THAT TIME OF YEAR

That time of year:
1. Whether happy or sad, good or bad, you reflect on the past.
2. Whether filled with excitement, or overcome with dread, you look into the future.
3. When you are grateful for what you have.
4. When you mourn what you have lost.
5. When the joys of family are celebrated.
6. When the pain of being alone is truly felt.
7. When you think so much about your own predicament, you are forced to think about the predicament of others.

So don't deny the annual ritual, but take stock, take a deep breath, and love those you love. And love those you don't even know.

And most of all, be grateful that you can.

May the end of this year, be filled with as much love, joy and peace as you are hoping for in the next.

I RISE

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

MAYA ANGELOU

FAITH = GREED Pt 2

Turns out Warren Buffett shares my view on buying on fear and selling on greed.

So, how does faith fit in?

Well faith is the opposite of fear. In the markets, greed is the opposite of fear.

Intuitively it means that when things are going well, it's easy to have faith, and it's easy to have greed. The last 10 years have seen the growth of the megachurch and the hyper-debt fueled asset explosion which is now finally unwinding.

Somewhere along the journey, our spiritual life and our material life have become so entertwined, that our faith, I believe has commingled with our greed ie. the love of money. The prayer of Jabez, and other fads that have swept Christiandom pair the two words together.

On one hand, if generosity and social justice is the offshoot of the wealth/faith continuum, then I think that is in general a positive thing, for those in need. However, the spiritual mindset of those who are at the source of this wealth transfer is what I question.

I'm not proposing that we pray for poverty, or lack, as that would be contrary to Bible. God blesses, and abundance is our inheritance. But the messages from the pulpits of some megachurches may be propagating a blurring of the faith/greed line.

Perhaps, instead of praying for more wealth (and to be fair, more to give away) we should be praying for humility and holiness. God is not a genie, and he is not around to grant wishes. He exists for us to worship, to submit, to be a servant of.

So for all those, who are doing well financially and growing in wealth; what are you praying for? More wealth? Take a look at the % you are giving away, and maybe you'll find that the amounts you give away are getting bigger, but the % has not.

So now that times are tough, and those in need are on the rise, and fear is ruling the world, perhaps a response of true faith, in the one who is worthy to have faith in, will take its rightful place.

Peace.

FAITH = GREED Pt 1

OK. The title of this blog is the title of a book that I am working on.

I've been a person of the Christian faith for 16 years, almost exactly. At the time, I was employed by Merrill Lynch, the investment bank. From the outset, I found the greed factor highly refreshing, it was overt and "clean"; not covered up with any real noble causes. Make money for others, make money for yourself.

Upon coming to Christ however, I did have a crisis of whether to stay involved in such a business. My resolution, be a person of faith, and attract the curious.

So suffice it to say that the word Greed, the Gordon Gekko "Wall St." kind of greed, has been well absorbed into my psyche and understanding. As a trader in the markets, you had to understand this word. It was, and is, one of the driving forces from which all self-interest of its participants could be understood. Analyzing the types and levels of greed, was helpful to my work.

The other driving force, is, of course, Fear. Suffice it to say that the systemic global financial risks that exist in the world today, would certainly be worthy of some fear. Fear of the known: things are going to get worse; fear of the unknown: how bad is it going to get. As a market participant, certainly fear is also a great thing to understand: your own, your fellow professionals, and the public.

I also developed quite a simple method of relative success. When I was most fearful, I bought. It worked. Turned out that my emotional decision making was no more sophisticated that a kind grandmother, responding to the headlines of the day. So when I wanted to buy, I sold. When I wanted to sell, I bought. 60/40 success rate was all I needed.

Well that's enough for Part One.

PS. Can't believe I didn't post in September. Must be something to do with moving houses (again) and travelling to Australia and back.

Randy Pausch redux

OK. Again a bit late with this one.

Randy Pausch died July 25, 2008. His last lecture watched a zillion times, Oprah, the book. Whoa. Remember Yul Brynner? Both had ads play after their deaths. Posthumous power. A legacy. A life beyond death. A life beyond yourself.

So many authors, composers, artists. More famous and influential after their deaths, than in their short lives. Jesus most of all. Still rockin it 2000 years later. Technically not dead of course.

If your goals end at your death, then you'll live it like that. If your goals are set in terms of generations, you'll probably choose more carefully, what you do with each day you are given.

Choose wisely.

Simple Prayer

God. Help me be the worshipper you made me to be, the man that I was created to be, the husband that I longed to be, the father that I hoped to be, the son that I have to be, and the friend that I chose to be.

Let it be.

IF

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling...the jungle book guy

ON THE MOVE

No meaningful post here really. But another geographic milestone.

We arrived in Wolseley/Regina Saskatchewan on April 26th from LA. Same continent, different universe.

