HEADLINES [click on headline to view story]:

Family Money

Personal Directions

The Doctor's Consultation by Dr. Iain Corness

Agony Column

Camera Class by Snapshot

Recipes from Rattana

Dr Byte's Computer Conundrums

Family Money: How Much Time?

By Leslie Wright,
Managing director of Westminster Portfolio Services (Thailand) Ltd.

I am often asked how much time I spend each week on managing my discretionary clients’ portfolios. Also, how much time I might devote to researching the individual component funds, and how I might make those selections. (Now if I told you my trade secrets, you wouldn’t need me any more, would you?)

Many fund managers are perceived by cynics as making their stock selections by throwing a dart into a dartboard, like sticking the tail on the donkey - and judging by the less-than-stellar performance of many funds, this method could well be just as valid as any other.

Keynes showed us the way

Interestingly, one of the most famous and influential economists, John Maynard Keynes, as part of his duties as Bursar of King’s College, Cambridge, spent just 10 minutes each morning over breakfast running the college’s investment fund. The results, apparently, were quite satisfactory. The tale may be apocryphal, but it does prompt the thought: how much time should you - or your portfolio manager - spend running your portfolio?

Certainly Keynes believed that there was no positive correlation between the time spent managing a sum of capital and the returns thereon. In other words, there was no guarantee that devoting extra time to the task would bring superior returns.

Anyone who doubts this only needs to look at the returns posted by professional investors - especially those wise men who run multi-million pound unit trusts, pension funds and the like - who are on the task full time, 40-50 hours a week. If time alone brought results, they would lead the pack. Yet we know that their performance is nothing special. On average, and before their costs, their funds return what the market returns. Mathematically this must be so since, in aggregate, institutional investors pretty well comprise the market and the market can’t beat itself.

Still, the intriguing thought remains that this means investment is not like other pursuits, where time and effort must bring better performance. Maybe investment is truly an activity where you can be busy doing nothing and not be penalised.

Interest begets interest

However, those readers who mull over how much time they should devote to their portfolio each week should consider correlations between time and two other variables in the investment equation - in particular, the link between time and your interest in the subject. Clearly the more interested you are in an activity, the more you want to practise it and this is as true of investment as it is of golf or tennis.

But there are good ways to practise and bad ways to practise. The bad way consists of dealing in shares like a lapsed alcoholic: always desperate for another. Practising in that way might add up to learning by experience, but it’s also likely to confirm Oscar Wilde’s quip that "experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." The good way consists of hours spent over text books, spreadsheets, annual reports and the like. It’s the investment equivalent of honing the perfect golf swing - you do it by repetition. It also gives rise to a paradox: in the long run, the more time you spend on investment, the less time you need to spend on investment. Put in enough hours of practise and tasks that once looked forbidding - tinkering with a Black-Scholes pricing model, tweaking a discounted cash-flow valuation - become easy. Just don’t expect the effort to translate into better investment returns, though. But by the time you’re expert, you’ll know that.

The value of time

Then there is the correlation between the time and money spent running a portfolio. The more you spend the more resources you have to cut wasted time. The difficulty is that much of your costs will be fixed. So, while spending £1,000 or so a year will buy enough data and internet access to fill many productive investment hours, that level of cost might be prohibitive to some; peanuts to others. The wonders of the internet mean that much valuable source material is available cheaply - but still takes a considerable devotion of time to sort the wheat from the chaff. And when there are over 400 funds in the European Equities’ sector alone, how does one decide which ones to select? By what critera? Most amateur investors will immediately say "Performance!" without defining the period (typically the past 12 months).

In fact, to select, say, 3 or 4 above-average performing funds in a chosen sector over several time frames (6, 12, 36 months, for instance) is a safer bet that they will perform above average over the coming 6-12 months also - if the manager doesn’t change in the meantime!

But, if none of the foregoing is much help, readers can always resort to the Keynes stock-picking method, which comprised a combination of doing nothing (that we know) and - presumably - buying those shares on whose names the marmalade landed.

Personal Directions: Success is a matter of choice and not chance

By Christina Dodd,
founder and managing director of Asia Training Associates

Recently I was talking to some students from China concerning the subject of "success" and how to achieve one’s goals in life. They offered some very interesting opinions and ideas including the element of "luck and good fortune" as playing a hand in their fate. Some were definite that their whole lives are determined this way while others insisted that personal effort plays a major part.

