Post 1264, Day 238 of 2014
- 1,334 days since I started this blog -
- 1,334 days since I started this blog -
I have two stock investment accounts. One is a self-directed IRA, started just under four years ago with the transfer of a 401K plan after the company that held it laid me off. The other is a normal account, started a little more than a year-and-a-half ago, started to provide a little cushion for my immediate post-retirement expenses.
I've already admitted that investing in the stock market is something of a game to me, and my feeling that I have mitigated the risks as best I could, and that I wasn't depending on the money to fund my retirement.
An aside: My retirement will be funded by pensions from Social Security and IBM. If I stay on the job another fifteen months, I will get a little monthly something from the VA.
That will have to do.
Back to the matter at hand.
So I have these two accounts, and, thanks to a bull market, my investments have done quite well. I admit that it makes me happy to see that, although I can't take any credit. In the past, I've been successful and failed hugely, too.
But it's a game to me, at least as attractive to play as solitaire (which it resembles in some ways). And there's a guilty pleasure that has nothing to do with results, too.
I get to make a spreadsheet to track my portfolios. There are automatic ones I could use, of course, but that wouldn't be much fun.
I like spreadsheets. Not the meaningless bean-counter spreadsheets. Mine have meaning for me. I have a spreadsheet for tracking my weight, for instance, which is the source of the graph I put in the Food and Diet Section every day.
I build my spreadsheets from scratch, and refine them (adding new insightful things, sometimes correcting errors) over time, and as updates are needed (new info, or, in this case, new stocks/transactions.
This sense of composition is the thing that initially attracted me to software. As with most things in my life, I backed into it - I had a plan, but let things take me where they would.
In 1976, a number of events happened that took me out of my central focus of playing music, and I ended up going to a 'matchbook-cover school' near Penn Station to learn electronics, with the goal of applying that to something music-related, like repairing my always-breaking custom stereo, or guitar amplifiers.
I did well in this school, with only a few people actually competitive for top of class (most were there getting their post-Viet Nam GI Bill benefits, and not really being that interested in any kind of academics). As I finished my eighteen-month technician's program, I was offered a free ride in a new class on microprocessors, a new technology at that time.
The midterm (final for me, as I was graduating and wouldn't be taking the second part of the two-term class) was to write a program where each switch in the Motorola trainer we were using, made a different 'note' sound on a speaker hooked up to the output.
I literally dreamed the solution, woke up and wrote my first computer program, tuned and tested it in class that day, and was the first one to complete the assignment - my solution was not only more elegant than the teacher's, but it was a perfect C-scale.
That made me switch my goals to become a software engineer, which led me to choose IBM, from among the companies recruiting me as an electronics tech, as the company most likely to help me realize that goal.
I made the switch from tech to programmer in three years, and quickly learned that I had totally romanticized the job and the field. There was little creative freedom in programming, and most of the work was piecemeal, with no opportunity to see anything through from beginning to end.
My personal spreadsheets, though, are different. Although not really programming, they are still built entirely by me, to function only as I like. For better or worse, they are as close to creative programming as I get. They also entertain the math geek in me (that's my degree field, Summa Cum Laude, thank you).
So, investing is a game, and my spreadsheet is my scoreboard, and I decide how it is played, and what the scoring rules are. Early on, I decided that the only worthy goal was to double the return of a safe investment, like a savings account. That meant I had to return about two percent per year.
The actual results are more than eight times better (so far), and represent a huge swing in my net worth: I've swung from being in deep debt to having much more than that in savings/investment.
Suffice it to say, it feels like I'm winning.
Please leave a comment if you visit my blog. Thank you!
Food and Diet Section
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| 2014 Daily Weight |
Previous Weight: 212.4 lbs
Day Net Loss/Gain: - 2.8 lbs
Diet Comment
Well, maybe yesterday was a bit of an anomaly. Today's weight, after a good day yesterday, would seem to indicate that.Diet Comment
Food Log
Breakfast
A cocoa-hemp-kale protein shake (coconut milk, kefir, kale, large organic egg, whey powder (24g protein), hemp seeds, hemp protein (7g protein), raw organic cacao powder, chia gel, moringa leaf powder, celery, cinnamon and stevia-inulin blend.
