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Contest Time
May 28th, 2007 by 
investoid
Because we changed our CIBC Investor’s Edge accounts over to electronic only communication, we received two subscriptions to the National Post online. for one year. I only need the one subscription, so I’ve decided to give away my second one in a contest. Thanks to Million Dollar Journey for the idea - he did this recently on his blog.
So, if you’d like a subscription to the Post for one year, please do one of the following:
- Send me an article about “Why I like to invest”. I’m interested to know why others are motivated to take the time to do their own investing. If you have your own blog, I will link to it at the top of the article.
- Send me a question that you’d like me to answer in a post.
Please have your submissions in by Friday June 1. I will announce the winner on Monday June 4. Please contact me and include your e-mail address so I can send you the information you need to activate the subscription.
I look forward to reading your questions and articles!
Posted in General | 
May 28th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Why I like to invest?
I like to invest because I like money and I’d like to have a lot more of it. I think a lot of people work pretty hard at their careers especially in the beginning in order to improve their economic lot in life. After a while though, you often end up in a career path that you might not have a lot of control over ie you’re an expert at doing something that pays around $x dollars per year and that’s that. It doesn’t matter how hard you work or not, you make the same money. At that point, I think some people (like me) get interested in investments because it’s something they have control over. If you do a good job investing then you’ll end up with a lot more money than if you do a poor job. I find that quite motivating.
I’ll put my post idea in a separate comment.
May 28th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
My post idea is actually more of a challenge to you. You mention in your “About” page that you like picking stocks and have a portion of your portfolio set aside for that purpose.
I believe that all investors should monitor the performance of their investments regardless of what their methods are. What I would like to see is for you to try to come up with a way to measure the performance of your managed portfolio and compare it to some sort of index or passive alternative ie ETFs. I have no idea what stocks are in your portfolio (maybe that’s a post too?) but if you have a large group of stocks it shouldn’t be hard to find an index to compare to. If that doesn’t work then maybe another idea is to compare the performance of the stocks you actually buy vs. the stocks you considered. For example if you analyzed all five of the big banks and then ended up buying RY, how did RY end up doing compared to the other four banks?
May 28th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Hey FourPillars,
Thanks for the comments! With respect to your post suggestions, when I started this blog I told myself I’d start placing my stock opinions on a page and their then/now prices. I haven’t done it yet for a couple of reasons: 1) I have had less time to do full securities analysis that I’d like, 2) I was lazy and didn’t feel like figuring out the code to have it update in real-time with a feed from Yahoo! I will try and get around to this sometime in the next month or two.
As for my holdings, I think that would make a good post. Since I just bought a house I sold a lot of the individuals stocks I held outside of my RRSP, which has left me with mostly ETFs and a couple of high-yield stocks/trusts.
May 29th, 2007 at 6:58 am
Why I like to invest?
Well I have to admit I just love the idea of me doing nothing more than a little research and then getting paided for it until I sell that stock/fund. There is something so nice about getting $40/month in distributions in my wife’s investment account without having to do anything.
CD
May 29th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
By the way - thanks for adding me to your blogroll!
Mike
May 31st, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Hello Investoid
Here are my reasons for why i like to invest:
1. Investing helps me control my financial destiny.
2. Investing engages my analytical and competitive edge when researching stocks and trying to beat the indexes.
3. Since i like reading and learning about business, economies, money management, equities, commodities and mining stocks, investing allows me to put into practise that which i have learned.
A question i would like you to answer is: How much time in a day or week do you spend researching, learning and looking up news and matters related to finance and investing??
June 5th, 2007 at 5:25 am
[…] to everyone who participated in my contest. It was good to learn more about what motivates others to be do-it-yourself investors. I will also […]
June 6th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
[…] Pillars asked, as part of my contest, to come up with appropriate benchmarks against the stocks that I hold in my portfolio. I think […]