I found some thoughts on this subject by Shiv Khera, an educator, business consultant and much sought-after speaker as well as a successful entrepreneur. His writings from "You Can Win" offer a straight and common sense approach as to how we conduct our lives and succeed in those lives. He also has some comments on the role "luck" has to play.

"Success is not an accident. It is the result of our attitude and our attitude is a choice. Hence success is a matter of choice and not chance.

Most crackpots keep waiting for a jackpot. But can that bring success?

A priest was driving by and saw an exceptionally beautiful farm. He stopped his car to appreciate the bountiful crop. The farmer was riding on his tractor and saw the priest at the corner. He drove toward the priest and when he got there the priest said, "God has blessed you with a beautiful farm. You should be grateful for it." The farmer replied, "Yes, God has blessed me with a beautiful farm and I am grateful for it, but you should have seen this farm when God had the whole farm to himself!"

How come one person moves forward with one success after another, and yet some are still getting ready?

How come one man goes through life crossing one hurdle after another, accomplishing his goals while another struggles and gets nowhere?

If the answer to these two questions can become part of the curriculum, it could revolutionize the educational system. The uncommon man seeks opportunity, whereas the common man seeks security. We need to keep our minds on what we want, not on what we don’t want.

What is success?

A lot of research has gone into the subject of success and failure. All that we need to do is learn our lessons from history. When we study the life histories of successful people, we find that they have certain qualities in common no matter which period of history they lived in. Success leaves clues and if we identify and adopt the qualities of successful people, we shall be successful.

Similarly, there are characteristics common in all failures. If we avoid those characteristics then we shall not be failures. Success is no mystery, but simply the result of consistently applying some basic principles. The reverse is just as true; Failure is simply a result of making a few mistakes repeatedly.

One of the many reasons for failure - A Fatalistic Attitude

A fatalistic attitude prevents people from accepting responsibility for their position in life. They attribute success and failure to luck. They resign themselves to their fate. They believe and accept the predestined future written in their horoscope or stars, that regardless of their effort whatever has to happen will happen. Hence they never put in any effort and complacency becomes a way of life. They wait for things to happen rather than make them happen. Success is a matter of luck, ask any failure.

Weak-minded people fall easy prey to fortune-tellers, horoscopes and self-proclaimed God’s men who are sometimes conmen. They become superstitious and ritualistic.

Shallow people believe in luck. People with strength and determination believe in cause and effect. Some people consider a rabbit’s foot lucky; but it wasn’t lucky for the rabbit, was it?

Some people think they are just unlucky. This breeds a fatalistic attitude. People who get involved half-heartedly say things like: "I will give it a try", "I will see if it works", "I will give it a shot", "I have nothing to lose", I haven’t put much into it anyway".

These people guarantee failure because they get into a project with no determination or dedication. They lack courage, commitment and confidence. They are starting with complacence and call themselves unlucky.

Effort does it. Life without vision courage and depth is simply a blind experience. Small, lazy and weak minds always take the easiest way, the path of least resistance.

Athletes train 15 years for 15 seconds of performance. Ask them if they got lucky. Ask an athlete how he feels after a good workout. He will tell you that he feels spent. If he doesn’t feel that way, it means he hasn’t worked out to his maximum ability.

Losers think life is unfair. They think only of their bad breaks. They don’t consider that the person who is prepared and playing well still got the same bad breaks but overcame them. That is the difference.

Luck favors those who help themselves. A flood was threatening a small town and everyone was leaving for safety except one man who said, "God will save me. I have faith." As the water level rose a jeep came to rescue him, the man refused, saying, "God will save me. I have faith." As the water level rose further, he went up to the second storey, and a boat came to help him. Again he refused to go, saying, "God will save me. I have faith." The water kept rising and the man climbed on to the roof. A helicopter came to rescue him, but he said, "God will save me. I have faith." Well, finally he drowned. When he reached his Maker he angrily questioned, "I had complete faith in you. Why did you ignore my prayers and let me drown?" The Lord replied, "Who do you think sent you the jeep, the boat and the helicopter?"

The only way to overcome the fatalistic attitude is to accept responsibility and believe in the law of cause and effect rather than luck. It takes action, preparation and planning rather than waiting, wondering or wishing, to accomplish anything in life."

Have a great week and if you need any information on personal and professional training matters, please contact me at Christina.dodd@atasiam.com

The Doctor's Consultation by Dr. Iain Corness: Slipped discs - a very painful problem

by Dr. Iain Corness

Back pain is one of the commonest orthopaedic problems, and the often used terms such as lumbago, sciatica and slipped disc get bandied about at the dinner table. However, an acute bad back is not the sort of condition that you want to chat about over desserts. The condition can be crippling and not "cute" in any way.