Almost 4 months, 30,000 kms (at least) of commuting later, we are moving AGAIN.

New city, new house, new school (for the kids).

Another season ends, another season begins.

We are hoping this one will last!

Hope this post finds you well.

MILESTONES

Noticed the date a few days ago. It's been a year since my family and I have changed countries/continents. Amazing.

On July 11, 2007 we hopped on a plane from Sydney to Los Angeles.

On April 26, 2008 we hopped on a plane from Los Angeles to....Wolseley, Saskatchewan. Town of 1,000.

On August 15th, 2008 we will...yes hop on a plane (we're like kangaroos), from Regina to Calgary, Alberta.

Suffice it to say, that I am sincerely hoping that the hopping is going to stop for a while.

Late.

THE MESSAGE OF YOUR LIFE

Many of you will have heard from Randy Pausch. I must have been living in a cave when all that broke, on YouTube, Oprah etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Well check it out yourself.....

A good many years ago I did a branding project for a company. For it I interviewed key management and one of the questions was:

If you had 5 minutes, in a stadium of 100,000, and with 5 billion watching on TV, what would you say/do? What would be your message?

Randy Pausch had over an hour to give his last lecture. And the power of YouTube and Oprah to boot.

Most of us will not have such an audience to tell our message.....but we have our LIFETIME to live it.

What is your message? Are you living it? What a very challenging question.

To be super honest, right now, I don't really think I'm living it....I'm not even sure I know it, in detail enough to frame it and express it to you.

Let's learn our message. Live our message. I'm sure it's bigger than how you are living now.

what's your financial age

You know how you come up with something, and then you check it on the internet, and tons of people have had the same idea.....well a while ago, I was speaking with a friend of mine...who will remain nameless, coz he's a great guy...but I called him a a financial toddler. He was just very financially unaware, and frankly was a serial overspender.

So I thought. We've got our chronological age, but what's our financial age.....do we save, do we have a plan, do we budget etc. etc. do we have financial maturity.

Anyway, so I thought maybe there would be a book in it, and there might be, but I found this incredibly insightful and short quiz on http://www.unbiased.co.uk/financial-age-tool which is on the site for indie financial advisers in the UK. Take the quiz and ponder what it's trying to ask you.

Then look back on my incremental exponentialism blog.....it all ties in!

Big Picture and all the Small Details

I'm old enough to remember listening to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem. His signoff was always significant to me "Keep your feet on the ground, but keep reaching for the stars." It's a big tangential but related to this post. Because when you look down at your feet, it's not very far away, it's right beneath you. You can see the detail. When you reach for the stars though, it's expansive, limitless, and requires a telescope to see the details.

I told my wife the other day, after a particularly bad decision I made. Please regularly ask me these two questions:

1) Are you keeping the Big Picture in mind?
2) Do you know all the Small Details?

As it has been said, "You need to know where you are going, to figure out how you are going to get there." I'm good at the Big Picture. Projecting, framing, conceptualizing. I'm also pretty good at Small Details. The minutae, the legalese, the things that can trip you up. But I'm sometimes not so good at keeping those two in balance, and context. I can easily get lost in the visioneering, or bogged down in the small details. So I'm happy that I have a wife who will keep me accountable to these two questions, which really help me make decisions, and proceed with my everyday.

After all, its the daily decisions we make that have a cumulative effect of our life's outcome, in technicolor dynamic real-time.

So ask yourself these two questions today.

Maintenance

Turned forty recently, and almost with clockwork precision:

1) Metabolism slowed down
2) Started to go grey
3) Skin not as bouncy as usual.

When you buy a new car, it comes under warranty for a good deal of time. Services are infrequent, and repairs are minor. Come 150,000 miles, and a many years later, maintenance may need to be more frequent, and repairs get more expensive, as do the accompanying parts.....

So what's my point.....as I ponder mortality for the first time in my life, it's come to my attention, that as we get older, we need to more purposefully take care of ourselves, as our physical selves from here on out may decline at an alarming rate without making an effort to keep things working. Yes, I'm talking about eating better, exercising more, and just paying more attention to upkeep.

Take a house for example. You don't even notice the paint flaking at first, but without attention and maintenance, it will quickly deteriorate.

So do something that's good for your body today. Something healthy. Let' live long and healthy lives.

Cheers

LIFE WITHOUT SEAT BELTS

I'm old enough to remember: laying in the back window shelf...yup, where the speakers are behind the rear seats. Usually I would look up at the sky and occassionally, get car sick looking back at the vehicle following us.

Yes I know Princess Di would probably have survived, if she were wearing her seat belt, and Lord knows how many lives have been saved since the advent of mandatory seat belts.

