Archives: 2008 November

Often times in salary negotiation the question about your salary history will come up. It is not a good idea to discuss your salary history if you can avoid it, as it can give the employer a hand up in negotiation.

It is a bad idea to discuss salary early in the hiring process. However if it comes up, do not get yourself caught in a lie.

My preference when pressed for an answer is as follows:

1) State that you’d rather not answer that question because your previous salary is not terribly relevant to the current job you’re applying to. You’d rather be paid commensurate with the market and within the companies standard guidelines for the role and responsibility.

2) If the employer insists you mention your previous salary, mention with the total value of your salary package. Also, restate that it is not the same company you will be working for, and so your past salary is not related. There are so many factors including lifestyle, vacation, time in lieu of pay and other things that also factor in.

Part I

During the insane summer run-up in crude oil prices, I did a series of articles on the inevitability of a crude oil price pullback.

Who knew that it would be this hard and this fast?

I’m sure that if we asked 100 oil business execs and oil analysts in June if crude could be trading in the 50s in less than five months that 100% of them would have said, “No way.” And then they would have looked at us like we had just suggested a plan for immediate peace in the Middle East. Or a way for the Cubs to win the World Series.

Yet here we are, $57 and change with price in a downward spiral.

Why the monstrous drop? Is it the demand drop that everyone has been talking about this morning? Demand has fallen at least 1.3 million barrels per day globally (that estimate seems very conservative to me; crude supply and demand numbers are notoriously fudged because most of the world’s output is controlled by central governments). But with the OPEC countries producing around 30 million barrels per day, that certainly can’t be the main reason for the 60% drop in crude prices.

When investing in US savings bonds, you may hear of a Savings Bond Wizard and wonder what it is. A Savings Bond Wizard is a computer program that is free and available from a governmental site for US savings bond investors to use. The Savings Bond Wizard is a registered trademark of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Public Debt.

The Savings Bond Wizard has many uses. First of all you can manage your portfolio of savings bonds there easily. You can input all of your saving bond investments into the Savings Bond Wizard and have it keep track of all your savings bonds.

While some people prefer to use the simpler savings bond calculator, most investors who can use the Savings Bond Wizard opt to use it. The Savings Bond Wizard is much more powerful than the savings bond calculator.

The Savings Bond Wizard is probably most useful in helping US savings bond investors keep track of the interests the savings bonds have earned. There are many types of calculations the Savings Bond Wizard program can do and they can be saved when done.

The stock market is one of the most profitable investment tools available to the small investor. It is the way that many people have achieved the millionaire status that they have always dreamed of. The stock market is a very complex amachinea. It goes up or down based on many factors in the world. These factors can be the reason why you make money or you lose it. The financial crisis of the US banking industry sent ripples throughout the world and caused the Dow Jones to have the largest point drop in US history.

The news reported the drastic losses that affected many retirement plans because so many retirement plans relied on the stock market. Those who were following traditional financial theories of buying low and holding for the long term till the stocks have reached the maximum value and then selling, were hurt by this current financial plunge. What the news did not report was the fact that there were many investors that did not suffer great losses. In fact, there were those who had learned to utilize the short-term ups and downs of the market to their advantage. These are the people who have learned the skill of day trading.

Making too many trades is one of the most common (and destructive) mistakes traders make.

Given the complexity of option trading, you might think it would be a more common mistake to misread charting patterns or forget to check for stochastic shocks. But it’s not. The biggest mistake is trading too much.

Why is this? Well, I have a theory about that…

Most people (including me) were brought up believing they must work hard to make money. It’s almost like they can’t believe that making a lot of money could actually be easy.

Because of this, they end up trying to “work hard” at trading. And their idea of working hard is trading as often as they can.

It wouldn’t be so bad if frequent trading produced better results. But it doesn’t.

Traders who are stuck in their thinking and believe they must work hard to make money trading end up settling for bad trades just so they can feel like they’re putting in enough effort. Instead of exercising patience and waiting for a really good trade, they enter new positions regularly, no matter what!