If finance interests you...

My sleep cycle is all over the place. I haven't been able to get a full nights sleep for over a week. I have way too many projects due this week, and groups in five of my six classes ( except poetry. I'd actually appreciate a poetry groupwork right now. Anything that wouldn't be so "real world"). 

The one I actually am excited about is this project we are doing for one of our finance classes. We have to go sign up for this website called StockTrak, an online investment portfolio manager. It gives us a million dollars, albeit imaginary, to invest with. Personally, I'd love to invest in the market. Yeah yeah, I know how nothing is going right with the market, and it hit a 20-year low yesterday and blah blah, but this is the perfect time to do one of two things:

1) Buy historically overpriced stocks that are at a low now, but will expectedly regain their value

2) Short sell stocks. You literally have nothing to lose.

For the first, take the example of  Berkshire Hathaway. I don't have much information on this company, but what I do know is that it was trading at around 135,000 this summer. Even though now it is hovering around 75K, it's potential is huge. If you have time (read 8-10 years), buy this stock and hold on to it. You may see this dip to much lower levels (if you can predict these, then wait and buy then - win win situation), but it will rise. 

As for short selling stocks  - why not? The market is slipping. Almost every company has seen its stock price drop. Short selling is the best and safest way to turn profits. A short sale is when you "borrow" shares and sell them, so you have an account that you have to settle at a later date. Let's take the example of Apple. On the 9th of Feb it was trading at $102.51 per share. If you short sold say 1000 stocks on this day, you would be 1000 shares in debt, but $102,510 richer. Today, the stock was trading at $86.95. All you would now need to do would be to buy the 1000 stocks you owe for a low low price of $86,950. This will settle your account of 1000 shares in debt. And you just turned a profit of $15,560. In two weeks. In other terms, you just made more than an entire year's worth of in-state tuition in two weeks. Or my rent for the next two years, in about two weeks. What do you need to do this? Probably just an account on e-trade and a few thousand for the margin. 

Why the long nerdy tirade on investments? Because I AM learning in my classes, despite what some of my grades might suggest. And because my dad reads my blog, and maybe this way he will agree to loan me the money I need for the margin. 

Kelley's not just teaching me how to survive on an hour of sleep. I know what I'm talking about, dad. Trust me. 

Oscar Noms and Slumdogs

Lazy lazy Saturdays. The official end of the second week of classes is here, and I am knee deep in homework. (Did I say something about Saturdays being lazy?)

Big things happened this week. Obama officially became president (flubbed oath or not). Kate Winslet *finally* won a Golden Globe, and made the millions who hate public speaking feel better about themselves. Slumdog got itself 10 oscar nominations, and I have nothing to say about that. I haven't seen Slumdog yet, and I will when(if) it comes to bloomington. I am expecting way too much from this movie, and as a rule, I get annoyed at movies that portray India as a dirt-poor country filled with noisy raggy people where civilization does not exist. I don't think Slumdog does this, but I heard one of the film's crew talking about the "harsh realities" of shooting in mumbai, and she made liking India sound like a case of the stockholm syndrome. 

India really needs to understand that its image is not built by movies like Slumdog Millionaire, and it should not stake claim to such movies. Am I proud of Slumdog? Yes. But I am proud as a lover of the triumph of an underdog, a small budget movie making it big. I'm not proud because of it being shot in India, because of it having an indian cast, or because of it being "somewhat indian". 

I'm over analyzing. 

A really good oscar nom? Taraji P Henson. She REALLY deserves it, and it's good to see a non-usual (yeah, another word I just made up: not unusual, non-usual. The difference is in the subtleties) name in the award circles. Besides, who didn't LOVE her in Boston Legal?

Anyways, it's high time I stop blogging, and go back to doing assignments. Ah, lazy lazy Saturdays.  

Google is taking over the world, and ruining my life.

As someone who has grown up in the world's largest democracy, I have always been wary of giant conglomerates. The fact that I am the world's biggest cynic doesn't help either. Don't get me wrong, in a recession, sometimes the best place you can be is in a diversified global body that is too big and too deep into things to fail (or be allowed to fail).

Let me start by making a few things clear. I intended to write a post about Obama's inauguration, the significance of yesterday being MLK Jr. day, and how the new president won over most of the IU students. Then something happened that made me completely switch gears, and take the 10 minutes I have between class and work to rant about google. 

Blogger.com is a google owned website. So is Youtube, Orkut and about a million other websites. All of this was fine till Gmail, in its alter ego as Umail,  became the email service provider of choice for IU. I have long had a dual presence in the web world - one email for the university stuff, and one for personal use(only). This is not required, so it IS just me. But one thing that almost all of us do is multitask. I don't have time to check my university mail, my regular mail, Orkut (which is a less glamorous cousin of Facebook and MySpace), and all the other websites I frequent individually. And because of Gmail being my email service, and my unversity email, EVERYTIME I leave one website and go to another, I have to sign out and sign in again. Otherwise it asks me to create a new account(multiple accounts IS the problem, dude). 

So as a consumer who doesn't want to a)remember multiple passwords, b)have to keep signing in and out and c) have to let go of the separation of personal and university email divisions, I have one plea to make to google : Stop taking every successful website over! I would like some diversification in my choice of websites, and who they get their marching orders from!

I'll have the Obama post up soon. I missed the inauguration since I was in class, where the prof reminded us there was bound to be clips of the speech on youtube(google, sigh). 

On a happier note, I found a great way to get indie music from fresh artists for free :iTunes indie sampler. It's free for download, 20 songs (I like about 12 of them, the others are ok, not great). Join their Facebook group (before google takes that over too) and get the code!