Ian Thomson

I receive Van Tharp’s newsletter “Tharps Thoughts” and I just had to share something from the latest edition with you …

Tom Watson, Golf and Me
by
Van K. Tharp, Ph.D.

It was Saturday evening, and I had tears in my eyes as I explained to my wife what was going on in the world of golf. Tom Watson, a man two months shy of 60, was leading the British Open after three rounds. It didn’t matter that Tiger Woods had missed his first cut in a major, losing the opportunity to win major number 15. Tom Watson, at nearly 60 years of age, was about to win major number nine. A miracle was about to happen. My wife and niece didn’t seem to get the enormity of the situation. I couldn’t express it to them, or if I did they were not interested enough to watch the drama of the final round.

In golf the collective belief is that when you reach the age of 40, you are very unlikely to be competitive anymore. Somehow you don’t have the strength or the mental tools to play consistent top golf. When Jack Nicklaus won the Masters at age 47, I thought it was one of the greatest golf feats ever. In addition, Julius Boros won the U.S. open at age 48, although that was probably a little too early for me to be aware of.

Read the rest of the article here

Thanks Van for such a great article!

For all you traders … Ed Seykota’s trading rules … set to music!!!

A collection of the best ever, top-quality, ROFL investor/investing jokes ever …

• The market may be bad, but I slept like a baby last night. I woke up every hour and cried.
• What’s the difference between buying a lottery ticket and buying a penny stock? In the first case, you help finance your local community swimming pool. In the second case, you help finance the stock promoters home pool.
• My broker and I are working on a retirement plan. Unfortunately, it’s his!
• A long term investment is a short term investment that failed.
• A stockbroker is someone who invests your money till it’s all gone!
• It was so cold today I saw a stockbroker with his hands in his own pockets.
• A market analyst is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today!
• Momentum Investing: The fine art of buying high and selling low.
• Value Investing: The art of buying low and selling lower
• Q: Why did God create stock analysts? A: In order to make weather forecasters look good.
• There was a tremendous turnaround in the market today. A stock brocker who jumped out of a window on the twelfth floor, saw a computer screen on the seventh floor and did a U-turn.
• You know you’ve gone to the wrong stockbroker when you ask him to buy 1,000 shares in IBM and he asks you how to spell it.
• The problem with investment bank balance sheets is that on the left side nothing is right and on the right side nothing is left.
• How do you find a good small-cap fund manager?  Find a good large-cap fund manager, and wait
• The credit crunch has helped me get back on my feet. The car’s been repossessed.
• The United States has developed a new weapon that destroys people but it leaves buildings standing. It’s called the stock market.

OK …. yes, I admit it …. I lied!

I hope at least one or two made you smile.

For the moment I am protecting my source …. but if there are enough complaints about the quality of the jokes then I will go public.

Today I went and saw some of the fabulous statues that they build each year for the Las Fallas fiesta. They are made from papier-mâché and are as big as the surrounding buildings! Here are a couple of pictures that I took today as they were completing the assembly of some of them …

Final stages of construction

The figures are larger than life!

Stone Age DJ

Wedding scene!

This amusing video was originally shown on Saturday Night Live. It has a good message in there too.

I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think.

Many thanks to Melissa Meers for showing me this.

And the news from America:

If you had purchased $1,000 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49 left. With Fannie Mae, you would have $2.50 left of the original $1,000. With AIG, you would have less than $15 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling refund, you would have $50 cash.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink a lot of beer - and recycle (Hic! - Ed.)

Many thanks to Andrew Blunden from Part Time Professionals for this investment “advice” Check out his website for ways to source the most experienced CFO, executive and corporate accounting talent, in the most cost-effective way.

Many thanks to fromtheold who kindly sent me this via Twitter.

It reminded be of the pain when I tried to learn to surf. However … at least I was in the water at the time!

This joke was apparently voted the best Australian joke of 2008. What do you think? …

A bloke’s wife goes missing while diving off the West Australian coast. He reports the event, searches fruitlessly and spends a terrible night wondering what could have happened to her. Next morning there’s a knock at the door and he is confronted by a couple of policemen, the old Sarge and a younger Constable.

The Sarge says, ‘Mate, we have some news for you, unfortunately some really bad news, but, some good news, and maybe some more good news’.

‘Well,’ says the bloke, ‘I guess I’d better have the bad news first?’ The Sarge says, ‘I’m really sorry mate, but your wife is dead. Young Bill here found her lying at about five fathoms in a little cleft in the reef. He got a line around her and we pulled her up, but she was dead.’

The bloke is naturally pretty distressed to hear of this and has a bit of a turn. But after a few minutes he pulls himself together and asks what the good news is.

The Sarge says, ‘Well when we got your wife up there were quite a few really good sized crays and a swag of nice crabs attached to her, so we’ve brought you your share.’

He hands the bloke a sugar bag with a couple of nice crays and four or five crabs in it. ‘Geez thanks. They’re bloody beauties. I guess it’s an ill wind and all that… So what’s the other possible good news?

‘Well’, the Sarge says, ‘if you fancy a quick trip, me and young Bill here get off duty at around 11 o’clock and we’re gonna shoot over there and pull her up again!

I have just finished doing a training course called PPC Domination. It teaches you how to set up and manage a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign (eg Google Adwords).

If PPC Advertising is something that you do, or are thinking of doing, then check out my thoughts on it …

You can check the product out here: www.EasyPPCDomination.com

If you have used it yourself, I’d love to hear your thoughts too.

One of the things I enjoy doing in my spare time is cooking and my favourite type of cooking is baking. And here is one of my favourite recipes. It is for Banana bread and, having tried and adapted a few recipes, I firmly believe this latest result to be the best.

I make this whenever I find that I have too many bananas around and some are becoming over-ripe. It is a fabulous way of using these rather than wasting them. So much so, that I often deliberately buy too many bananas!

Some of the reasons I particularly like this recipe are:

• It’s flexible - you don’t need to get the quantities right - close is good enough
• It’s easy - basically, all you do is bung everything together and stir - you don’t even use a mixer
• It’s quick - it can be in the oven in 10 minutes
• It doesn’t require a big clean up afterwards - so I don’t get into trouble for leaving a big mess!
• And, of course, the best reason of the lot - it tastes fantastic!

OK, so the ingredients are:

• 5 or 6 over-ripe bananas
• 125g butter
• 250g sugar
• 2 x eggs
• 1 x teaspoon vanilla extract (or 2 of vanilla essence)
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 350g self-raising flour

Method:

1. Pre-heat oven to 170 degrees C
2. Melt butter (on the hob on low or put into a bowl and zapped in the microwave on low - just melted, not boiled!)
3. While it is melting, peel the bananas and bung them into a large bowl
4. Pour the melted butter into the bowl and mix - breaking the bananas down into small chunks as you do it. You can keep going until you get pulp if you like but personally I like to find banana bits in the banana bread
5. Add the sugar, eggs, vanilla extract and salt and mix
6. Add the flour and mix again
7. Pour into a loaf tin. You can butter this but my preference is to line it with baking paper - it’s easier to get out when cooked
8. Bung into oven
9. It is ready when a knife comes out clean - usually after about 1¼ hours.
10. Cool on a rack - try to wait for it to cool - it slices easier!
11. Fabulous sliced, toasted and buttered
12. Would probably work with walnuts added but I’m not a huge walnut fan so haven’t tried it.

So, let me know what you think. Also, I’d love to hear other suggestions of good recipes for over-ripe bananas if you have them - sometimes even I can have too much banana bread in the house!

Ian