Sivan Segev | 
05 18th, 2009| 
Posted on my new blog:
Bought Wii at discount, Looking at games for my 4 year old
Cheers!
May
18
May
15
Hello, I’m happy to announce that I’m in the process of relocating all my content from withinmymeans.blogvis.com and withinmymeans.freehostia.com to Thrifty Trend - Sivan’s new website including DelayedExec and Free Stocks Ticker
See you there soon!
Cheers!
Mar
9
And again, I’m pretty sure the google cache page is working just fine…
The fellows at blogvis are really hurting my reputation and the blog’s web presence.
Mar
5
Sucks ass - that’s all I can say. I bet they don’t mean to suck as much ass, but they do.
My blog withinmymeans.blogvis.com is down again on 3/5/09. It’s not that it has ever attracted a huge following, but it did have it’s 10-20 readers a day. This is a hit to my own reputation.
Once again, I refer my readers to google-cache:
Dec
17
I’m happy to announce a new open sourced freeware I wrote called DelayedExec.
The problem: When Windows Vista starts many applications are registered to run and some are locking up resources and cause you to sit there and wait until the memory and resource consumption storm is over.
The hatchet solution: People on the web would advice you to turn off most of the start up applications. For some it improves windows startup experience.
My solution: DelayedExec is yet another startup applications, only it allows you to move the other applications from startup to being run in a queue in a timely manner - leaving you a less stressful computer upon startup.
Download here. (zipped MSI)
Source code here. (zipped c#)
Prerequisite: DotNet 3.5 Runtime
My personal flavor of setting it up: move everything that doesn’t register itself back into the delayed queue, and put the sidebar at the top of the queue.
What it doesn’t solve: Some services and hardware devices cause windows to lockup for a few seconds, this is out of my application’s control - and playing with devices and services to reduce stress is something a bit “risky” that might not work for everybody.
Screenshot:
License and liability:
I hope it helps you, I don’t take any responsibility regarding how you use it or what it does to your computer. The license is simple: free to use, free to change code - don’t remove link-back and credit from application. The installer is Microsoft standard automatic installer - and if it fails, all I can say is try again.
Have fun and spread the word around, support this site - click on an ad.
Cheers!
Dec
2
All my uploads were on skydrive, so regardless of my blog status at blogvis.com they are available.
Here are the links:
FreeStocksTicker.zip - 1.0 release
FreeStocksTicker_src.zip - 1.0 released source code
FreeStocksTicker Beta.zip - 1.1 beta with several scrolling lines
FreeStocksTicker live Beta Src.zip - 1.1 beta source, updated more frequently than the beta binaries
The source code is in C# and demonstrate usage of Yahoo online services to download stock quotes, creating plugin mechanisms, and reading RSS feeds.
Keep’n it “real”…
Dec
2
I really thought I’d never go back to this site, but here I am. Today, blogvis died. If it won’t come back by next week, I’ll restore from backup my posts there over to here, and work on the theme. I think that most of my recent posts might be gone, for now though - there’s google-cache:
cached “withinmymeans.blogvis.com”
Cheers? We shall see…
Update1
Imported my content from blogvis, blogvis.com claim they will be up again on new servers. The import is very imperfect… Need to copy images and adjust theme, also add plugins and enter my ads again. Hopefully the blogvis will be back soon - I don’t wish to relocate my blog…
Update 2
Blogvis is up, and so is this site. You might find backlinks here to blogvis - but for the most part I have the look and feel under control on freehostia. It seems things load up here faster too.
Just to be clear, this is a BACKUP site. New posts will and are posted on blogvis and unless there’s a problem will not be reposted here (until I find a good enough reason to start paying for a domain).
Update 3 - 12/9/2008
Blogvis went down again, and they took all the blogs off air. When they restored my blog - everything was gone except for the content I had in backup to begin with. 
One thing is sure, the template I used is not supported and my blogvis blog will drift away from this one.
I’m working on restoring what I can though. It could take a couple of days.
CHEERS!!!
Dec
1
I could just write each one of the monthly free trade as one of the 10 great reasons, I’ll try to go deeper.
I have been a client of ZECCO for more than a year now and know a thing or two about the good and the bad. I’ll list 10 great reasons to sign up to ZECCO, then I’ll give you a link (I’ll make a small commission if you sign up there…), then I’ll list a few negatives.
Here goes:
- 10 commissions free trades are more than enough to purchase new positions, liquidate a few positions or rebalanced once a month. This is just the right amount to limit you, the investor, from over-trading and foolishly destroying your capital. If you must trade more than 10 times a month, the cost of the trade is still very cheap. Transferring your individual account is free. Transferring your IRA account is cheap, and the yearly fee of the IRA account is relatively cheap.
- Their interface and infrastructure has matured over the last year, it is very useful and much more reliable. To compensate for September’s shortfalls in accommodating the overload of trades - we, the investors, got October with unlimited free trades. They listen to us and take actions when action is needed.
- Trading records are now available online. They used to send us snail mail for every day we traded, which is wasteful and annoying. Now you get email alert and get to download the trade confirmation in PDF format.
- I’m not an options trader, nor will I use their Mutual funds service - which had greatly improved. Reason #4 is to state that these services are available and the options trade is very cheap (compared to other brokers). ZECCO also provides low interest on margin, which I don’t use - so I won’t comment on.
- Premium tools. Again, not a subscriber (I’m not cheap - just fiscally concerned…), but I did get a free trial of the performance tools provided by gainskeeper and those are pretty useful (if you don’t use other offline tools to trace your performance). For the same reason, I can’t comment much on the active trader service with the streaming quotes except to mention that it’s there.
