An article on the NYT website about the booming self-storage business.

Here's an excerpt I found interesting.

“Storage has my hopes in it,” said Mr. Martin, who sleeps on a foldout bed in his mother’s guest room. “I don’t tell anyone this, but at least once a week I go over and look at my couch, my refrigerator, my TV stand, my mattress and realize I did have a life, and maybe there’s a way to go back to it.”

I hope you know what I find wrong and incomprehensible about this statement.

I am not an expert on human physiology. I am not even what I would call 'well-versed'.

I have no hard empirical evidence to back up my claims. I barely have anecdotal evidence.

Bear with me for a moment.

It's not enough to just do your exercises, even if you're consistently seeing gains

So you recently got into lifting weights, and you've seen some good gains. You're journaling your progress and have a workout plan that fits your needs. What's wrong with this picture? Nothing really, just the fact that what's working now isn't what will always work.

This is why you keep a journal/weightlifting log. It will tell you immediately when your current strategy hits a plateau. A recent history of consistent and significant gains is a massive red flag and almost always leads to a plateau of performance.

Why is this? To be perfectly honest, I have no freaking clue. However, I offer the following possiblities (assuming your plateau is not related to extenuating circumstances like an injury):

• physiological habituation

  • this is the simplest one to solve - simply start doing some new types of exercises and workouts - any power lifter can tell you that simply rotating bench/deadlift/squat you're not going to make new records

• your personal inability to muster enough willpower/gumption to move through the plateau

  • it's always hard to tell how much this is a factor; suffice to say that if your ass is well-kicked after each workout session, it's unlikely this is the issue

• improper resistance increases

  • I have done this one on many occasions - consistent and significant gains make me want to up the resistance/weight for an exercise when that weight increase is not entirely merited.

• your muscles are growing faster than the support systems

  • This is highly correlated with attempting to increase the resistance/weight on an exercise too fast. When you achieve new records your body will often require a 'consolidation' period. Remember, in order for muscles to grow bigger and become stronger you need increased blood flow (bigger, stronger heart), greater bone density (how fast do you think bones thicken up anyways?), and increased nervous system activation (your muscles are useless without nerves and a brain that really know how to tell them what to do).

• inappropriate rest periods between workouts

  • This is probably one of the trickiest issues to deal with. I have not come up with a satisfactory rule of thumb to address this. The important thing to remember is that your capacity for work almost always increases faster than your ability to recover from that same work.

• you're bored with your training

  • Just as your body habituates to new stresses, so does your brain and nervous system. Simultaneously, a lack of enthusiasm for strength training will result in sub-par performance and extended periods of plateau. Here are a few things I've found helpful to keep up interest in training:
    • get a training partner (this can backfire though; if your training partner loses interest it can infect you too)

    • learn new exercises and incorporate them into your routine
    • learn to be inspired by others: read interviews and biographies - it's much better when someone else has already made your mistakes for you! (this principle is applicable to all endeavors, not just strength training)

every person's body is different

One important thing to remember is that although you may be performing the same exercises with the same weights and in the same manner as someone else, you may not be receiving the same benefit.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach that is applicable. There just isn't.

When you perform an exercise you must be totally focused on that exercise and the way that your body is responding to it. If you are not focused on interpreting all of the interacting elements between the point you begin loading up the bar (or putting your push-up blocks in place) and eating your post work-out meal, you lose out on the most valuable information for your success.

What muscles are being activated during the exercise, and at what points are specific muscles activated in a maximal manner? How much time did you spend resting between sets? How long was your total workout and how much rest time have you had since your last workout? How long did you spend warming up? How is your routine going to help you achieve your goals? These are only a tiny portion of the questions that you could be asking yourself.

Gaining muscle is sometimes just as much a mental activity as a physical one. Simply having an effective routine is not enough; like everything else in life, change is the only constant and your ability to deal with change will determine your success.