Lunch
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| Salmon salad (Wild Alaska pink salmon, celery, mayonnaise) on baby kale, baby spinach, chard, black beans and cole slaw mix. |
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| Bacon and shrimp with a balsamic deglaze reduction. Not shown: Ezekiel 4:9 Flax sprouted grain bread and guacamole. |
Celery and home-made mayonnaise and a protein bar.
Liquid Intake
Coffee: 26 oz. Water: 98+ oz.
Please leave a comment if you visit my blog. Thank you!
A game? What should become of those who are losing? What about those who don't want to play? What about those who don't have the resources to play? What about those who aren't permitted to play, by the players who don't really want the competition? All actions have consequences. Human actions also have human consequences.What are your thoughts on my questions?
ReplyDelete- Light - Love - Compassion -
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ReplyDeleteNot every game, or, at least, not every play of every game, has a me-against-them duality winner-loser situation. For me, this is a game of solitaire. I win or I lose, with no consequences for anybody but the ones who maintain the field of play, and since they always win (they are in it to collect players' fees), so where's the harm? This is a game that anybody with the price of a ticket can play - in order to be kept from competing, you have to want to own the field, not play on it. I do not create or maintain the field of play, and only my privileged status in this life affords me this diversion. It is true that, while it is a public field, you have to buy your way into play. This field is a private casino. That said, there are no admission charges or vetting for qualifications to play. Everybody knows the game is rigged and the general public is at a disadvantage. What you are gambling on is that you know which way the fix has been put in. If you don't have the money to gamble at this casino, there are other places to gamble, and in the history of humanity, as far as I understand it, gambling of one sort or another has always existed. The consequences of winning and losing at anything depend on your approach. If you gamble with money you can't afford to lose, the effects can be far-reaching, no matter what the outcome. People play all sorts of competitive sports (golf, pool, cards, etc.) against themselves, as practice - in these cases, the consequences are usually that their play improves, or their attraction to the play changes. If the experience is a good one (winning at solitaire), they usually continue playing. What is the cost or consequence? They have lost some time. In my case, I am gambling with money that I have no plans on using. If I lose? I have less money to not use. Also, less money for emergencies. The consequence of not playing, however, are also having less money for emergencies, since inflation is real and there are no 'safe' bets anywhere. I have created a portfolio of dividend issuing stocks. Whether the stock itself is more or less valuable than what I paid for it is irrelevant: I get paid a quarterly or monthly dividend at higher rates than bonds or savings accounts. If my whole portfolio goes to zero, and I have nothing, given the geographic and business diversity of my portfolio, that would be indicative of an end-of-the-world scenario, and the financial part of my life wouldn't be relevant at that point. As to human actions and consequences, my only thought is, so? True for any action. Time spent tracking my investments has only the consequence of not using that time for something else. I really enjoy working with my spreadsheets, though. And consequences are the result of a zoomed in view of life. I prefer a zoomed-out view. In the big picture, human actions have little significance.
ReplyDeleteReading this whole thing over, I realize I could have saved a lot of words and reading time for you if I just owned up that my investing, like so much of what I do, is just masturbation. And whatever the consequences of masturbating may be, I fully embrace them.
Is the only consequence that matters the one or few that affect you? What about the consequences for the rest of us? your reply to my questions was all about you alone. it sounded to me as selfish, and self-centered,and ignorant of the connectedness of everything and everyone. It seems that this is the outlook that allowed our slavery to the capitalist economy that has caused endless warring and the deprivation of the very many and the ever increasing wealth of the few at the top. Where and to who do you think the money you invest goes? Is it used for the benefit of the the many, or to secure the power and comfort of those few at the top.What is happening to humanity? We will kill ourselves and take much of other lifeforms with us,and maybe kill all life on earth as we know it if we continue to live the way we have historically lived. Wake up to the reality. We are at the fork in the river. we are making the choice between just being carried along in the stream which leads to the same dead end, or choose the stream of harmonizing with the whole, flowing down the stream of unknown possibilities of a more unified being.
