Crowl's easy guide to the stockmarket.

I always thought the stock market was pretty easy to understand: it was similar to backing a horse in a race. If it wins, you get money; if it loses, you lose what you have.
I’ve always understood that if you have money in the stock market, you don’t sell when the value is heading downhill, and you don’t buy when it’s going uphill. Rather you do the reverse. I got this piece of wisdom from a book many years ago and it’s stuck with me.
Plainly I’m a bit naïve when it comes to stocks and shares because there are always new terms coming my way (even when I’m not looking for them) that I don’t understand at all. Yet the even the Motley Fool says you won't find a simpler strategy than buying and holding quality stocks. Isn’t that what I’ve just been saying? Don’t back the losers, back the winners. Yes, you’ll lose occasionally, but not often.
The other thing is, sit on your shares. According to another piece of market wisdom, shares that are left to grow will do so. They may have dips but in general good shares rise.
Of course such an approach doesn’t generate much interest on the stock market and someone came up with the idea of covered calls, a strategy which can generate some small extra income, but is also risky.
Well, some people like risk. Some people back apparent losers to win, and when they win come out with lots more money. So if you’re going to get involved with covered calls, make sure you have someone who knows what they’re doing helping you with it. There are even programs that can help, such as PowerOptions®. (It has that little copyright sign beside it because it’s copyright. Duh.)
PowerOptions® is said to be the only internet-based provider of data that gives investors the ability to make good decisions. It’s a bit like one of those books written by an old racing hand, the sort of person who really has been making money out of horses for decades. There’s no easy road to riches, but there are some helps along the way.

Keeping in touch

As we prepare to go the UK for six months, we’ve been looking at all sorts of options for dealing with calling home and using email. There are plenty of options, but a lot of them are expensive, with a capital E. We’re probably going to use Skype in part, though so far it’s debateable how well it’ll work for us. But we’ve done some testing here at home and things are starting to come together.
Skype, of course, is only of use if you’re close to the laptop. Another option I wouldn’t have normally considered is a calling card, but Pingo’s cards seem to be very economic to use - and they allegedly don’t have any of those awful charges that eat up the money on the card before you’ve even started talking. I’ve just had a look at the FAQ, and it seems it’s only when you call from public phones that you have additional charges. Well, that’s normal, I guess.
Usually when I come across these sorts of cards on the Net, they’re limited to one country, but Pingo actually lists NEW ZEALAND. I had to use capitals to show that for once the great US of A has acknowledged that there’s a little country down the bottom of the world. We’re not the only country they acknowledge and act as a prepaid calling card provider for. In fact, the list goes on and on, and their site quotes all sorts of rates for calling from hither and yon and back again. Yes, even for NZ. Ain’t that amazing?
Their rates are very good too, though there seemed to be a bit of a discrepancy between their quote in English pounds compared to the same quote in New Zealand dollars. One is 2.7P per minute, and the other is a phenomenal .072 per minute. I don’t think those two quite equate. Nevertheless, that’s a pretty good rate. But what I did like the idea of is having a pin connected to the card. Gone are those awful days when you had to press umpteen buttons to get to the person you wanted to call. And if you made a mistake - you started all over again!
Pingo calling cards are available in NZ, but I can’t find a direct link. So I’m going to give you one for the International prepaid filipino calling cards, since I can find that link much more easily!