April 1, 2008

1. Short 200 OWW at $7.02
2. Cover 200 OWW at $7.19 loss: -34.02

April 2, 2008

3. Short 300 COT at $3.4801
4. Cover 300 COT at $3.35 gain: +39

April 4, 2008

5. Buy 100 GU at $15.15

April 8, 2008

6. Sell 100 GU at $14.21 loss: -94.01

This one was particularly frustrating due to the fact I could have easily sold at several points for a profit, and possibly even over $80 profit. You can see some of my thoughts in this post: Anatomy of Failure, a bad GU trade.

April 9, 2008

7. Short 100 CRY at $10.1701
8. Cover 100 CRY at $10.25 loss: -$8
9. Short 100 IMMR at $8.11
10. Cover 100 IMMR at $7.90 gain: +21.01

April 10, 2008

I should have made this trade in my SogoTrade account... I ended up paying $9 commissions...
11. Short 250 PRTS at $3.98
12. Cover 250 PRTS at $3.85 gain: +23.48

now back to SogoTrade...

April 11, 2008

13. Short 300 NTZ at $4.00

April 15, 2008

14. Buy 500 MNKD at $2.00
15. Sell 500 MNKD at $2.18 gain: +90.15

April 18, 2008

16. Short 200 NXTM at $6.46
17. Cover 200 NXTM at $6.32 gain: +28.16
18. Cover 300 NTZ at $4.05 loss: -$14.97

This NTZ trade was silly on my part; this stock was going absolutely nowhere and just trading within a range. I should have taken an early profit and gotten out.

19. Short 500 EDEN at $2.59
20. Cover 500 EDEN at $2.36 gain: +114.99

April 22, 2008

21. Buy 500 MNKD at $2.08
22. Sell 500 MNKD at $2.10 gain: +10.60

Hmmm... just about out of free SogoTrade trades by now ain't I?

In order to avoid the SEC pattern day trader rule in case I want to liquidate my position intra-day, I do the next trade with Zecco, paying $9 roundtrip commissions...

April 23, 2008

23. Buy 500 CPSL at $3.66
24. Sell 500 CPSL at $3.7001 gain: +11.05

This trade was annoying, because I should have done 1 of 2 things: either sold into an early spike for gains closer to $50, or waited it out for a later spike, which did come despite the fact I got scared out of the trade.

April 24, 2008

25. Buy 500 CPSL at $3.6999

Back in CPSL again, and too close to the middle of its current range.

April 25, 2008

26. Sell 500 CPSL at $3.65 loss: -$34

April 28, 2008

27. Short 300 NXTM at $6.36
28. Cover 300 NXTM at $6.22 gain: +$42.20

This NXTM cover is where my free trades in my SogoTrade account ran out. It was good while it lasted, and I'd be down an extra $75 without those free trades!

April 30, 2008

29. Buy 500 MNKD at $2.25
30. Sell 500 MNKD at $2.49 gain:+$114

Account Balances

Zecco: $2514.35
SogoTrade: $2916.24
Current Total: $5430.59
Total Original Capital: $5250
Current Total $ Return: +$180.59
Current Total % Return: +3.44%
$ Change in April: +$309.64

My net change for the month of April was +309.64, which despite having some good luck, was largely because of a better definition and application of my strategy. However, please note that without the copious free trades from SogoTrade and Zecco, I would probably be sitting at a loss simply due to transaction costs. I have made well over 60 individual trades since opening my brokerage accounts; even if all of those were $3 SogoTrade commissions, I'd be sitting at +$0 and likely be posting a negative return.

It's kind of funny that most of my good trades have ended up in my SogoTrade account. Of course, since my SogoTrade account was opened much later, and I didn't start getting a strategy together until early last month, it's not surprising. Also, SogoTrade has much better short inventory than Zecco, so sometimes I am unable to make profitable short trades in my Zecco account purely because I can't borrow the shares I need from Penson.

haha! suckers

Pop Quiz

Q. Who benefits most from inflation?

A. People whose networth is largely tied up in marketable assets (benefit from rise in nominal price of assets). People that take out lots of debt (when money is cheap, it's easier to borrow). In other words, rich people, specifically ones that own businesses.

