Antony’s Life Blog

(Picture is from stock.xchng.)

I’ve been tagged by Dian to write 10 facts about me. So let’s start.

1. I do not speak Chinese although my ancestor is from China. My grandfather is originally from Fujian province in China.
2. I enjoy cooking. Interestingly, I learnt how to cook after I left my home country, Indonesia. Before that, I didn’t even know how to cook rice.
3. I love photography (link to my Flickr account). I bought my first DSLR camera last Christmas.
4. My favorite food is gudeg. It is always the first food that I eat each time I visited Yogyakarta. It’s about 1 hour from my home, Magelang. Unfortunately, I can now only eat gudeg once a year.
5. I met my wife for the time at Sentosa Island, Singapore on September 5, 2004. We were on the same tour to the island.
6. When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a medical doctor. Never thought to be an engineer.
7. I had only $3,000 when I started my study in Germany. It was sufficient to cover 6 months of living cost only. How could I survive? I had part-time jobs at Fraunhofer and then Sony International Europe.
8. My first full-time job was at Nokia Germany. The R&D center where I used to work has been shut down by Nokia due to high labour cost.
9. I have never invested in the stock market until I was 31 years old. I made a nice 50% profit in the first year and lost all my profits in the second year.
10. I have never met Dian in person. Btw, Dian is a blogger who tagged me for this stupid posting.

Now the fun part. I have to tag 10 other bloggers: Abigail, Jess, Safaroni, Shu Xiang, Sony Lin (those are all my cousins), Celine, Owen (my niece and nephew), Laura, Cien2, Wiryanto.

The rules:
1. Each blogger must post these rules
2. Each blogger starts with ten random facts/habits about themselves
3. Bloggers that are tagged need to write on their own blog about their ten things and post these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose ten people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’ve been tagged and to read your blog.

(Picture is from stock.xchng.)

After I wrote a posting “How I come into Trading World“, a friend of me asked how I lost $25,000 this year.

First of all, I would like to disclose how I made $25,000 profit in the stock market last year. There were three of my stocks that hit home-run last year, i.e.:

• VMW (VMWare). VMWare is probably the most successful IPO in 2007. My profit from VMWare is about $6,000.
• AAPL (Apple). Apple made home-run last year by releasing iPhone. My profit from Apple is more than $5,000.
• TIM (Timminco). Timminco is one of the stars in Toronto Stock Exchange last year. It is a mining company specializing in solar grade silicon used in the solar photovoltaic energy industry. My profit from Timminco is almost $5,000.

I made a couple of thousands more on other stocks, such as SPWR (SunPower), a company who sells high-efficiency solar power systems for home and business, and BIDU (Baidu), a Chinese Internet search engine.

When year 2008 started, I was so greedy. I was trapped in a “rich-quickly” scheme. I bought some call options of Apple. I knew that Apple is going to release iPhone 3G. Besides that, Mac is eating PC’s market share slowly. Btw, If you have no idea about options, there is a nice article from Wikipedia.

After I bought Apple’s options, suddenly Apple’s stock dropped 40% in less than a month. If I hold Apple’s stocks at that time, I might not be so worried. The thing is I hold options; so I have to fight against time-decay. At the end of the day, I sold my Apple’s options for a total loss of ~$15,000. I lost another a couple of thousands more from my other stocks that tumbled as the global stock market crashed.

Bottom line: Do not be so greedy. There is no such thing called “rick-quickly” scheme. Lastly, be careful when trading options. It is very risky business.

(Picture is from stock.xchng.)

If you are following news about “financial disaster” in the US, you should know that the government is currently debating $700 billion bailout plan. If you are not following financial news recently, I recommend you to read this controversial plan from Wikipedia. This is going to be the biggest bailout in American history!

How much is $700 billion?

• It is $150 billion more than what the US government have spent on Iraq war (as of August 2008).
• We can buy more than 1 million Ferrari with the money.
• We can buy 2,000 planes of Airbus A380, the largest passenger airline in the world.
• It is almost twice as much as GDP of Indonesia. I am not kidding… it is as much as the total market value of all good and services produced within the country for almost 2 years.
• I may have to work 10 million years to get this amount of money.

It is indeed a lot of money. That’s why many Americans do not agree with the plan. However, this plan is needed to save the world economy; otherwise we’ll be in Great Depression part 2.

Bonus Links

• The Subprime Mortgage - an interesting comic explaining how this financial disaster happened. Very interesting comic and highly recommended!