
"Price" - Hotels are arranged from the cheapest to the most expensive
"A-Z" - Alphabetical order

My question is - What does "Best Value" mean? Cheapest Hotel in each Quality standard? How does it differ from "Price"? (I did a sort according to both "Best Value" and "Price" and they both return different results) Maybe it would help if there's a pop-up text box which explains the above 4 categories when users do a scroll-over.

"Save up to 70% off": At the top right hand corner, I am sure you will be attracted by these 5 words. It would definitely help if HotelReservations.com can explain or give a breakdown as to why users can save up to 70% off when they make online bookings through the website.

"$100 Rebate" Promotion: There's an ongoing promotion which gives up to $100 cash rebate with online booking. The catch? You gotta make a 12-night booking. I'm sure you have heard of the phrase: "Nothing in life is free". Well, I have a personal saying which goes: "Free stuff often comes at a high price".

Conclusion: I have seen about 10 out of the 71 posts made by other bloggers, and they were all generic in nature, and nothing which were specific to HotelReservations.com. I do hope that the owners will appreciate my honest review of their website and implement some of my recommendations. Competition is stiff in this industry, and we must all strive to improve continuously. Overall, I think it is a good online travel website, but with a few tweaks, it can become better.

Investment: How many Stocks should you own? (Part 2)

Click here for Part 1 of this post.

So the heck with diversification, right?

Well, not exactly.

First, the least-diversified investors frequently lagged the market; they just lagged by less than investors who held more stocks. Second, because stock returns are so uneven, the "average" undiversified investor doesn't really exist. At any given point, there are something like 10,000 stocks in the United States. Most of them are mediocre, but a handful are what Bill Bernstein of Efficient Frontier Advisers dubs "superstocks" capable of delivering gargantuan returns for years. Think Microsoft in the '90s, when it returned 9,000%. More often superstocks are lesser-known companies. (aC: This is so true; That is why my strategy is always to go after penny stocks with great fundamentals. You can buy more volume of stock A that's worth only $0.20 and wait for it to move to $1.20 as compared to a stock B that's worth $2.00 and watch it move to $3.00, even though the latter will usually move faster. With the same $10,000, you can buy 50 lots of stock A and reap $50,000 in gross profit as compared to 5 lots of stock B and gain just $5,000. Of course, the hard part lies in identifying those Stock As; Stock Bs are your typical Blue chips)

Across a large group of people whose portfolios are mostly in one or two stocks, the lucky few with superstock portfolios will make the group's average return look great, even if the vast majority of individual members have lousy or middling results.

On the other hand, investors who spread their bets across dozens of stocks have only a slightly better chance at catching a superstock. And if they do land one, it won't have nearly as much impact on their portfolios, or on the group's average return.

So the real story is that you need a lot of stocks to be adequately diversified, and you need a concentrated portfolio to give yourself a shot at striking it rich. An unsolvable catch-22? Hardly. In fact, you can have it both ways by employing a straightforward, two-part strategy.

First, direct 90 percent of your U.S. equity allocation into a total stock market index fund that automatically gives you a stake in thousands of companies. (aC: In Singapore terms, this will your ETFs that track indexes like your STI ETF 100) That guarantees you a piece of every superstock that already exists or might emerge later - and, more important, it means you'll be adequately diversified and your investing costs will be at rock bottom.

Then pursue your search for the next Microsoft or Google by researching the daylights out of a very small number of companies and putting the remaining 10 percent of your portfolio into your one to three best ideas. This way you'll let yourself have a little fun. You will also minimize your risk and maximize your hope.

(aC: Hmmm... I have a different recommendation here - I would recommend the allocation to be 70% ETF and 30% "undervalued penny stock". If it's 90/10 as recommended above, I dont think gains from the UPS portion will provide any meaningful offset to the market return of the ETFs.)

Review: Submit2Please

Traffic - The currency equivalent of the Internet realm.

Submit2Please is an online business which offers manual directory submission to various directories across the world. They promise that your website's URL will not only be submitted but they will eventually be listed on the targeted directory.

So why is directory submission important?

Directory submission has 3 major benefits and they can be broken down as:-

Higher Positioning in Search Engine Results
Indexing of Web Site/Blog
Higher Probability of Click Through Traffic (otherwise known as CTC)

How much is it?

Submission to 500 Directories within 18 days - $99.95

Submission to 250 Directories (of PR 3+) within 14 days - $74.95

Submission to 250 Directories within 14 Days - $64.95

Submission to 150 Directories (of PR 4+) within 8 Days - $49.95

Guaranteed inclusion in Google index within 10 days - $9.95

Is the above expensive? That depends on how much revenue you are currently generating from your Blog/Website in the first place. My rule of thumb is 30% of your revenue should go into online marketing/advertising expenditure. So how do we put this into practise? Let's say your Blog is currently generating $50 a month, I would advise you to sacrifice 1 month of your revenue and pay for the 150 Directory submission and see if this boost up your revenue. If it does not result an increase in your monthly revenue by 200% (i.e. $150), then I would say it was a waste of money.

Lastly, let me touch on the ROI considerations provided by the website as follows:-

Assumptions (worst case scenario):

Consider our deal of submission to 500 directories for USD 99.95
Consider only 50% directories accept your site submission
Further you can safely consider that every directory which accepts your website will send your way at least four visitor in the entire year! So you still get 250 x 4 = 1000 unique visitors in an entire year for a cost of USD 99.95. So you get one unique visitor for less than 10 cents!

Here's what I think of the above. Firstly, a 50% hit rate is overly optimistic; A more realistic figure would be 5%. Secondly, I will use back the assumption that each directory will only send 4 visitors to our targeted URL over a one year period, because I think this is reasonable.

What we have is the following: 25 X 4 = 100 unique visitors over a one year period for a cost of ~US$100 or approximately US$1 per visitor. I personally find that too expensive. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that these visitors will return for a 2nd visit. Anyway, for those blogs that have 100 visitors in a single day will probably not be too thrilled by this kinda stats...

59th Emmy Awards - Stronger

"Th Th Th Tha hat that dont kill me
Can only make me Stronger
I need you to hurry up now
Cos I can't wait much longer"

Haha! Have you guys seen the Emmys? The above video is super funny (if you take away the whole Ryan Seacrest part)

Rainn Wilson of "The Office" (US) fame has to compete with the king of hip hop, Kanye West in a rap song contest in order to win... NADA! As Wayne Brady puts it, the people at the Emmys are rich enough; They don't need no more prizes. Instead, the winner of the rap song showndown will get to present the next award - "Best Reality TV Series" (which explains the whole setup)