Q. Who is hurt most by inflation?

A. Everyone that's not in the previous list, i.e. not the moneyed interests that promote the use of such worthless measures of inflation.

It's interesting to see the orchid cope with an alteration of its growth pattern due to the disorderly damage my accidental machinations have caused. I'm curious how soon it will drop the other leaf, or if it will keep that one for a while.

This was posted on my Facebook wall by a guy I know from high school. For some reason, I doubt he authored this particular missive.

Yeah, he's gonna post a message on my Facebook wall out of the blue and leave that kind of garbage.

However, this bit of Facebook wall-spam came right after receiving a couple friend requests that were awful suspicious. Take a look at the first profile:

It's interesting that she has almost no friends that are all in one place, and certainly no one that I know. Why would they want to be my Facebook friend? The profile also has no real content in it - just a picture.

Then I got another friend request a week or so later from an awfully similar profile:

This one at least is attached to a university I might actually know someone at, but still, the profile is in the same pattern.

• highly geographically scattered 'friends' with no high concentration locales

• absence of any unique personal information
• no wall
• female

Why does female matter? I assume the bot creators have a higher response rate if they use female pictures in the profiles that they use to 'friend' males with.

the wall spam

I think that seeing this Facebook wall-spam indicates we have achieved an interesting new level of potential network compromise. I can only see two possible situations whereby someone could manipulate a Facebook account in this way. The first is simply that the account login and password have been compromised, and possibly the Facebook spams are carried out by a program running on my friend's computer (accidentally downloaded virus perhaps). This is somewhat likely, but I believe that this spam is the result of a malicious third-party Facebook application.

I can easily see the situation where a malicious program is able to run on Facebook's own servers in the guise of a third-party application that someone has added to their profile. Although I doubt the Facebook development kit is full-featured enough to have exploits hidden inside it that could be particularly damaging, it would seem that this sort of bot creation is certainly not impossible. Imagine it - a bot that's largely not detectable by administrators, because it's not really doing anything it's not supposed to be allowed to do. It operates within its own layer inside the Facebook cloud, never having infected the thin-client used to access the cloud, or the cloud itself, per se.

However, if we are to assume it's a malicious program, or 'computer virus', it would have to have a vector of infection, correct? Well, based on my buddy's page, it seems he's ripe for the plucking. Here's a random screenshot:


Even if I'm totally wrong about this whole thing, something of the sort seems inevitable:

the computer virus's second cousin, twice removed

Welcome to the dawn of a new era in Cloud Computing.

One common method for promoting blog posts and websites is to look for other blog posts and websites that discuss similar items and then leave a comment with a link back to relevant content.

What is interesting about this approach is that people regulate their comments very tightly. Let us examine two approaches that I have encountered when attempting to promote my website through this sort of largely harmless and possibly helpful, comment 'spam'.

I promote my Zecco review on The Sun's Financial Diary

So naturally, I want my articles to have high search engine ranking. So what do I do? I search for the keywords that I want other people to get to my site by using, and look for the blogs, because those will allow the posting of comments.

Here is a search for 'Zecco Review' on Google. When I wanted to open up a brokerage account, I used this review to help determine I first open a Zecco account, so when it came full circle and I commented on it and left a link to my review, it seemed quite appropriate. Sun (the website operator) was kind enough to reply to my comment and agree with my general opinion that Zecco was a so-so broker at best.

I attempt to promote my Zecco review on Debtkid's website

The very first result of that Google search leads right to a review of Zecco on Debtkid's site. Naturally, I wanted to promote my website on the Number 1 result for 'Zecco Review'! I believe I posted almost the exact same comment that you can see on the Sun's website, and shortly thereafter, I noticed that I received a few referrals from his site.

However within a day the referrals dried up. What happened? I went back to Debtkid's site, and surprise, my comment might as well have never existed! Why would this happen?

