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My old alarm clock desperately needs to be replaced, I had to set my alarm to 5am to wake me up at around 7am. The 2 hour gap randomly increases and decreases every day so a lot of guessing work was involved.

My friend and I went to an area near Ikea to have dinner, after that we decided to stop by Ikea so that I can get a frying pan (cheap!).

While in a rush to go home, Ikea’s Dekad caught my eye. I just had to buy it. I always have a knack for vintage watches and clocks. It has a sleek, black metal body and it doesn’t look like cheap plastic replicas, there are no letterings or cartoon pictures on the clock face. It only costs me RM25 and I was obsessed with it ever since I paid for it at the counter. It’s perfect!

Except… I have no idea that it not only looks vintage, but it works vintage too. It’s a wind-up! My friend and I, being too tech-savvy for non-digitized equipment, fiddled around with the four dials behind it. We spent almost 20 minutes figuring out what does what and finally got it working.

This intricate machine is currently sitting elegantly on my desk, ticking away (if I remember to wind it) and waiting to sound its loud machine-gun alarm…

Free Budget Worksheet for those who constantly asks “Where did my money go?”, run your numbers through this free printable budget worksheet (excel format) after you tracked your expenses.

This is a great personal budget worksheet because it saves me from forgetting expenses that exists. Sometimes I forget to include small on-going expenses like newspapers and this worksheet saves me from recalling what expenses I have and don’t have, this budget worksheet lists all the expenses from daily expenses to bi-monthly haircut to an occasional vacation.

Click here to download your own budget worksheet

Two stocks (which I bought) opened with a gap this month…

SHFL had an earnings conference at 5pm on the day I bought the call options. The earnings announcement was great news and the next day, it opened with a huge gap upwards, my $1.85 call options became $5 instantaneously! It was also my first trade made with 2 contracts (I figured I have enough capital to buy more than 1 contract).

EPD had a sharp increase the 2nd day after my purchase too, but I was in a Put option. Thank god for my stop loss, the trade exited automatically at a loss of $90.

Balance after exit trade made in March: $3,191.28 (Goal reached!)

* After commissions, SEC fees, interest earned, non-resident alien withholding

Total profit for the month: +221.89%
Average profit for the month: +55.47%

Started using on 17/03/06. We shall see whether it has increased my PR (currently 2) and my traffic.

If anyone remembers my previous post about how paid-to-surf program sucks, I wish to take back what I said… partially.

I registered for an account at Alexa Booster, a paid-to-surf program. So I’d like to take back what I said about paid-to-surf programs, they don’t suck…. they just suck if you wanna get paid to surf, but they are great when you want to advertise and increase your website traffic for free!

I’ve been using Alexa Booster since December and my traffic, as well as my alexa rankings, has gone up. My alexa ranking used to be in the millions, but at this time of writing… it’s 698,730.

Another great thing is that I don’t autosurf much, I get some free random credits when I login and then I wait for paid-to-click ads to appear on the alexabooster site. With one click, I can get 500 manual or auto credits. 500 credits is enough for me to advertise for about 1-2 weeks.

Does it increase sales? Nope. Users of Alexa Booster mostly just view my site to get credits, but it certainly makes your site look good in the ranks. So don’t get your hopes up if you want to increase sales!

I didn’t do pretty good this month…

ET was a mistake, I accidentally executed a sell order on a put option which I’m suppose to buy. Made about $1 loss there from the commission charged.

HUM, OII and JBHT was doing great and gave me a $300 profit initially but because I held it for too long (greed sucks sometimes), I ended up with a $35 gross profit. *sob* I broke the system rules by not using trailing stop loss.

XEC was disappointing. After about 4 days of monitoring the stock and seeing the put premium falling, I decided to sell it to avoid further loss. Besides that, my internet access will be disconnected for a few days because I’ll be moving to a new apartment. On monday (4th day), the stock started to fall and fall and fall….. the put now costs $5! :`(

Balance after exit trade made in February: $2086.09*

* After commissions, SEC fees, interest earned, non-resident alien withholding

Total profit for the month: +33.46%
Average profit for the month: +5.58%

With the invention of the internet, making money is easier than ever. The reason is you can make money when you answer surveys online or get paid to read e-mails on the internet. Now isn’t it easy to make money?

There are many paid-to-surf programs, “paid to read e-mail” programs, etc on the internet but the question you have to ask yourself is do you really want to answer surveys for the rest of your life? Is this an income you can depend on when you retire?

I don’t fancy leaving my computer switched on just to earn money nor do I want to read ads in e-mails or answer hundreds of surveys in order to make a quick buck. Why settle on making money once when you can build your own monthly salary? I strive for something that lasts long-term and still generates income even when I’m having a vacation: websites that generate monthly income, properties that give monthly rental income, investments that provide attractive yields and so on.

And that boils down to my point about passive and active income…

Active income is income that is generated only when you work. For instance, if you go to work, you receive your paycheck. If you don’t, you get fired!

Passive income is income that is generated after you work. Examples of this type of income are: dividends from stocks, royalties from intellectual property, sales generated from your websites or network marketing business, etc.

A lot of people have mistaken what passive income is because it is constantly used together with get-rich-quick and getting-something-for nothing hypes. The reality is all things need effort, time and energy but the difference between passive income and active income lies in the results achieved from working. Notice that active income only generates income when you work and passive income comes infinite times after doing work ONCE. The key idea here is work smarter and to get paid for what you did instead of what you do.

