Let’s take a break from our weekly news roundup and try testing our knowledge of common stock market terms. This test was a hit some time ago in our website. Thought it might be interesting to see how many can ace it :-). Besides, it’s fun to know that a word you can pick out from the dictionary has a totally different meaning in the world of brokers, bulls and bears.

1.) When someone asks you to “hit” shares do you: A) throw your stock certificate? B) cancel an order to buy or sell? or C) buy or sell a stock at a particular price posted on the trading board?

2.) Under your “street name” is A) your complete address for your brokers’ record? B) the shares you own registered in the name of your broker or C) the code name of one broker trading through another broker

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Very early this morning, I was sitting across an Aklan-born, but Californian ex- accountant retiree who spends two hours everyday trading stocks online as his personal hobby.

It was so refreshing to hear him speak with a faint lilting Visayan accent that is so adorable, an accent countless of corporate meetings working in the US thankfully failed to erase.

As he was trying to combat his jet lag, he turned to me and asked, “What about you? Don’t you want to work in the States?”
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This photo is hot off the lens of an AFP photographer. Shown here are residents cleaning up rubble from a badly damaged house in Wajima, Ishikawa prefecture after a recent earthquake.

Couldn’t resist sharing it with you. Everybody has got to ask themselves: how prepared am I for an emergency? Are you protected from death, fire, illness? [Read the rest of this entry »]

It was swimming around my head like a mantra last week: follow your budget, follow your budget! As I tested this very common financial tip for Money Myth Busters, I came too close to becoming unglued. I couldn’t make it work.

It felt like my gym membership. I bought gym shoes, gym clothes, an MP3 player so I could focus on something else aside from my complaining muscles while on the treadmill. I will lose 10 pounds before you know it, I chortled to my husband. Before I knew it, my excitement lost steam.

I already tried this last year. Somewhere in the maze of zeroes and ones in my computer is an excel file that recorded my budget and actual spending for February, March, then half of April. Started again in August, halfheartedly did it in September and threw up my hands in despair in October.

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I’M a media person. I’m in the business of selling words. Anybody who writes for a living will tell you that it is always useful to read newspapers.

Yes it is… (I do have to toe the line right? ), but be smart when reading the papers. Read it to enhance your wealth.

For example, this week there has been a flurry of articles on the findings of a controversial SWS survey that one out of five Filipino families had to bear hunger at least once in the last three months. Our own Nonoy Espina wrote a great article about that here.

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Due to popular demand, here it is – a posting dedicated to mutual fund investing for dummies. Thanks to Alfa and Hachiko for this idea. We will definitely wait for the glorious, painful detail of your mutual fund experience!

There are a lot of definitions of mutual funds out there, but I am most fond of using the analogy of a car pool. Car pools help you get to your destination without having to worry about taking the best route – you let someone you trust take the wheel so you can focus on other things like..uhh..fighting stress!

Mutual funds can help you reach your financial goals without having to worry about the everyday ups and downs of the stock or bond markets. It is also a way of giving newbie investors a taste of what it is like to own stocks and bonds – at a much lower entry level. Imagine, for a P5,000 investment for example, you instantly have a diversified portfolio!

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Someone who looked like a messenger was standing at the door, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. I glanced irritably at my watch. I was planning to be early for my meeting..

“Ano po yun manong?”

“Nandito po ba si Salve Duplito? Meron padala sa inyo. Pwede pumasok?”

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You’ve all heard of this tip. Experts say the surefire way to get rich is to pay yourself first. Normally, people save money after budgeting for the usual monthly expenses. Paying yourself first means you sock away a certain amount before you pay your bills, your groceries, your haircut and manicure.

I can tick off a lot of big names in personal finance – David Bach, Robert Kiyosaki, Suzie Orman. They all say paying yourself first will get you out of the rat race. More than all the scurrying for higher interest earnings and hot stock picking, this one “secret” tip makes a millionaire.

Well, not quite. When MoneySmarts put that tip to the test, the figures showed that behind the simplicity of the plan are several conditions that need to be followed to make this work.

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I’m back! Sorry for being absent for the last couple of days. My PC almost died and went to computer heaven. Can you imagine losing 10 years’ worth of data? I once thought that ol’ box was immortal, now I’m treating it like a vulnerable crystal vase.

Back to business. A couple of business articles stood out this week, particularly one that has made several rounds around business and personal finance discussion groups on Yahoo.

A survey by Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) showed in a summary made available to AFP that the Philippines was considered the most corrupt country in Asia by almost 1,500 expatriates in 13 countries in January to February.

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Guys, check out INQUIRER.net’s latest column. Johnny Noe Ravalo will be sharing his expertise with readers through ‘Ask Dr. Noet’, where he will answer questions on the economy, trends, and — our favorite topic — personal finance, through the eyes of a macro-financial economist.

I met Noet when I was a newbie reporter covering banking and finance for BusinessWorld. In fact, he was the first economist I called up when I wrote my first story on gross domestic product. Oh the alphabet soup of economics and how they looked to a rookie reporter! I still smile when I remember that afternoon, hands all sweaty as I nervously punched the telephone buttons.

You can immediately sense how much a person knows when he can explain to a greenie and make everything sound sensible and understandable. That was my first brush with one of the best macro-financial economists in the country.

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