My comment was deleted because Debtkid, as an affiliate of Zecco, is trying to receive commissions for selling Zecco account signups, and people reading my so-so to possibly negative review is not going to help him do that.

In short, Debtkid has a conflict of interest and did not act with integrity by deleting my comment

The Sun also receives compensation for people signing up with Zecco, but because he is an ethical person that acts with integrity, he is not going to attempt to omit and hide the truth in order to line his pockets like Debtkid.

I left the following comment on Debtkid's site, I doubt it will ever show up:

Debtkid is vested in having you guys sign up for Zecco; of course he's not going to write a bad review.

I attempted to drop a link here to my more nuanced and not-so conflicted-of-interest review (I am not an affiliate of any brokerage unlike Debtkid) , but Debtkid apparently did not think my comment worthy of posting.

My review of Zecco in 2008
Some difficulties I have had with Zecco, and also, SogoTrade.

And of course, the only comment on this review is blandly positive nearly content-less praise:

I love Zecco so far, and I’ve been with them for over a year. Not only do you get the 10 free trades but the rates are pretty low for options and trades after ten, lower than most all the other sites I’ve looked at. Their customer service has also been great for me so far. I recently had a technical question, emailed them and not only got back an email back within a half-hour, but also got a call from one of their engineers who helped me solve the problem.

Where were those awesome engineers when Zecco decided to take the day off and read the paper while taking a huge dump on Monday, April 14th, 2008?

Doesn't just seeing Anthony Hopkins make you feel warm and fuzzy?

One individual wanted to get into contact with another commenter, and so I helped him do so, and he also supplied me with some more information about Ingram.

Apparently, the guy that left a comment about having lunch with George in Chicago sparked the interest of the gentleman I was in contact with. According to him, George is violating the terms of his probation and he should still be under house arrest in San Antonio, TX.

He also led me to this write-up on George Ingram III in an oil industry newspaper. It's very revealing to say the least, but you'll have to pay five bucks if you want to read it. It discusses his attempt to take control of Petroecuador, Ecuador's state-run oil company, through some sort of ridiculous scheme where he would put 'no money down.' He also made very ambitious claims regarding potential future increases in oil production. Of course, if the deal went through, Ingram's Denver-based company Global Intelligence Corporation would receive a $155-mil contract to provide "data systems [based on] secretive decision software software supposedly in use by the US Department of Defense."

Central to all of his schemes are his ready promises of vast amounts of cash. However, this is cash that he doesn't have access to at the moment - because according to him it is tied up in illiquid foreign investments.

At least two Ingram relatives say his claims of great wealth and secretive government links are pure fantasy... "There was no big inheritance," says one cousin: "It's a fairy tale. The whole family is mystified."

"He's one of the biggest liars ever created, or he's a man of incredible means," says Texas lawyer Edward Watt. Watt won a $50,0000 judgement against Ingram in 2003 for unpaid legal bills, despite elaborate counter-claims Ingram raised, and lost. Watt says he does not expect to be paid, convinced Ingram is un-collectable.

MF Smith blasted [Ingram's claims of great wealth in his chapter 11 bankruptcy filing] as "incomplete, inconsistent, and unverifiable" and noted Ingram did not own a car, could not pay the $850 bankruptcy filing fee and his house had been foreclosed in 2000. "What is an individual with a net worth of $1.7-bil doing in bankruptcy?"

Edward C. Bahl

One commenter named 'Denis Robinson' with an e-mail address tied to globalintelcorp.com is most likely Ingram himself. Global Intelligence Corporation (GIC) is the fraud shell company that Ingram set up in order to facilitate the 'investments' he attempts to con out of people. The most amusing part as far as I am concerned is that the company purports to be an expert in 'Business Intelligence' - something I know more about than I would like.

This 'Denis Robinson' attempts to slag the name of a one Edward C. Bahl, who apparently was just another one of George's victims, along with such information-age stalwarts as Verizon and IBM.

