Sunday, April 6, 2008

Risk-based Wealth Accretion

Creating wealth has always involved some combination of risk and luck. This weekend, I had one high luck event and an unrelated opportunity for a high risk event.

My lucky event was that I went to the local casino, threw some quarters into a slot machine, and had it spit out 10,000 quarters. That's $2,500 for those of you without calculators. This is a nice boost to my bank account and to my overall poker fund.

My high risk event came in the form of another "use this check for anything" offer. They are providing me $8,500 at 0.99% interest for the next 6 months, or 6% APR for the life of the loan. Additionally, they will be charging a 3% fee.

While normally I discuss that these fees prevent any good use of the close to free capital, I think the stock market is at a point where I could invest short-term with the funds and make some good returns.

I will be spending the next few days hashing out the details here, and making a decision by the end of the week.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Luck and skill two things that always make the difference. To often people think that its all about luck and never do the math.

Anonymous said...

I would be interested in seeing your honest tracking of such an investment gamble. You might as well head to the casino with the whole amount. No one has/can consistently make money over time by short term market timing or trading. Its very hard to predict the future. I take that back, whoever you choose and pay to facilitate your trades will consistently make money by day trading. "Where are all the customers Yachats?"

Finance Guy said...

Anonymous, I will disagree with you that short term trading cannot be profitable since an entire industry makes money from day to day trading activities beyond those of a simple brokerage.

Anonymous said...

what is the name of that industry? I want to invest in them.

Finance Guy said...

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/05/011705.asp

Start there. Suffice to say, one aspect of an Investment Bank's profits are derived from professional day traders.