Hijinks Inc.

Category: Finance

  • The $5 gets redesigned

    Hot on the heels of the dollars decline The Bureau of Engraving and Printing has announced that they will releasing a redesign of the five dollar bill. You may recall that originally the five wasn’t going to be redesigned. But they quickly changed their minds once counterfeiters began bleaching $5 notes and printing fake $100 bills on the bleached paper to take advantage of the fact that some of the security features were in the same locations on both notes.

    To pimp slap this counterfeiting trick, the government is changing the $5 watermark from one of Lincoln to two separate watermarks featuring the numeral 5. Also, the security thread embedded in the $5 bill is being moved to a different location than the one sported on the $100 bill.

    Larry Felix, director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was quoted as saying

    “We wanted this redesigned bill to scream, ‘I am a five. I am a five,’”

    during a recent interview with The Associated Press. Alrighty then, Larry…

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  • Longterm Savings Growth

    Focus on the big picture, get a savings account with a good interest rate and try and set aside a certain amount of money each month. Even if you’re only putting in $50 a month, it still adds up over the course of a few years. Figuring out just how much you’ll have put into saving, but figuring out how much you’ll have made from interest is somewhat more time consuming, so here’s a simple way to figure out just how much money you might save over an extended period of time.

    Savings growth calculator after the jump.
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  • Google is up, dollar is down, investers less then pleased.

    Via USAGold.com.

    On February 1st of 2006 I bought one share of Google stock. I paid $400 for it. I planned to ask for the certificate and display it in my office. I wanted to be able to say that I bought Google at $400.

    Today Google closed at $555 and I am up a whopping 39%.

    Suppose I sold my share today and took my $155 profit.

    $155
    -$40 for trading fees
    ————————–
    $115 Gain
    -15% Capital Gains Tax
    ——————————
    $98 Net Gain

    My net profit is $98 (24%) This sound pretty good, except that the dollar has dropped 34% since Feb 2006 and I have actually lost 10% on this transaction.

    BTW, I left for a moment to sell the share during my composition of this post. I can’t afford losses like that. I bought SLV (silver) with the money. I don’t expect to make a profit on SLV, just freeze the $555 asset. I expect that the dollar will fall a lot more than 34% in the next year. Alan Greenspan actually said in his new book that it would be best to keep your money in “other than US currency”. Ironic isn’t it?

    Now granted, this is on a forum frequented and managed by gold fanboys, but it’s hard to call bias on cold hard numbers isn’t it?

    Seeing is Believing

  • Where is the innovation?

    I have mad love and respect for AMD, the first computer I ever built was AMD powered, and rocked the K7. Let’s face it, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to build my own computer at age 14 if it weren’t for AMD, they undercut Intel right and left in pricing, they were the processors for the little guy. But I have to stop and ask them, what happened? Sure, your prices are still lower… but so are your clock speeds, so are your benchmark scores!

    You’re just finally getting around to releasing a quad core processor, umm… hello? Intel did that eons ago. I don’t mean to rag on you guys, but seriously, you’re letting me down. Buying ATI was a smooth move, but in the long term it only made you a slightly more annoying thorn in Intel’s side. Blogging Stocks thinks Intel is prepping to crush you like a steroid crazed football player crushes his Mt. Dew can after winning the big game. Your performance lacking and battery draining mobile chip sets still make me cry, the desktop platform looks like you’re only hope, don’t let me down.

    And then you went and dumped how much in to Transmeta? 7.5 mil? And you’re hoping to get what out of this? Bottom line, I like you AMD, but there’s a reason why I own Intel stock.

  • Facebook could be the biggest IPO since Google

    Facebook LogoRemember when Blackstone (NYSE: BX) was touted as “the biggest IPO since Google” and it’s been falling every since it’s debut, and VMWare (NYSE: VMW) turned out to be a the hot item instead? Good times those were. And now we can’t go a day without hearing some rumor of Facebook going public, or being bought out (which isn’t likely). Now there is an IPO I would cash in on, I missed out a Google being broke at the time, but that will not (hopefully) be the case if Facebook goes public.

    Facebook is currently well on it’s way to 60 million users by the end of this year and has also recently received bona fide status as a social phenomenon in the form of a lawsuit by two of Mark Zuckerburg’s former classmates, claiming he stole their idea. They are suing him for fraud, copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets… brilliant! Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss the twin brothers behind the lawsuit are the founders of the lesser known social networking site ConnectU.

    Lawsuit aside, Facebook is paving the way for potentially amazing performance if/when it goes public. Another rival of Facebook, Classmates.com is readying for its own IPO which may be the push other social networking sites need to get them to go public.