This weekend I finally have the time to organize my investments. I havn’t keep an eye on it for a few months and I didn’t even keep a good track of record of my profits and losses. I spent a whole afternoon entering all my transaction records into my yahoo profile and determine which stock I should hold and what new stocks I should get. I find my performance is just ok, on average I have about 8% of return per year. I had made some good stock picks and a few bad picks. The best peformer is Advanced Medical Optics (EYE), I got it when it first IPO at $9, after 3 years I sold it at $36 making a 400% profit. I could have hold it longer since it went up to $47 now. Oh well, I should not be too greedy. I found that picking what stock to buy is the easier part in investing, deciding when to sell much more important. Almost every stock I owned had went up at a certain time after I bought it. The key is selling it while having a profit. I have held on some stocks for too long and its value drop so much I had to take a loss. I don’t buy stock for short term gain, my goal for each stock I pick having a 50% return in 2-3 years. I don’t look at market news or charts trying to speculate the price change. It is too hard to read accurately and you can never beat the pro-traders. My approach is reading the big picture on market trends, then invest in the top companies in the industry with growth potential. My primary source of information is the Economist. I have keep track of stocks picks from the Economist, so far the record is quote impressive. Most of them goes up with a half year lag after the article is published. Too bad that I don’t have the principle or the guts to invest in all of my own stock picks. Here are some of my stock pick at the moment: RSA Security (RSAS), TVIA Inc (TVIA), Avaya (AV), Titanium Metals Corp (TIE), Monsanto (MON), Apache Corp (APA)

We have another farewell lunch today. The boss has joked it has become a monthly feature and he even nominate the lesser boss for next month’s farewell lunch. Sometimes I really doubt what is the point behind farewell lunch. In the lunch with a big group of people, you won’t have much chance to talk to the one who is leaving. You end up talking to whoever happens sitting next to you. People comes mostly because they can’t think of a reason not to come. I see it as a occasion to socialize with other colleagues, especially I have lunch with my own group of friends instead of people from the same project. The guy who is leaving belongs to my lunch group, so we will have another farewell party with him tomorrow. This will be a real party and we will have fun, unlike today’s formalized bussiness lunch. Today before I went home, I turned the cubicle of this guy, who sits next to me, into a racing track for my Bit Char-G. The only problem is my other 2 Bit Char-G havn’t arrived yet.

Today at lunch, I heard a rumour from the usual source of all information. The rumour is about a secret admirer to another girl. According to the rumour, there is guy thinks that the girl likes him, because he found she glanced at him many times. The girl seems to have no impression about that guy, neither do us. Whether the rumour is true or not is not my concern. I would like to point out one obvious fact. If the guy is not looking at the girl, how does he know that she is glancing at him? If glancing imply a crush and from the fact that the guy glanced at the girl, it implies the guy likes the girl. It is natural for man to fantasy about girls. He may imagine his crush actually likes him, try to read traces from thin air to justify his emotion. It is acceptable if he hide all of this in his heart or take action to turn it into reality with his own hand. However, what good can it do by telling this to a friend of that girl? Unless the guy is a total loser in love, it makes absolutely no sense to confirm whether the girl likes him or not from a third party. I think this rumour is just a creation aims to bring us some good laughs.

Recently, Pat digged out her Super NES console and try to finish the Mario Land game pending over 10 years. This get me into conversation about emulator of console on the computer. I tried hard to explain what is an emulator to Pat, but it seems she couldn’t understand. I think the best way to explain is show her what is a emulator. So I downloaded the N64 emulator with over 150 games in ROM. I just tried out some of the N64 games tonight, such as Mariokart, Mario tenis. I found that I can still enjoy the games despise those games are 7-8 years old and the graphics is dated. In fact, in some sense those games are more fun that the overly complicated games these days. I wonder what progress has the gaming industry made in all these years. All they have done is just remaking the same game with better graphics. There is no new type of game play emerged since real time strategy and online RPG games. If the gaming industry don’t start having more innovation, I can see the end of gaming is coming. Why pay for similiar games again and again, year after year? Why can’t we just play the old games we had never played before?

I have my first and last exam of this term today. It is the final exam for my philosophy course. I didn’t spend much time studying it. Just start late in afternoon yesterday and finish before midnight. In the final we have to study 7 philosophers. Since we already know the questions ahead of time and we know we have choices in the exam, I have the luxury to give up a few more differcult philosophers. Althought I still try my best to understand their very confusing thoughts in my review. The exam in held in one of those dark lecture hall with armrest size writing surface. I just hate having an exam in this kind of room. We only have to answer 3 out of 6 questions in the paper but we got 3 hours. I finished my paper in 1 hour, wrote down everything I remember about those three dead guys. I have a feeling I will get a C+ again this time.