AhYap’s Blog

Phil Town, the best selling writer for the book “Rule #1″ post an answer to my question today at this post.
After completing Phil’s book, I also read his ENTIRE blog, which is as precious as his book.

He totally change the way I think about INVESTING (which you know I sucks from this post ‘My trading and investing story Part 1‘).

His book and his blog contains too many useful information that I can’t summarize here, so you MUST read it yourself! A friend recommend this book to me in October and I have been recommending this book to everyone that I have meet.

I want to share 2 things with you today.

1. Why long-term trader THINKS differently than a short-term investor?

I have always been a short-term trader and the reason for that is simple. It looks like I have more control on the short term than the long term. I find it very hard to imagine 3 years from now, 5 years from now or 10 years from now. Or maybe you can say, I am too lazy to wait 3 years from now. I want it now!
So, short-term traders are those who find that investing for the long term is RISKY (hard to predict) and thus they prefer to trade for the short term. They also find ‘long term’ too long to wait for.
Then after reading Rule #1, I find out the long term investor (Phil Town and Warren Buffet), they are not investing in stocks! They are actually investing in BUSINESSES. This is very important. They are not actually investing in ’stock’, but investing in the business!

These guys (long term investor) find that short term market movement is very hard to predict but find it easier to estimate the long term prospect of the business.

Saw the differences now? Short term trader find it risky to invest long term while long term investor actually find it risky to invest short term. How dramatic can it be!

2. Short Term Trader is not an Investor, it is a Job (or Slave to the market)

I am a big fan or Robert Kiyosaki (although Robert and Donald Trump cheat my money for their new book Why We Want You To Be Rich). According to his CashFlow Quadrant, a real investor is the one that have money working for him and thus he will have more time and freedom.

On the other hand, a trader (especially day trader) is not an investor but a self-employed. He is doing a job everyday. There is no freedom. He is working everyday when the market open. If your goal is to achieve freedom, how can a trader probably going to give you freedom?

You probably won’t even have peace in the weekend when the market is closed. Why? If you have a big losing position Friday that you haven’t close, you will have to wait until Monday morning before the market continues. You won’t be able to sleep well and play well on the weekend!

Surprise, surprise. Many of us doesn’t know that we can actually search and order all Kinokuniya books online!

Website: Kinokuniya

Ordering books from Kinokuniya is very fast and shipping cost is only RM6 flat (RM30 for east Malaysia). If your total order is above RM300, shipping is FREE! However, I do not recommend you to order RM300 of books just because you wanna save the RM6! I did that once with 7 books, and end up that I am only able to finish 4 of them, leaving 3 untouched in my book shelf. The theory is that if you buy a lot of books at the same time, you won’t appreciate them and thus won’t be able to finish all of them. You will also feel overwhelmed having to read so many books at once (especially if the book has 1,000 words per page and it is as thick as YellowPages!)

I usually order a book at night. They will processed and shipped my order the next day. So I usually got my book the very next day!

I have to rely on Kinokuniya a lot because in Ipoh, the availability of books are very limited. There are only 2 mini Popular Book Store and 1 tiny MPH. Unless the books you need are very popular (like Rich Dad’s series that take up a whole cupboard), you don’t have a lot of choice. And that’s why Kinokuniya online comes to rescue!

While RM6 of shipping looks like an extra, I am happy to pay for it because of the speed and convenience to someone who is not in KL! Even if you live in KL and you can go to Kinokuniya KLCC directly, you still need to pay for petrol, tol and KLCC per-hour-based car park fee. That will be more than RM6.

How do you pay for your oder?

Credit card.

What about Amazon?

I ordered twice from Amazon. They give big discount on books (usually over 30%). Unfortunately with the shipping fee (cheapest option), it end up being the same as non discounted price. This is not the problem. The problem is for Amazon to ship the books from US to Malaysia, it takes a few weeks! When the books arrived, you might not have to mode to read it already. hahaha. You may choose more expensive shipping options (where shipping will be more expensive than your books!) and it still need to wait minimum 10 days although they say 5 days. Why? Because it takes them another 5 days to prepare and pack your books.

What if a book you need is not available in Kinokuniya but Amazon?

This should be rare with the size of Kinokuniya, but it happened to me last month. On Nov 19, I searched for the book The New Buffettology and it is not available in their database. So I emailed them. They replied the next day and told me that they can actually order the book for me. I ask them to go ahead and I got my book yesterday (1 month)! I am very happy with their service

What about MPH and Popular book store online?