Let’s begin this week with the "slipped disc" problem. First thing - discs do not "slip". They do not shoot out of the spaces between the vertebrae (the tower of cotton reels that makes up your spine) and produce pain that way. The disc actually stays exactly where it is, but the centre of the disc (called the nucleus) pops out through the edge of the disc and hits the nerve root. When this happens you have a very painful condition, as anyone who has had a disc prolapse (our fancy name for the "popping out" bit) will tell you. Think of the pain when the dentist starts drilling close to the tiny nerve in your tooth. Well, this is a large nerve! When the nucleus of the disc hits the sciatic nerve, this produces the condition known as Sciatica - an acute searing pain which can run from the buttocks, down the legs, even all the way through to the toes.

Unfortunately, just to make diagnosis a little difficult (if it were all so easy why would we go to Medical School for six years!) you can get sciatica from other reasons as well as prolapsing discs. It may just be soft tissue swelling from strain of the ligaments between the discs, or it could even be a form of arthritis. Another complicating fact is that a strain may only produce enough tissue swelling in around 12 hours after the heavy lifting, so you go to bed OK and wake the next morning incapacitated.

To accurately work out just what is happening requires bringing in those specialist doctors who can carry out extremely intricate forms of X-Rays called CT Scans, Spiral CT’s or MRI that will sort out whether it is a disc prolapse, arthritis or a soft tissue problem. The equipment to do these procedures costs millions of baht, and the expertise to use them takes years of practice and experience. This is one reason why some of these investigations can be expensive.

After the definitive diagnosis of your back condition has been made, then appropriate treatment can be instituted. The forms of treatment can be just simply rest and some analgesics (pain killers), physiotherapy, operative intervention or anti-inflammatories and traction.

Now perhaps you can see why it is important to find the real cause for your aching back. The treatment for some causes can be totally the wrong form of therapy for some of the other causes. You can see the danger of "self diagnosis" here. Beware!

So what do you do when you get a bad back? Rest and paracetamol is a safe way to begin. If it settles quickly, then just be a little careful with lifting and twisting for a couple of weeks and get on with your life as normal. If, however, you are still in trouble after a couple of days rest, then it is time to see your doctor and get that definitive diagnosis. You have been warned!

Agony Column

Camera Class: Selecting the lens

Just what is a camera? Sounds too simple, but in actual fact, no matter what you pay for a camera, the basics are all the same. There is a light-tight box with film in it, and there is a piece of glass at the front that can be focussed onto the film. The rest is fancy stuff to work out exposures, but the simple light through glass to film is the same for every camera. Even with digital cameras, you still have the glass at the front, focussing onto "electronic" film. It’s just the same.

One of the questions professional photographers often get asked is, "What lens would you use to shoot a (insert the subject)?" However, the lens a pro selects depends upon many factors, and the subject being shot is only one of them!

In some instances, you can almost get the identical looking shot of the subject with a 28 mm lens, a 50 mm or a 135 mm. By now you are saying, why have all these different lenses if the shots look all the same? The essential word here was "almost" the same. There will be telltale differences and it is these differences that make or break your photographs. By using the differences you can manipulate the shot to produce the effects you want.

Right then, let’s get down to some examples. You are on a tropical beach, Jomtien will do, and you want the blue skies over the sea type of picture. Unfortunately, the sky is only pale blue. What to do? The lens to use to increase the blue colour of the sky is the widest-angle lens you have got in the bag. How does this work? Simple, you are taking an enormous area of sky with the wide angle and compressing it into the small 35 mm negative. Compressing all that sky increases the depth of the colour and makes it more blue than it really was!

Another example, you have just bought a car and want to send a photo of it to your relatives at home. You want them to be jealous. You want it to appear as imposing as possible. What to do? Leave the wide-angle lens on and get down low and close to the car. Look through the viewfinder and the car suddenly looms large and powerful above you. The closer you get, the more it looms above you. Click! It is in the bag and on its way to impress the rellies.

This time you want to take a photograph of your house. Unfortunately there is a rubbish dump at the back, and no matter what angle you take it from there are piles of rubbish in the background. This one is even easier to get over. Use a long lens (135 mm and upwards) and take the shot. With the short depth of field available with the longer lenses, the rubbish dump will turn into a nice blurry, soft, out of focus background, and no one will ever know you are living in Soi Garbage.

