I’ve not touched this blog of mine for slightly more than a month now. Took a hiatus on this one while I focused my energy on other ventures for a while. Was it worth it?

Well yes it was. Now that I’m getting more hands-on and involved in other aspects, I expect I will have more and better contribution to this blog in the very near future.

So don’t think I’ve gone away. I’m about to bounce back and talk more about money related posts very soon!

Meanwhile, I hope you’ve been eyeing the market with a keen eye. Year end is coming and you know how year end period tends be make a merrier and friendlier market.

To read more personal finance and money related articles, visit Penny Sense.

What a hiatus it has been

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I’ve only recently gotten to learn and know more about Jim Rogers, the famous trend spotter who was also the cofounder of Quantum Fund with George Soros back in the 1970s.

If you do not know of nor heard about Jim Rogers, you can visit his website, The Millenium Adventure and see some of his published books and other works there.

This week’s The Edge did a feature on Jim Rogers and I savoured the article. It’s a good 3-pager and I learned some bits and pieces just by reading the feature article.

But what I found to be a surprise is that Jim Rogers does not believe in diversification when it comes to investment strategies. In his interview with The Edge, this is what he said:

“Look, nobody ever got rich diversifying,” he says a little defensively. “Diversification was something hare-brained investment advisers came up with so they could sell all sorts of fancy investment products and charge big fees. Henry Ford never diversified. You need to identify a good investment trend and stick with it.” Even legendary billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who runs diversified conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, isn’t spreading his risks just for the sake of diversification, Roger says. “Buffett would tell you that he buys a lot of things that have similar characteristics.”

So what did you think of that? It makes sense but dare we not diversify after having been told for the longest time that we should and we must?

To read more personal finance and money related articles, visit Penny Sense.

Jim Rogers is not for diversification

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For a long while I’ve heard of the famous Thesis theme developed by Chris Pearson. Then for equally long I was considering getting it after reading the many raving reviews about what it can do and why Thesis is like no other Wordpress themes out there, all free and premium Wordpress themes combined.

A little bit of background information about the Thesis theme…it is THE MOST customisable Wordpress theme you can ever find! It doesn’t require any in depth knowledge of HTML for you to tweak and customise the theme to suit your style. It can really be anything and everything you want. You can choose it to be as simple or beautifully decorated with graphics and colours as you wish. And did I mention you do this with just clicking on buttons?! Well for the more advanced tweaks, you will need to learn how to use some hooks to instruct your site to behave in certain manners, but once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty limitless what you can do.

So in March this year I finally hopped onto the bandwagon and went ahead to buy my first ever premium theme. Since I own a few blogs, there was no point in getting a single license so I bought a developer’s license which gives me limitless use of the theme on as many domains as I want.

Since then I’ve slowly converted some of my blogs onto the Thesis Wordpress theme platform and have no regrets. I do have more sites to convert but am taking my time as I would like to concentrate on the more critical ones first.

So what made me part with some $160+ for a Thesis Wordpress theme? Well, you can read the many reviews and even read about it on DIYThemes site. I won’t repeat after everyone the benefits of Thesis. But I will share with you why I am totally happy with it.

After all those fantastic reviews, how did I find the Thesis theme and is it really as good as it is said to be? Well let’s just say I’m a satisfied customer although there were some teething issues with it. But nothing that I can’t get some help with in the active support forum at DIYThemes site.

So what was it that made me a satisfied user of Thesis? I would have to say that after 3 months of using the theme, I find that my traffic has improved. As a way to track this, I deliberately used the theme on some sites and left some alone. When I saw the results of improved organic traffic, I was convinced that the theme was working for me. And that is why I am now converting this site’s layout to use Thesis too since my little experiment to test Thesis has proven to be satisfactory.

I can’t really attribute this directly, but I feel that it may have also helped in my Adsense earnings. Due to higher traffic, I guess the chances of clickthroughs for Adsense also increase with it. Further, there were some help with some customised Adsense hooks that I could easily pluck into my site and that was supposed to help.

