Blog along at your own risk

Tuesday, February 04, 2003

If you missed buying CBOT rough rice and COMEX palladium during their recent lows (5 year low in the case of Pd), you might want to start watching OJ. While rice and palladium should still have a long way to go on the upside, you already missed a large part of the potential profits, and there are always new bargains coming along. In the case of OJ, it still hasn't hit a 12-month low so just watch it for now.

Warning: I'm still a "paper trader" and don't trust myself completely yet, so take everything I say, especially with regard to commodity futures, with plenty of salt. And read Ted Warren's book for yourself. You can find commodity charts all over the net; I regularly use Barron's easy-to-use charts.

posted by John Otis Comeau 12:36 PM

In case you haven't tried it, Amazon Marketplace is a great way to sell old books, videotapes, CD's, etc. You won't get back the money you paid for them if you bought them new, but then again you get some cash in hand for all those paperbacks you'll probably never read again. Just search for a book you have by name or ISBN (you'll find it above the UPC label on the back), let's say for example The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Right next to the photo, below the price information, you'll see "24 used and new from $4.40". (the numbers and prices change regularly, of course). Click on that, and on the menubar you'll see "Sell yours here". Just follow the instructions, provide Amazon with the numbers off one of your checks so they can deposit to your account, and away you go. One caveat: they will not disburse any of the funds to your account for 14 days after you provide them with the checking account information. But their script which displays when you will get your funds is programmed to show 14 days after you signed up as a seller. This means that, for example, if you signed up on the 14th of February, and provided your checking account info on the 15th, the script will tell you that you will be getting your money on the 28th; then when the 28th rolls around, the display will change and say you won't get it until March 14! That's because it automatically rolls over another 14 days. The truth is that you can get your money the next day, on March 1, which is 14 days after you provided your checking account info; you'll just have to initiate the transfer by clicking the appropriate button.

Now, maybe you want to be leery of this whole idea; there may be incidents of Amazon cleaning out people's checking accounts or something like that; do some research and watch your back. All I can say is that, except for the scare I had when it looked like they were going to keep my money for another 14 days, my experience with Amazon so far has been great, and I've pocketed about $60 since I signed up in mid-January.

posted by John Otis Comeau 11:11 AM

Monday, February 03, 2003

First post, let's see how this works. I'm supposed to be fixing the house, but here I am at the library killing time instead. Found an old friend, Andy Tannenbaum, on the web today at http://shamash.org/trb/xhome.trb.html. Still waiting for SDF to come back online, and working on a top-secret programming project... More later, got to get off my ass and let someone else use the computer.

posted by John Otis Comeau 10:27 AM