Carnival of Financial Independence: Sequel Edition ? 6400 ...

Yep, its back, and I only had to find 66% of the articles by myself this time.

PK from Don?t Quit Your Day Job has earned the top spot in this week?s edition and an honorary spot in all future carnivals. ?How? He was the first to submit his article and thus save me the time of sorting through drivel all across the internet in order to find it. ?That tells me the man knows a thing or two about the value of time and how understanding it can make you rich. ?Oh, there was an actual article link in that e-mail he sent me. ?Remember the last time you thought you had managed to outsmart the company whose product you just bought? ?That company spent more money and time on figuring out how to get you to buy that product than you did in rationalizing why you were actually getting the better of the deal. ?Food for thought.

This is for all of the rest of you. ?I did find a couple other posts worth mentioning here but because I had to take the time to find them they are infinitely less cool than anything DQYDJ wrote recently:

If you can catch the errors in the above sentence then you did not go to school in Mississippi.

Control Your Cash gets another nod this week mainly because they talk about gym memberships and how many of you all suck at making proper use of them. ?Okay so maybe the main point of the piece was about subscription services, whatever, its good regardless of what approach you take to reading it. ?Stop trying to make like a pretentious college freshman struggling through?Jane Eyre and just listen to what the man is telling you.

The third and final article this week comes from The Dividend Guy, well, actually from a guest poster named?Paul Gabrail. ?The thesis is to avoid the ?big miss? when investing which sounds defensive but is really just common sense. ?As long as you can avoid the catastrophically bad decisions that amateur investors tend to make you?ll be able to weather the smaller mistakes just fine.

Ugly Duckling Of The Week

The UDOTW is a new feature that I am going to try out. ?Instead of doing the boring thing of trying to pick five stocks that I think will do well over the next year, or five years, or thirty years, I want to go the other direction. ?After all if I am going to pick stocks that I think are going to do well I?ll just throw them in my portfolio (which you can read about here). ?Think of this as a weekly case study in what kind of stocks to avoid (assuming my methodology is correct). ?Lets see how well I can do at finding disaster cases.

This week?s entry is?RealNetworks Inc (RNWK). ?Here is the boilerplate description of the company from Reuters:

RealNetworks, Inc. (RealNetworks), incorporated in 1994, is a provider of network-delivered digital media products and services. The Company also develops and markets software products and services that enable the creation, distribution and consumption of digital media, including audio and video. The Company operates in three segments: Core Products, Emerging Products and Games.

Remember RealPlayer? ?These guys own it. ?Remember the last time you used RealPlayer? Neither do I. ?Here is the ten-year chart:

Apparently no one else uses RealPlayer anymore either (not their only product by the way, but it is?recognizable). ?So how did this company draw my attention? Check out the following figures from Fidelity:

5 Year EPS Growth: -24.59%
5 Year Cash Flow Growth Rate: -42.77%
5 Year Revenue Growth: -3.21%
Return on Equity (TTM): -10.48%

Yikes, keep this stock away from my portfolio.

$0 Workout Of The Week
Because being frugal is no excuse for being fat

Run 800m
3 x Leg Blasters
Each Leg Blaster consists of the following:
20 x Lunges (10 per leg)
20 x Squats (no bar or anything, just squat nice and deep)
20 x Jumping Split Lunges (10 per leg, jump and switch leg positions in midair, land in lunge position)
20 x Squat Jumps (squat down, explode upwards into a jump, repeat)
Run 800m

Come back next week for more of the same, except for everything that will be different.

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Source: http://6400personalfinance.com/2012/07/19/carnival-of-financial-independence-sequel-edition/

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