If you want to earn more, work less, and happily retire, start creating income streams that do not require your active participation. Whether you are just starting your business, or you already have one, the sooner you start thinking about how you are going to change your business model to create more passive income, the sooner you can achieve financial freedom.

Well, what better time to start learning how to trade and invest than starting in a new year, right? These are REAL Trades. Yes… with REAL money. If you are interested to know which broker I’m using, please visit this page.

I started well with LLL, but STA didn’t do well and hit the stop loss.

Starting Capital: $2,100.28

Balance after exit trade made in January: $2,035.39*

* After commissions, SEC fees, interest earned, non-resident alien withholding

Total loss for the month: -34.05%
Average loss for the month: -17.03%

Paper trade.

Date/ Action/ Symbol Description / Quantity/ Price / Commission charged/ Net gain/(loss)

NSM
1/9/2006 STC .NSMAE-NSM JAN 25 Call Qty:1 Px:$3.5 Comm:$14.95 Net:335.03
1/4/2006 BTO .NSMAE-NSM JAN 25 Call Qty:1 Px:$2.35 Comm:$14.95 Net:-249.95
Gain of $85.08

INTC
1/11/2006 STC .INQAE-INTC JAN 25 Call Qty:1 Px:$1.45 Comm:$14.95 Net:130.04
1/4/2006 BTO .INQAE-INTC JAN 25 Call Qty:1 Px:$1.15 Comm:$14.95 Net:-129.95
Gain of $0.09

SCHW
1/17/2006 STC .SHQNW-SCHW FEB 17.5 Put 1 2.6 14.95 245.04
1/11/2006 BTO .SHQNW-SCHW FEB 17.5 Put 1 2.05 14.95 -219.95
Gain of $25.09

ELX
1/20/2006 O STC .ELXNX-ELX FEB 22.5 Put 1 1.7 14.95 155.04
1/13/2006 O BTO .ELXNX-ELX FEB 22.5 Put 1 1.9 14.95 -204.95
Loss of ($49.91)

Balance in account: $5,290.58

ELX
When I first made my trade on ELX, it dropped from $1.9 to about $1.5 on the same day. I forgot to make a stop loss and the price stayed around $1.5 on Tuesday (Monday was holiday).

I hoped and prayed that it went back up to at least the cost which I paid ($1.9), but it didn’t… It kept going down for 3 more days. It was until Thursday that I gave up and decided to just make a limit order of $1.70 and hope that the loss will be minimum. ‘Wo dee ho’, the market fell and ELX also fell which resulted in the increase of the premium price of the put to as high as $1.85. But it was already too late as I had made a limit order of $1.70 (and wasn’t at my computer to monitor my trade). OX has automatically executed my order.

I hope I’ll stick with my rules – make a stop loss order and not delay further in hopes that the option premium will rise again.

SCHW
OX’s virtual trading simulation doesn’t support contingency orders nor trailing stop, I think I may have gotten a better gain on this one if a trailing stop was used. I think I had exited this trade too early.

You can check out my options broker. I opened my trading account at ThinkorSwim.com (TOS).

Apart from the fact that they have a weird name, they really set themselves apart from other options brokers. They have a unique website that’s not boring like other broker sites, sometimes their sales copy are really funny… Go to their “Our current promotions” page and you’ll know what I mean. I wonder when I’ll get my monkey… hmmm…

This funky company doesn’t only look good from the surface, they are also an options broker with exceptional customer support. They answer all my questions politely and what’s most impressive is that one of the rep said I can start trading with less than their minimum deposit of $3,500. He then immediately re-activated my already expired free-trial account for another 14 days without me asking him to. I’m absolutely pleased.

Thinkorswim’s commission fees for each options contract is $2.95 or $9.95 + $1.50 per contract, whichever lower. It is lower than optionsxpress.com if you trade less than 6 contracts. There’s no monthly fees or whatsoever. It’s as straightforward as that.

Their trading platform, “Think Desktop”, is excellent. I use it to trade, monitor stocks, analyze stocks and even the charts. It’s completely stable and extremely easy to use. Trading tools similar to ‘Think Desktop’ always charge monthly fee or very high prices ($200 and above) but TOS is the only online options broker that offers a trading platform for FREE.

The two things that I’m not satisfied with thinkorswim is that the trading software doesn’t show the bid/ask prices when you open the program during after-market hours and they don’t have paper trading. Other than that, if you are looking for an online options broker, then I’d suggest ThinkorSwim.com. I don’t think you should waste your time looking at other brokers, this is the absolute best. Visit their site, download their software, try it out and please come back here to thank me for recommending you this valuable resource LOL!

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Update:

On January 28th: TOS launched paperMoney, their new paper trading software. See their description:

“paperMoney, our groundbreaking papertrading functionality. Every thinkorswim login can now access a virtual margin account and a virtual IRA account each funded with $100,000 of ‘play money’. The functionality is exactly the same as the “live” thinkorswim platform, except that the trades aren’t real and you can start over anytime you like. PaperMoney lets you trade stock, options and futures 24/7 with all of the best tools in the business. So, go ahead and fire away. Sleep is overrated anyway.”

On February 25th: TOS launched TOS charts, their new charting package that includes:

* Streaming real-time data
* Over 140 technical studies
* 9 different drawing tools
* Single-click access to have 20 chart windows displayed on a single page
* Daily E-mini futures

Disclaimer: I do not earn commissions for recommending them to you. I just love being their customer and I love telling others that I’m their customer.