ReplyDelete- Light - Love - COMPASSION -
" What is really insane is to do the same thing over and over, each time expecting a different outcome. "
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure who said this, but i wholeheartedly agree with it.
- Light - Love - Compassion -
To me the important thing is who's using your money and for what. Is it going to a company that has 10 year old kids working for slave wages, or heaven forbid, weapons manufacturers, or pesticide and herbicide companies? Or is it going for developing alternative energy, or something that might help the planet? Is it helping to make the 1% richer while the 99% are losing more and more every day? And it's not always obvious. Many of the big organic food companies are owned by parent companies who support Monsanto which is spending billions (that's right, billions) of dollars to defeat GMO labeling laws. They say it will just confuse people.
ReplyDeleteI have already said that my little investing game is masturbatory. Does it effect anyone else? Yes. Everything I do makes vibrations on the cosmic web. Everything everybody does affects everyone else, somehow. Can I know the effects? I don't think so. I don't think I fully understand how what I do effects ME. And what little insight I have diminishes by magnitudes as it gets further away from my ego.
ReplyDeleteIf I did nothing, that would effect others in ways I couldn't know, too.
I don't think the only effect that matters is the one I feel, but, in the big picture, I don't think that what I do really matters to anyone other than me. What little I've known of the effects of my actions on other people indicates a disconnect between my actions and their effect on other people, and seems independent of my intentions.
I am fully wrapped up in the current economy. I do not grow my own food or produce and shape the material of my clothes, and I didn't build my house on land I cleared. I pay for all these things with money I 'earn' by selling my time and labor. I participate in the group-think reality that gives value to paper money. Nothing I do (I work at the VA for the Federal Government!) is free of the cruelty and villainy of humanity. The air-conditioned air that I breathe as I write this is derivative of some good human's - maybe many -loss. The evil that enables my white, male, bourgois, privileged existence is part and parcel of any good that might come from it. It's pretty repulsive.
I don't know what to do other than to ignore the massive karmic debt, which I will pay out whether I do or don't embrace the guilt I should feel. I somehow believe that I am doing what I'm supposed to do, and accept that I am one with the whole, which means both victims and oppressors, saints and sinners are aspects of me.
I know the money I spend perpetuates evil, as does the money I save. Putting money in a bank doesn't seem better than putting it in an investment account where I can have some fun with it - or stuffing it in a mattress or burying it in the back yard. Do my investments do good things for bad people? I have no doubt. Do they do good things for good people? I would like to think so.
Beginning in the '80s, there were some mutual funds that tried to create baskets of stocks of companies that weren't ethically challenged. And they failed to do that. Because even the companies whose very existence was based on positive humanitarian ideals and rejection of exploitation and pollution get caught up in a world where business interactions put you in contact with the forces of evil.
I don't know the answer. It is a game of solitaire to me, and playing it means I am not helping anyone, or hurting anyone. I try to make my actions as neutral-to-positive as I can, but constantly see that, like my life itself, it is impossible to comprehend the unity of positive and negative, and things are ruled and governed by unintended consequences.
I write in the first person, so, yeah: Me-me-me. I try to be generous. I donate to charity. I won't pass a busker without putting something in the hat. But its all about me.
I am a rock, I am an island. But: No man is an island. He's a peninsula.
The quote is supposedly Einstein's. I'm not sure how it applies here. I try to repeat the things that make me feel good. Im pretty sure I'm supposed to feel good, because I do. But it doesn't seem to be that simple.
i don't think it is a matter of what you do. i think it concerns what you are being. are we being and acting with awareness, conscience, consciously? are we embodying the light , love, and compassion that makes up our reality, are we reducing the fragmentation , the divisiveness, the conflict in life, integrating our lives and being? this is not about guilt or innocence.
ReplyDelete- Light - Love - Compassion -
Sometimes yes, sometimes, not so much. I think I do the best I can, but in all honestly, I know lots of times I'm not. My intentions are good, so I'm paving the road to hell.
ReplyDeleteyeah, me too. we're all trying our best.
Delete- Light - Love - Compassion -