- Excellent customer support. You call or email and always get polite and on the point response. Enrollment and cash transfer mechanisms also have greatly improved.
- Quick orders mechanism, ultra fast execution. I have another brokerage account, when the market is overloaded (like in September), many brokerage houses had problems. ZECCO had increased their capacity and have fared well since. You need to remember though, it is always smart to sell when you can, not when you must - you just don’t want to be looking at a panic sell and be the one that needs to participate.
- Nice and useful real-time charts, watch lists and positions screen. The default screen for an investor/trader is the “Account Overview” which gives you total account value, positions, orders and a frame for quick quote. Like I said, nice.
- Maintaining a free commission account is much better than holding your portfolio in mutual funds. You have parallel potential investments in the form of cheap ETF-s, and you have a huge selection of such investment vehicles to go long, short, or commodities based on your strategy. You, the private investor get the chance to be much smarter and more diversified starting with only 2500$. You will not get kicked out of a position in a mutual fund because that mutual fund just lost 60%, and your 4000$ went below the 2000$ minimum as is the case with mutual funds and mutual funds brokerage. In addition, the only way to invest in a bearish mind set with a retirement account is to buy bearish ETF-s (or mutual funds), most retirement account providers don’t provide you with that option.
- ZECCO is SIPC insured, that’s not FDIC, but it does mean that your positions will remain your positions in case something would happen to ZECCO, the value of those positions would rely on the market though. For more (and better) details, see here.
If you have any question about my experience with them, feel free to comment below.
Open an account, you won’t regret it (you might regret your investment choices though)
| [ad#zecco-banner] |
Like I promised, here are a few negatives:
- The first negative has nothing to do with ZECCO, but with novice investors (like I am). Recklessness is often unnoticed until huge and painful losses get compounded. The most important thing a person with no experience should do before starting to invest is to think about his exit strategy and about his defensive moves. ZECCO gives you the freedom to be extremely successful or extremely reckless, you need to avoid the latter.
- I’m not a fan of “ZeccoShare”, that’s all I have to say about that elective and free service. “Community” is just not what I’m looking for. There are a lot of other resources you could use to do research, use them.
- There was no 3rd party research reports. Like I mentioned before though, there are ways around that. Last I checked though they added S&P analyst reports. Like mentioned before, they keep improving their services.
- When you have no margin, you have to wait a day or 3 days for trades to clear before having access to your cash. This could be the same as with other brokers, but it’s something to keep in mind. You can’t be very quick with your trades if you are fully invested in a retirement account. Should you trade like a maniac in a retirement account? Let’s leave that debate to another post…
- In both positions and balance view, you will get wrong real time data after trades or when you put an order to buy something. You need to maintain your total balance calculations off line or at watch lists.
- To track dividend payments, you need to enter the “Funding and Transfers” tab. Sometimes you need to reenter password. Then click on “cash history”, then manually enter a date range that includes today.
- The login sequence could be faster. I believe they are still working on improving that.
- I don’t know who still uses a live, personal broker. You don’t get that at Zecco, nor almost anywhere else unless you are extremely wealthy.
I hope I provided you with useful info, comments are welcome, spread it around.
Cheers!
Nov
30
My browser of choice is Fire-Fox, the biggest reason is the most important plugin out there - “AdBlock Plus”. This plugin prevents you from wasting time and bandwidth downloading ads which will often blur your vision while trying to read web content. I’ve been using it for more than a year and it has made browsing the web much faster on many different machines.
I know that many bloggers who actually do make money from blogging (not me) are using AdSense and other services to allow a tiny monthly income, and this plugin kills it for everyone - but for the web content consumers it is simply worth it.
P.S.
Before downloading Fire-Fox and installing AdBlock, be nice - click on an add on this site. Just clicking on an adsense sends me a cent or two, clicking on other content like Zecco or others might not make any dough for me, but I assure you I try to collect ads which could help you the reader. It is more important to me to provide you with value than make any money. Is this why I didn’t make any money? No it’s because I don’t chase readers and advertise much, so I get very little traffic - if you’re here, I’d love to hear feedback about the kind of content I provide…
Sample ads you can click:
| [ad#zecco-banner] |
| [ad#ad-1] |
OK - back to business, download and browse faster here:
Firefox |
Adblock Plus |
Happy Faster Browsing,
Cheers!
Nov
29
To those who downloaded and are using “Free Stocks Ticker”, here’s a quick FYI:
When you add feeds in the options xml, if the feed URL has the character ‘&’ in it, replace that character with & to avoid a crash and losing your options xml file. This is an XML standard, the character is used by that standard to signal many other characters as is documented in this wikipedia page.
To try it out, here are a few sample RSS feeds from financial websites you can add:
<feed>
<name>Coke stock market watch feed</name>
<url>http://www.marketwatch.com/rss/newsfinder/AllMarketWatchNews/?p=word&pv=KO&t=KO&dist=TQP_Icon_rss</url>
</feed>
<feed>
<name>Pepsi stock google finance feed</name>
<url>http://finance.google.com/finance?morenews=10&rating=1&q=PEP&output=rss</url>
</feed>
<feed>
<name>Alteria stock yahoo finance feed</name>
<url>http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=MO</url>
</feed>
Another note, for some feeds, like financial news for individual stocks, you might wish to increase how old you want the posts to be allowed, I increased it to 60 for these feeds:
<maxDaysOld>60</maxDaysOld>
Cheers!