What about a nice close up of your favourite painting you bought? Another "genuine" Sunflowers by Van Gogh. Will you use a close-up lens, the wide angle setting on the zoom lens? No, you should use the telephoto long lens and stand back. If you go in close with the wide angle you will get distortions at the edges and strange shadows across the canvas because you physically get in the way of the light. With the long lens there is less distortion and the light will fall evenly across the picture.

Mind you, there are times when the subject being shot does dictate the lens you would use. Let me assure you that when photographing rampaging lions I would use the longest lens in the world. A close up lens to photograph its dental work would not be my idea of fun!

So there you are, think about the effect you want, as well as the subject matter when deciding what lens to choose.

Recipes from Rattana: Chinese Beef with Shallots

This is originally a Malaysian dish, but shows the influence of Chinese cuisine all over SE Asia. It calls for Chinese rice wine, but sherry can be substituted. The original recipe also called for monosodium glutamate. Since this can produce allergic reactions, it is preferred to just purchase better cuts of meat, rather than using MSG as a meat tenderizer. There are also non-MSG tenderizers (papain) that could be used. If there is only poor quality meat available, then allow longer to tenderize. Keeping the meat thinly sliced also helps.

Ingredients Serves 2-3

Beef 250 gm

Chinese rice wine 1 tbspn

Garlic (chopped) 2 cloves

Shallots (chopped) 12

Vegetable oil 2 tbspns

Ginger (shredded) 4 cm piece

Sugar 3 tspns

Dark soy 2 tbspns

Beef stock 2 tbspns

Green chilli sliced 1 (garnish)

Cooking Method

Slice meat into thin bite-sized pieces. Sprinkle on rice wine or sherry and let stand for 20 minutes.

In the wok, heat the oil and add the meat, garlic and ginger. Stir-fry for 1-2 minutes then add sugar, soy sauce, chopped shallots and beef stock and continue to cook until most of the liquid has been absorbed.

Transfer to serving dish and garnish with sliced chilli and serve with steamed rice or fried noodles.

Dr Byte's Computer Conundrums

In this issue I decided that it would be helpful if we look at a problem we all share and which seems to frustrate some more than others. SPAM! One typical e-mail I recently received describes the problem.

Q. Dear Dr Byte

I receive some 30 or so e-mails every day. I used to get excited until I realised that 25 of these e-mails were junk mail, porn invitations, do I want a larger appendage and several Nigerian scam requests mixed in.

I am totally fed up with this and the time I waste to delete this stuff. I am getting even more frustrated because I don’t want this junk and I resent that my ISP seems to have given out my address. What can I do about this problem and is there really a fix for my problem?

Frustrated

Hua Hin

A. I am sure most of us who use e-mail have been inundated with junk and spam e-mail at some time, if not daily. Hotmail’s promises only work part of the time and using filters to block senders only works till the sender changes their send e-mail name or address.

What exactly is the problem and is there really any simple and inexpensive way to stop receiving junk and spam e-mail? Lets start with what is spam?

Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send - most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.

There are two main types of spam, and they have different effects on Internet users. Cancellable Usenet spam is a single message sent to 20 or more Usenet newsgroups. (Through long experience, Usenet users have found that any message posted to so many newsgroups is often not relevant to most or all of them.) Usenet spam is aimed at "lurkers", people who read newsgroups but rarely or never post and give their address away. Usenet spam robs users of the utility of the newsgroups by overwhelming them with a barrage of advertising or other irrelevant posts. Furthermore, Usenet spam subverts the ability of system administrators and owners to manage the topics they accept on their systems.

Email spam targets individual users with direct mail messages. Email spam lists are often created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing Internet mailing lists, or searching the Web for addresses. Email spams typically cost users money out-of-pocket to receive. Many people - anyone with measured phone service - read or receive their mail while the meter is running, so to speak. Spam costs them additional money. On top of that, it costs money for ISPs and online services to transmit spam, and these costs are transmitted directly to subscribers.

One particularly nasty variant of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists (public or private email discussion forums). Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab the lists of addresses, or use the mailing list as a direct target for their attacks.

How do spammers get my email address?

‘Harvesting Web Pages’ for e-mail addresses is one way.

‘Harvesting News Groups’ is another obvious way.

‘Social Engineering’ is the latest method. Usually greeting cards sites that collect your name from a friend of yours and then keep it or sell it to spammers. Yes I didn’t think of this one before but it’s so obvious.

