This week another feature has been added to the www.stock4d.com stock screener. You can now create links to any stock screen. For example, Growing companies with growing dividends, is a stock screen that will find companies that pay of dividend of more than 3% and have grown their dividend more than 20% in the last 5 years. These companies have also grown their income by more than 10% last year.
In order to create a link to a stock screen, set your search parameters as usual. Then click on the “Link” icon. You can then copy and paste the link in emails, or use the html friendly link to add to a web page.
Another cool shortcut is to right click on the results of your search and you can view the details of the highlighted stock on popular financial web sites.
Written by Michel on January 2nd, 2010 with no comments.
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The “rule of 72″ is a quick mental shortcut which allows you to compute how long it will take for an amount of money to double at a certain interest rate compounded annually.
The trick is simple, you divide the interest rate into 72, and that gives you the number of years it will take for the amount to double. For example, at a 10% interest rate, it takes 72/10, or about 7 years for money to double.
For example, assuming your house increases in value 3% a year on average, it would take 72/3, or 24 years for your house to double in value.
To make matters worse, you need to subtract the average inflation rate from your yield. So imagine if you are investing with fixed income vehicles say at 4% with a 2% inflation, that leaves a yield of 2%. With the rule of 72, it will take more than 35 years for an investment to double at 2%.
This puts your investments in perspective. You can see clearly the huge difference that just a few percentage points make. A 12% yield doubles in 6 years while at 7% it takes 10 years. Now take that over 30 years, the 7% yield doubled 3 times, while the 12% yield doubled 5 times. Take 1000$ and double it 3 times, you get 8000$. Now take 1000$ and double it 5 times, you get 32 000$. That is a HUGE difference.
The rule of 72 is a good approximation, but here you’ll find the mathematics behind compound interest.
Written by Michel on December 31st, 2009 with no comments.
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I have had very good user feedback about the Stock4D.com historical stock screener, especially good constructive comments from Charles E. Kirk at the Kirk Report.
Here is the list of recent enhancements to the stock screener:
- I have included 4 example screens to get started quickly
- Highlight visually which parameters are being used
- Save your last screen, so when you come back to the site, you don’t need to enter all parameters again
- Compute the 1 year PEG ratio for Canadian listed companies
- Added Number of analysts used to obtain the 1 year forward PEG ratio
- Added Dividend Payout ratio parameter
- Added Number of employees parameter
- Added Sales per employee parameter
- Added Income per employee parameter
Written by Michel on December 28th, 2009 with no comments.
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If you have a website, there is a good chance you have been contacted by a company called Linkstar, who is operating from the UK, with the following address, http://www.linkstar.co.uk. They are offering cash in return for advertisement on your web site.
Web authors spend a lot of time creating content and programming, so getting a few dollars back by placing a single add on a single web page sounds like a great deal. Google Adsense, is a popular way for authors to place advertising on their web clicks. So when a “Sarah Bennett” contacted me, to offer me 125 dollars per year for single ad, that was a very interesting offer, considering my relative low traffic web sites generate one or two dollars a week with Google adsense.
So “Sarah” from Linkstar, was very quick to reply to my emails, and sent me the terms for the ads. Just when I was about to accept the offer, I decided to do some research to find out if there is any “catch”. Well there seems to be some fine print, which you can’t read in the terms.
The ads that Linkstar proposes, are text link ads. So the ads are effectively regular text with links inside your web pages. Sounds innocent enough, maybe a little too innocent. The problem is that looks like a strategy to increase to ranking of web pages on search engines like Google and Bing. Search engines will rank pages higher, if there are many other pages with links to their pages. So these advertisers may not be interested in the actual ad on your site, but the links to their site, which increases their page ranks in Google.
So there is nothing illegal about this, but the problem is search engines don’t like it when you attempt to artificially increase the ranking of pages.
So I emailed “Sarah” back,
Hi Sarah,
I did some research and I plan on adding google adsense adds, and
adding text link ads to drive traffic to other sites, will risk
getting me banned from Google.
I understand this is all legitimate, but it doesn’t mix well with google.
Sorry, I’ll pass on the offer.
Best regards,
Michel
Here was part of ”Sarah’s” reply:
Michel,
I can only assume that the article is referring to more spammy forms of advertising.
We’re not looking to buy “Google PageRank”. We’re buying textual based adverts for traffic through to our clients. We’ve found that many browsers have become ‘banner blind’ now days and that textual based advertising actually performs well and is generally a more reasonable price.
…
Hope we could work this out.
Regards
Sarah
So I emailed “Sarah” back, asking if it was possible to place an image banner ad instead, which won’t interfere with paging ranking:
Hi Sarah,
The problem is that your clients want to increase their page rank,
from the links that would be put on my site. That does not fly well
with Google.
Here is a page to report those paid links,
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?hl=en&pli=1
Here is more info from a google employee,
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/
I would be more honest with your partners, and let them know that paid
links work well for sites that don’t use google adsense. Otherwise
google may ban them.
If your clients are ok to place a simple banner ad, we can work out
something. Otherwise I cannot take that risk.
Best regards,
Michel
Of course, this time, I never got a reply back from “Sarah” who wanted to work things out. A few days later I emailed again:
Hi Sarah,
Any chance we can work this out, if instead of a text links we create
a graphic image of the text, and when the image is clicked, it opens
up your client’s web site?
This way your client will get the advertising, and Google will see
this as legitimate advertising because it won’t artificially affect
page ranks.
Let me know. I am ready to accept an offer like this.
Michel
No reply. It was clear to me this is a “paid link” scheme.
So if you are considering Linkstar advertising or any other similar scheme, you need to be aware this may get you banned from Google’s index. I don’t think that this risk is worth 125$.
Written by Michel on December 27th, 2009 with no comments.
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