Verizon was never paid [for funding a Global Intelligence Corporation operation] and the hardware disappeared. Ingram blamed his employees for stealing, says Edward Bahl, whose firm was stuck wtih $100,000 in unpaid consultant billings. . . "I should have known then that Ingram was a fraud," says Bahl, who went on to help Ingram found GIC in Denver, funding much of that development by maxing out his own credit cards. Ingram blames Bahl for GIC's downfall.

Ingram is often lucky in that his victims would rather not admit to their being conned out of lock, stock, and barrel and thus sometimes do not file formal complaints.

Oh yea, what about good old American PureTex Water Corporation that had such big plans to open the 'World's Largest Bottled Water Plant' in Texas?

PureTex's only "asset," says Bahl, may be the gold-plated board Ingram persuaded to lend their names to the venture. They have included former Space Shuttle pilot and Marine Gen. Charles Bolden, ex-NASA Johnson Space Center head George Abbey, president Michael Frazier of Houston Investment bank Simmons & Co, and Fulbright & Jaworski law partner Howard Wolf.

White Collar Psychopath? (a clinical definition)

some consider the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be a dyed-in-the-wool psychopath

See also:
My review of SogoTrade.
My review of Zecco.

If you're interested in short-selling and you're using most discount brokers, there are a lot of disadvantages.

Short-selling at Zecco

You can find the occasionally updated list of easy-to-borrow securities from Penson right here. ThinkorSwim is another broker that uses Penson for clearing, however I'm not sure how the brokerage houses get 'dibs' on securities from their clearing agents.

It says right there on the easy-to-borrow list that no securities under $5 are able to be shorted, but I have successfully shorted stocks at Zecco as low as $3.25 - the only time an order was rejected for a stock being too low-priced was an order to short sell a security at $2.50 although it accepted an earlier short-sell limit order for the same stock at around $2.70 that was too optimistic. I assume the limit is therefore actually $2.50 at Zecco.

Shorting at SogoTrade

SogoTrade is unique in that it's self clearing; it's a direct subsidiary of Genesis securities.

You can find the easy-to-borrow list at the Genesis Securities website (I contacted them in order to find out where it was). It's a quite extensive list, and typically has many stocks available for shorting that are not present at Zecco. A few stocks this week that I could have shorted that Tim Sykes was unable to short were available at SogoTrade, namely FEED and PSTI. It certainly doesn't have everything, but for a discount broker, SogoTrade seems to have a good short list. I am not aware of a 'too-cheap' restriction on shorting, but the lowest priced stock I have shorted was at $2.59

The easy-to-borrow list at TradeKing

Well, I contacted them, and this is what they had to say about easy access to the daily short list:

Our brokers here have access to a good to borrow list. Since this list is constantly updated we are not able to make it available to clients. If you have a question about whether or not a specific stock is available to sell short contact us by phone or live chat.

I'd rather just see a list. Is that too big of a deal? Genesis seems to have their act together. That list is clearly auto-updated. I assume you could probably get TradeKing's list from Legent Clearing, but I have no idea who you would contact within that organization.

My article on George Ingram III has been one of my favorite bits of this website to date. It was just a random and idle afternoon that led me to post the story, but little did I know about the effect that this slimy individual has had on people.

Commenter after commenter has come out of the woodwork to tell us about the lies and shady deals that George Ingram has perpetrated. Interestingly, it would appear that George Ingram himself has now commented on my story about him.

It appears George left a huge pile of pure hogwash under the name of 'mhjacks2' - an obvious attempt at appearing to be the author of the website. Note the title of the comment 'I was wrong about George'. Who is this guy trying to fool?

so why do I think it's George himself?

When I looked to see the e-mail attached to this comment that attempts to do damage control, it was gx.ingram@georgeingram.net!!

Here is a link to the WHOIS query for georgeingram.net - it's not very informative. Private registration under 1&1 Internet, Inc. located in Chesterbrook, PA.

The lengths this guy will go to are amazing. Nice try Georgie-boy. Spamming my comments will get you nowhere, except perhaps an IP ban if you get really annoying.