So other than it being customisable, I am very satisfied that the money I spent on buying Thesis was really some worthy investment. I’ve already made it all back with my ad earnings. The only regret I have is that I didn’t get it sooner! Nevertheless it is never too late. So if anyone out there is mulling over whether it will be worth it, I will vouch for it and tell you to go for it

Go and check out Thesis for yourself. Seeing is believing. And there is a reason why so many people are advocates of Thesis. Click here to check out Thesis.

To read more personal finance and money related articles, visit Penny Sense.

Why use Thesis Wordpress theme?

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Today is the day of the marketing guru, Philip Kotler’s seminar on Marketing In Turbulent Times: Discovering Opportunities in a Recession with Chaotics Management System.

The seminar was held at the conference hall in KL Convention Centre and it started at 8.30am. I got in a little late, at about 8.45am and the room was already fully seated. I don’t know exactly how many people attended the seminar, but it was easily 1,000 people in that room.

It’s my first time seeing Philip Kotler in person and my first thought was that for a man of 78 years of age, he definitely looks very healthy and fit! And throughout the half day seminar, you don’t see his energy level sapping nor did he even stop for drinks of water whenever he was up on that stage delivering his thoughts and theories of marketing.

It started with Philip giving a general overview of the situation that is today, how many companies are reacting and behaving in times of a recession. He talked about how you can strategically plan ahead and what kind of strategies you can adopt instead of taking the easy “across the board” approach. He also shared many case studies of companies around the world on what they do in situations, how some of them think out of the box or deep within the box to continuously improve themselves.

All that led to the topic of putting in place some monitoring tools as a chaotic management system. He didn’t dwell in detail on this, but the general idea was shared as he explained the three fundamental things a company should do. Perhaps his new book, Chaotics, would talk about all that in detail.

After a tea break, the seminar continued with Philip Kotler taking us through the importance of the emerging market that is Asia. He focused more on how the ASEAN countries as a region can be a powerful bloc to the future to bring Asia up as the next big economy of the world. There were some interesting learnings from this session too.

Needless to say, I came away with good impression of the seminar, and the topics he touched on were spot on with what I do. So I found it relevant and money well spent. It would have been better if we could have talked more in detail about this whole marketing in turbulent times using his chaotic management system. But since this is a half a day seminar, there just isn’t time to drill down to more. Nevertheless, there were definitely things I took away with me at the end of the seminar.

Being such a well read man, he talked about many other authors and books in their own expert fields that supplement his work and I respect the fact that he gives credit where they are due and encourage participants to go and read up on those experts’ books instead of him giving away their content. I was jotting down a lot of the books he quoted and I’m now tempted to get some of them since they were highly regarded by the great Philip Kotler!

Anyone out there attended the seminar too? What did you think of it and what did you take away from it?

To read more personal finance and money related articles, visit Penny Sense.

A review of Philip Kotler’s Marketing In Turbulent Times seminar in Kuala Lumpur

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When I saw this advertorial in the newspapers, I was quite intrigued by what exactly this company sells (you may click on the image to see an enlarged one so that you can read the text).

In summary, this is supposed to be a business opportunity that one can join whether as an individual or as a company and it stresses that it isn’t a multi-level marketing opportunity. Its product is actually vacation vouchers that is worth hundreds and thousands but you get to buy it for some RM30 or so. And apparently many people or companies offer these vouchers as sales incentives to customers for a free holiday when they purchase their products or services.

Since it is so dirt cheap for anyone to purchase a vacation for just RM30 as a sales incentive that is sure to be popular with any customers, apparently people in this program are earning RM15,000 a day from selling these vouchers. At its lowest, people are earning RM2,000 a day from it. Sounds too good to be true? It does to me.

The whole works of it baffles me. But no, I’m not quite interested to waste my time to attend the special launch preview they’re having too. I just can’t imagine that the vouchers are really redeemable!

Am I being too pessimistic and judgemental, or does this sound real to you?

To read more personal finance and money related articles, visit Penny Sense.

Selling holiday vouchers can earn you RM15,000 a day?

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