First off, if you’re a blogger in Saskatoon and area or if you happen to want to meet some Saskatoon bloggers to…uhh…I dunno…throw fruit?  If you want to swing by a blogger meet, check out the Asian Taste restaurant at 101 3rd avenue north in Saskatoon.  The action begins at 1:00PM and if no one dies by 1:10PM, every one will likely stick around to chit chat the afternoon away.  Hopefully the blister that popped creating a raw strip of gummery in my mouth will be healed over by then.

Word to the wise.  no matter how tasty pepper pot soup is, let it cool off a bit before shovelling it into your mouth.

So with blogging out of the way, I’ll blog some more about something else.  A few years ago, I became enamoured of the stock market.  Looking at stock charts go up and down and up and down, I envisioned a wallet in my back pocket squealing in pain as cash stretched it’s limits so to speak.  Now uhh…that didn’t exactly happen but some where right now, $5,000 of mine is likely making someone’s wallet scream.  Heh heh…well actually I didn’t lose it all to be honest but I sure didn’t turn a profit in the long run.  It’s a lot of fun to watch your trading account become twice what it was originally worth but seeing it go from 200% value down to 80% is uhh…not as much fun.

So I decided to stop investing and after some fiddling around with currency markets and forex trading, finally decided to just give up.  I had an incredible knack for making a lot of money on the market, becoming cocky and then erasing all my progress.  Make the right pick, research and analyze it, find the right time to buy and then poof, you make $4,000 in a couple of days.  After it starts to feel like free money, people like me become reckless and bam…you lose $4,200 in the next couple of days.  Needless to say, it’s not a profitable cycle.

So after closing out my trading account and then coming to terms that the forex markets were just too volatile for people like me, I just cashed out and decided to keep living my life without the excitement of the markets.  I have to admit though, I’m always tempted to go back because it’s addictive.  Thankfully, I found a way to do it that won’t cost me a nickel.  When I was trading with trade freedom, I was entitled to a $125 or so referral bonus that I got for getting some one else to sign up.  Despite closing my account with trade freedom, I still got their news letters and some of them contained references to my account.

Now I had thought this referral bonus would have been sent to me via cheque or something but instead, trade freedom reactivated my account with the bonus deposited in it.  Neato…so with this free money that I discovered a year or so after it had been given to me, I figured I may as well try a new investment method…long term.  Instead of trying to swing a profit over a few days or a week, I’ll try and turn this $125 into…much more by using dependable stocks representing companies that are established and have dips and valleys in their share price.  I’ll try and concentrate on gold mines and companies with established producing mining operations.  Every so often I’ll give an update of gains and losses on my blog and I’ll see if it adds up to anything notable.

So…for the data miners that actually think I’m worth going after, feel free to comb through this post.  Believe me, it’s not really that valuable to you.

On Nov’ 5th of 2008, (3 months ago) I bought 300 shares of CRJ (Claude Resources) on the TSX at a value of $0.38/share.

Today, the share price is currently standing at $0.71 and my 300 shares have a market value of $213.

Each trade costs me $9.95 plus ECN fees…so about $10.

My portfolio currently holds only one stock (CRJ) and has a net gain of 71.8%

Yes…for some one who likes to pour through legislation and crunch simple numbers for fun, this is quite addictive.