Popular have removed their online search and order system few months ago. MPH do keep it until today. However, popular books takes 1-2 weeks to ship and unpopular books take 4-6 weeks! Do you want to order from them?

Update: Pelf commented that you can order book from MPH Online for RM4 postage (Free if order above RM80) and delivery only takes 1 day! Making MPH a very good choice if the book is available.

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At last, if you know any other online book store that is good for us, please kindly share it here so I can give it a try. Now, check out their website here.

I was in One Utama MPH bookstore yesterday and saw that Robert Kiyosaki and Donald Trump will be launching a book call “Why we want you to be rich” at 10 October!

I am not sure if you can get rich by buying this book. But I am very sure you will make them rich. So later you can write a book “Why You Want Them To Be Rich”.

Surprise surprise, I found a book in my cupboard that I bought in 2006 (11 years ago). The title of the book is “The Internet Complete Reference” by Harley Hahn. Bought for RM62.40 from Popular Bookstore. The book was recommended by Computimes Magazine (not publishing anymore).

11 years! I have been using the internet for 11 years! And that was the 486 PC, 28.8 kbps modem and Windows 3.1 stone age hardware, software and connection! There are so many changes in just 1 decade. Do you know that there is an option to TURN OFF images loading so we can surf the net faster? People are now enjoying broadband connection with live video streaming, dual core super power processors, wireless connection, 3G ….

But what I am interested in pointing up today is that the internet changes a lot in the last decade, after referring to that book. At that time, internet was made by the following components:-

1. Mail
2. Web
3.Web Search Engine
4. Usenet
5. Gopher
6. Veronica and Jughead
7. Anonymous FTP
8. Archie
9. Mailing Lists
10. Telnet
11. Talk Facilities
12. MUDS
You might not even recognize some of the components because many of them is now obsolete. Let’s look at them today.

1. Mail - Email is still popular today, but one of the biggest changes is that web-based email arise (Hotmail) and dominate the original POP email.
2. Web - World Wide Web is the component that grow up to the strongest which is basically the INTERNET today!
3. Web Search Engine - At that time was Yahoo. Later Lycos, Altavista, etc. Today is Google.
4. Usenet - Still existing today but most has been replaced by Web-based discussion forums.
5. Gopher - Hah, you sure don’t know what is this. This is the ‘web’ that doesn’t have pictures but pure boring text. No wonder they are obsolete now.
6. Veronica and Jughead - This is the search engine for Gopher, dead now.
7. Anonymous FTP - Still exist today to host download, but most downloads are hosted directly from the Web. Even if a file is hosted by FTP, modern browsers support direct anonymous FTP download without the need of another software.
8. Archie - This is the search engine for files download. Now everyone is using Google to search. Dead.
9. Mailing Lists - Still quite popular, yahoo even have a free service for this. Members in the mailing list can send email to the whole group easily.
10. Telnet - Telnet is remote access to a computer. The new generation for telnet is called SSH (secured shell access) for better security. Now we also have remote desktop connection for Windows and a lot of other software for remote management.
11. Talk Facilities - This is the grandfather of Yahoo Messenger, Skype, Microsoft Live Messenger, Google Talk, etc. There are lots of talk facilities at that time but most are dead now except ICQ.
12. MUDS - This is some kind of text-based gaming where online gamers meet. Yep, playing games by just typing words and reading text. No graphics! This has been replaced by online RPG games today like World of Warcraft, Ragnarok, DotA!!!!, etc.
What else changes in the last 10 years?

1. Google is not even mentioned in the book!
2. Altavista, Lycos, Excite, Webcrawler are history.
3. Netscape is dead.
4. TM-NET came out and screw Jaring (for Malaysians only)
5. You actually need to type in commands to connect to the internet, and the commands are
ATZ (means reset modem)
ATDT1511 (means dial 1511)
Then you need to enter username and password.
I forgot the command to logout.
6. Banner advertising is dead. It actually created the Dot Com Bubble because the advertising create no value to the advertisers.
7. There is no such thing as blog or blogging at that time.
8. Mahathir retired. Hmmm…. but he doesn’t know ….

It is indeed a bit weird that I have actually bought a book to learn about the internet. But then, at least I know what is bcc! Do you know what is the use of the bcc field when you are sending an email? 9 out of 10 people have no idea what is that and yet it exist until today. Check it out baby.