You know how you have love-hate relationships with some people? my parents are those people. I love them, and they’re probably the people I most care for (I remember the last time I cried was in a dream when my dad died), they mean a lot to me; but sometimes they just get on my nerves.

For one thing, they nag and bitch at me alot. For my mom, this usually means her annoying me with “Why don’t you clean this room? wash these dishes etc etc” For my dad it would be “Why can’t you do anything right? Why don’t you exercise more?”. Yeah.. it really gets annoying. And it’s also annoying how they would put in “If you don’t do things this way, how would you ever find a girlfriend?” Or “If I was your girlfriend I would be appalled blah blah” It’s really annoying how they presume my love life is somehow interconnected with the way I organize my stuff.

Another dispute we have is with my way of thinking, especially with regards to finances and my home country. You see, my parents have a very old-fashioned way of thinking. Hard work and education -> good job -> retire at 65. Don’t take any risks. Housing prices will always go up. That’s the way the thinking was a while ago, but I think in today’s day and age you have to have more innovative thinking. I said “I want to purchase a home with cash”. My parents laughed at me. I said “I made $X through the stock market”. My parents didn’t believe me. They thought the stock market was a way to scam money from you.
They’re very conservative on fiscal matters yet they just purchased a $375,000 condo. That’s so hypocritical. They said I’m being very fiscally irresponsible because I have $1000 owing on a credit card with interest 8%. “You are so stupid to let the credit card companies charge you interest. Why don’t you pay that back right away?” While at the same time they have about $300,000+ on a mortgage. “But the mortgage rate is only 2.5%, yours is 8%” Yeah, but 8% of $1000 is much less than 2.5% of $300k isn’t it? What’s the point? And on a condo whose value is going decrease once the interest rates goes up. My parents think that housing prices will never go down as long as you are in a prime location, which is also hypocritical advice because they always say to me “If it’s so easy to make money on the stock why doesn’t everyone do it?” and my response to that is “Because most people are like you and don’t like to take risks. If it was so easy to make money by buying condos and housing prices never go down (See: US housing crisis) then why doesn’t everyone do that?”.
They’re very cynical and untrusting of other people. They also forbid me from inviting over any strangers because “they might kill you”. I said I was willing to take the chance to make a business deal with them, if the possibility of him killing me is 1,000,000:1 then so be it. My parents were astounded and thought that my logic was flawed. They wanted to kick me out of the house for thinking differently. “There’s something wrong with the way you think, Tong” “You don’t think like a normal person does”. Ok well, why would I want to think like a normal person, I want to be above the average person. And how do they know that the average person thinks this way. They think their beliefs are above everyone else’s, that you have to think in the old ‘traditional’ style and any other way is too ‘radical’ for them.

And my home country, which is China. It’s strange because my parents are 100% Chinese yet they do not want to go back to China. Why? I don’t know, my mom comes up with a different excuse each time. Last time it was “I’m too lazy to get gifts for my relatives” (cause you have to get gifts for relatives when you go back apparently) and this time it’s “I don’t understand the way they think there. You will lose face if you go back there and you’re not rich and successful”. That sounds silly. If you are not rich and successful, then your relatives will think less of you? Maybe that’s how Chinese think? Has China really become that capitalist that people there are more arrogant than Americans are? I wondered why all the international students had alot of money, and according to my mom, “They have to send their money overseas to their children because they’ll be forced to spend it back home to get raises, promotions, etc”. Not really sure how true this is, but I don’t understand what vendetta my parents have against our home country. I’m very proud of my home country China and my hometown Shenyang. My dad went back for two weeks to visit his relatives, got sick of it and came back. My mom doesn’t want to go back at all and thinks all Chinese people are ‘tan guan’ which means greedy corrupt officials. I don’t agree with that… yes lots of Chinese people are corrupt but I don’t think that all of them are, or even a majority.

Well I disagree with my parents on a lot of things, but even so they did raise me and even if they don’t support me moving to the United States, I will thank them for giving me the opportunity to be so independent. I really can’t wait to start a new life. Graduation can’t come soon enough.

Well as many people can tell my interest in fashion is quite unique. One of my favorite inspirations for fashion are military uniforms. They look very nice and combine formal wear with a bit of edge. Although, I can’t join the military because of my eyesight, I still have an interest in the fashion.

I was taking a look at this design:

There’s two problems with it:
1) A bit inappropriate to wear as a civilian. Esp the medals and the badges.
2) All those ordered as a set would cost over $360 USD+

So… I decided to make my own outfit from separate parts.
Here’s the result:

US Navy Style Dress Jacket w/dress shirt

So I bought the jacket separately and sewed the stars, insignia and badges on myself. I also have another pic without the inner shirt but adding the shoulder boards:

US Navy Jacket with shoulder boards

The cost of all the pieces were:
1) 1959 US Navy Jacket Size 38R: $35 USD
2) LT hard shoulder boards: $15 USD
3) US Technical officer badge: $15 USD
4) US Navy insignia pin: $10 USD
5) Enlistment stars: $7 USD
6) Tuxedo shirt + bowtie: $24 USD

Total cost: $106 USD. So I saved myself about $260 by getting the components separately and putting it together myself…not too bad. It also doesn’t look bad at all as evening wear.

That’s what I’ve been up to recently… Since Chinese New Years + Valentines is coming up soon I have two rather mellow guitar instrumentals uploaded:

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When the bear market hits...