I have a couple of pet hates: the big food/big pharma/big insurance conspiracy, but namely big insurance. I really don't like insurance companies. For those involved in that industry, or have benefitted from having insurance, I don't intentionally want to offend you.

Now insurance feeds off fear. ie. what if negative scenario analysis. Flood, fire, accident......acts of God. Where maiming gets you more money than dying........where they calculate odds to do with your life/death issues.

Yes, seat belts save lives. And your insurance is lower because of them......

But remember life without seat belts? Unbridled, carefree. Think about it. A life without fear. Full of hope. Full of faith. Full of peace.

OPTIONALITY

I used to trade options based on stocks. These were known variously as call options and put options. You might be familiar with employee stock options: the employer gives employees the right to buy company shares at a fixed (usually discounted) price. It gives people ownership. But I digress.

There is inherent optionality in life. Options typically have a fixed expiry date. So does life. It typically has what is known as the strike price, this is the price from which the value of the option is calculated against. We could regard this as where we are at at birth for example. In a call option, the higher the value of the stock, the higher the value of the option. This is typically intrinsic value + time value. So during your lifetime, you have a fixed period of time to create value. You could measure this in $ earned in a lifetime for example.

On a balance sheet, you need to depreciate assets eg. computers. We all know that a computer is not going to last forever. In fact, even if it works fine, it will be incompatible with a lot of new software etc. in only a year's time. So suffice it to say that things don't last forever. Thus they ALL have optionality: a fixed period of time to be of value or not.

So when we expire, will we expire worthless? Or will we expire with a lot of intrinsic value......for those puzzled by this, I'll try and expand upon this concept in due course.

Thanks for reading.

JONAH & THE WHALE, AND GETTING THE MONKEY OFF YOUR BACK

For the last 9 years I've had a general sense of unease about something I believed I should devote my time to seeing come to pass. It involves putting on an event in a country where such a thing would be difficult to pull off. In the last 5 years in fits and starts I have kept the possibility alive, but never put it all on the line to get it done.

In the meantime I have variously spent my time:

1) Doing nothing
2) Doing things to distract myself from doing THE thing

So like Jonah, I've been running away. But the sense that this could be my "Signs" moment-- you know from the movie: the little girl who places glasses of water all around the house, the brother who has wasted his prodigious baseball batting skills; only to discover that the aliens threatening earth can be destroyed by water--this could be the moment, the task, the ONE THING, that I was asked to do by God, and I have found all manner of ways to avoid actually doing it. Tried to hand it off to others....

But it won't go away, I can't stop thinking about it, and it's possible I'm sitting in the belly of the whale and don't even know it.

I can't shake this perennial burden that I need to stop thinking of other things to occupy my time, and focus on getting this thing done. Mostly from the point of view that I need to be obedient to God, but really just to seek the peace, and the removal of the burden that I currently have.

SO......are you doing what you are supposed to do....or are you finding every reason not to do it. 9 years on. Mine is still here, and its getting unbearable.

Financial Statements VS. Life

I've been looking at a lot of financial statements lately. Profit and Loss statements. Balance Sheets. Cashflow statements. Reconciling accounts.

It got me thinking: if I were to take a snapshot right now of my life, and somehow could define and quantify the assets and liabilities, not financial, but personal: perhaps emotional, certainly spiritual....what would it look like? What would my accounts receivables be? What and how much would my accounts payable be? how much equity...positive or negative? Balance Sheets are notoriously unreliable as it is well and truly a snapshot, one slice of time.

P&L statements on the other hand, are over a period of time, so the crests and troughs are clear. Is there net profit? What were the costs of goods sold? What are the income items in my life. The expense items.....do I have a high overhead....

Have I lost you. These ruminations mean a lot to me, as I have always found powerful analogies to life in the world of financial concepts and terms. My first education in this perspective was in the world of optionality, and these days more in the realm of financial statements.

A company has to reconcile its accounts often, and people need to balance their checkbooks....how often do we take stock of our lives? Take inventory.....see what a snapshot looks like....see how we have spent the last year. Look for trends, imbalances....strengths & weaknesses.

Hope this has meant something to you.

Oooops. It's a new year already!

Well. My new year's resolution was to write more.....I was also going to keep to at least a monthly post on this blog...missed December, doh!

So dear reader, you find me at such a tumultuous time that I cannot even start. Though "drama" is nothing new with me, I have put myself in such a predicament that dramatic is the only way to describe it. After a fantastic break with friends in lake tahoe, though things have increased exponentially in terms of the aforementioned drama, my response to it has changed dramatically. Resignation rather than anxiety, with a dash of hope, would best describe it.

You know, in all of the power of perspective, truly, what doesn't kill me will make me stronger....so here's to strength.

Pray your next 12 months has started with a bang.