‘Guessing’ your email address is also one way. For example, if there is a Fred at example.com maybe there is another Fred at whitehouse. gov The next step is to verify the address, usually in one of two ways, either SMTP verify a mail command that will check to see if the recipient is actually ok with the mail server or perhaps a blank or innocuous message from no one you know to see if your address ‘bounces.’

Another method is ‘theft’ by craftily creating a website that actually is not http but anonymous ftp. A lot of browsers would send your email address as the password for anonymous ftp (long ago courtesy in the early days of BBS). Making a worm which emails the author with your (or friends) email address book, even a chain letter can be used for this purpose.

‘Buying’ mailing lists is probably the most common. Many sites, when the dot-bomb explosion hit, realized a list of email address was an asset to be sold. The people buying didn’t care if you only opted in one site. They had your address, used it and probably sold it off again.

So what can we do?

1. Well you could complain to the spammer’s provider.

The first step is finding out who to complain to. This can be a little bit complicated and there is often little point in complaining to the guilty party. But you can complain to whoever is providing them with internet access. However, if you aren’t sure, and think there is a significant chance that the sender is really ignorant, rather than disobedient, of email norms, you might try complaining to the sender.

Finding out who to complain to can be broken down into several steps. The first one is determining the domain name the spammers are using. One good place is if the body of the message includes an email address to reply to or a web page to look at. This will often be via a different provider than the one used to send the spam, but many providers forbid use of their services by spammers. But not all.

2. Complain to organisations like mail-abuse.org - http://www.mail-abuse.org/

I sometimes wonder if governments are really interested in stopping spam. The USA have legislated but who really cares and what powers do they really have against a spammer located in say Turkey or China?

You can get more information from http://www.u. arizona.edu/~trw/spam/ and http://spam.abuse.net/userhelp/#hide

Is there an application which I can install to stop spam?

There are many applications and service providers which claim to resolve spam. Issues only arise where something legitimate gets deleted because someone used a key word, phrase or name that you added to the keyword/name list. These applications are a little bit like Netnanny to stop the kids looking at inappropriate sites. So if you want an e-mail nanny, here’s the pick of the current bunch.

Eliminate Spam! works with MS Outlook 2000/XP only. Non-Outlook users need Risk-Free Mail service which protects from both spam and viruses and works on Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape, Act, IncrediMail, and any other e-mail client that supports the POP3 protocol. The simple version is free and a more comprehensive version is available but has a price tag. This one gets 3 stars and you can download from http://www. eliminatespam.com

N-Dream provides a free service which deletes all your spam e-mails in your mailbox. You do not have to download any software. If you’re interested go to http://spam. n-dream.com/. This free service gets 2 stars.

ChoiceMail is a junk-email blocking system that works by requiring unknown senders to fill in a form to get your permission to send you email. This pay for service gets 3.5 stars because the idea is good. Go to http://www.digiportal.com/ to sign up. However, remember its not free and there is a delay between an unknown sender being asked to fill in the form, you providing the OK, and then receiving the e-mail. That’s if the unknown sender filled the form.

MailWasher is a powerful email checker which claims effective spam elimination. MailWasher says this will stop unwanted viruses and e-mails before they get to your computer. No gimmicks here, it is easy to set up and easy to use, that you’ll be managing your email like a pro in seconds. It can even be used as an effective privacy tool. This is a simple and reasonably effective way to manage your incoming e-mails. The Free version gets 3.5 stars and the Pro version $29.95 gets 3 stars for cost and can be downloaded from MailWasher. http://www.mailwasher.net/

ComThing is a completely automatic tool which claims it stops all spam for a given address or addresses. ComThing will also optionally archive all spam so that the user does not have to ever wonder if they missed something. There are several secondary tools as well which have been designed to make internet communication easier and more efficient. ComThing is very powerful yet due to the extreme level of automation very simple to operate and well worth a look. ComThing scales perfectly and will work with multiple accounts or satellite computers with either an independent or centralized and remote administration. Best of all its free but only gets 2 stars and you can download from http://www.comthing.com/

As for my own choice? Well I eliminate spam e-mail when I download e-mail by simply selecting all the spam and junk and pressing the delete button. Time to action, around 20 seconds if I am really sleepy and slow. I do, however, use the Block Senders List for anyone who tries to send me a virus.

If you have any tips that you’d like to share, or any questions about your internet or pc experience, contact me: Dr Byte, Chiangmai Mail.

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