Ah yes. It’s about time I　talk about one of my favorite things to do – invest in the market. It is something that not everyone can do, or knows how to do. I just want to share some of my thoughts and experiences about it so far.

I started investing in November 2008 – around the time the financial crisis happened. I recognized a great opportunity then to invest because the markets were all down as a result of global economic malaise at the time that the next great depression was happening. All the major indexes were down to their 1998 levels and it was a good time to get in. Fast forward a year or so later and we can see that all the indexes have gained 30-60% from then and the DJIA is hovering between 10,000 and 11,000.

Investing in stocks is something that many people are afraid to do. They are afraid of risk or losing money in case a company goes bankrupt. Or what if the stock price goes down and I lose alot of value? I’d like to take a quote from Winston Churchill who said that ‘Pessimists see the difficulty in every opportunity and Optimists see the opportunity in every difficulty‘. Investing in stocks need not be a daunting task. Alot of people think you need to be really knowledgeable about finance, or you need alot of capital. Neither. Much of it is common sense and I started my portfolio with a measly $1000 in savings.

The basic premise of the stock market is to make profit and/or earn money. You can do this two ways: buy common stock and hope that it goes higher and then sell it at a profit. This is the most common way. Or you can buy preferred shares and hold it long term and make income from dividends. I would suggest the latter if you have a lot of cash handy. The main goal of a company is to be profitable. Once a company is profitable the stock generally goes up and assuming you have bought it at a lower price you can sell it to make profit, buy more of it hoping it goes up more or hold it to see how much it goes up. I’ve taken a pretty standardized routine of buying stocks now. I’ve invested for over a year, learned the good and bad and generally this way has worked for me. During all of 2009 I have yet to have a month where I have had a net loss. Last month was the first month I ever actually had a net loss for my investments, and it was mostly due to a stupid glitch with my brokerage. You want to know how I invest? Here’s how I invest (keep in mind that I’m a short term investor):

1) Look at which companies are currently profitable and can sustain their profit margins. If a company has a product or service that can be differentiated from its competitors that’s a good sign. If a company is in an emerging market, like China, that’s a good sign because there’s room for growth. A prime example is Sirius XM Radio (NASDAQ:SIRI). Back in Nov 2008 this stock was trading at $0.25/share. Now if you look at it Sirius XM has a good product: it’s the sole provider of satellite radio. It also increased subscribers year after year and more car manufacturers were offering it in their cars. In addition, this stock was so cheap that it had very little room to fall. So it’s a good investment. And if you look at the quotes for SIRI now, you’d see that it’s trading at more than $0.90 a share, that’s almost 4x the price it was back when I first invested in it. If a stock’s value seems cheap for what it is, then that’s a good deal. Two other stocks I would like to call attention to are Baidu (BIDU) and Ctrip.com (CTRP). These two Chinese stocks are at the top of what they do, in terms of market share, revenue, etc. Baidu is the leading search engine in China and because of China’s nationalistic spirit, I doubted that Google was going to surpass it (turns out they pulled out completely). Baidu was trading around $120/share back in February 2009. This is an incredibly attractive price for a stock that had such a huge potential for growth (online advertisement, search deals w/government, etc). And currently Baidu is trading at around $430/share. This is likely to sustain for a few more years because of its dominance of the Chinese market and to benefit from its growth. Next, Ctrip.com is the leading provider of travel service in China. This is another potential segment for growth because as middle class Chinese move up benefiting from China’s growth, they have more purchasing power allowing them to spend more on such things like travel. In addition, Ctrip provides both international and domestic flights. Again when you have a company that is in an emerging market and said company dominates its competition (EPS, Revenue, etc) then you have a winner. Ctrip’s value went from $17/share back in March 2009 to $76/share last month before it split. Again more than 400% gain.

2) After analysis of the stock and purchasing x shares of y company, there’s the thought: what if the stock falls? There’s two things I would in this case. Stocks fall for a number of reasons: a) Stock fell because earnings report b) Stock fell because of increased competition c) Stock fell because the market fell. In case a) and b) I would suggest selling the stock depending on how bad it was. If it’s not expected to return to profitability anytime soon, it’s gonna tie up your portfolio which you could be using to purchase better deals. In a worst case you should hold it because a) and b) tend to have longer term repercussions on the stock’s value. On the other hand, if it’s c) there’s one thing I would do: invest invest invest and/or average down. When those bearish days hit and the Dow drops 100+ points you know that’s a good time to buy. Because usually it doesnt mean anything about the company, it’s mostly a market reaction of investor fears and as Warren Buffet says ‘be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others a greedy‘ these down drops are typically temporary and the stock typically goes back up once the market recovers.

3) Making profit. I tend to have a general rule about stocks. If I make more than $100 on a stock, I sell it. Sure it means I lost out on the opportunity to make more money but some profit is better than nothing and it builds up. If a stock is really high then I would use a stop limit to lock it in. Limit orders are also a nice way to ensure that you buy low and sell high. But one rule in general is that the most profit tends to be made longer term. In fact if I had held alot of my stocks I invested in before until now I would’ve been 10x richer at least… but for those with short term thinking like me, locking in little profits a bit at a time helps too. In general, limit your risk by knowing when to sell and when to hold.

So that’s it for now, three things to think about: How to purchase a stock, what do to if a stock falls, and when to make your profit. Stocks aren’t really as complicated as some people make it out to me. All you need is $1000 and some common sense if you ask me .

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