desperate for change

I recently came across “The Other 8 Hours” by Robert Pagliarini at the library. His idea is that while holding down a day job, you should be and can be making a dent in your wealth creation efforts.

This reminded me of the story of how Settlers of Catan was invented. If you haven’t played Catan yet, think of it as a version of Monopoly with much more depth and much more fun. Klaus Teuber, the creator of Catan, was designing boardgames to entertain his family while working his day job as a dental technician. Today, Catan is sold in Chapters bookstores.

Honestly, after working full time at a day job, there isn’t enough energy left to work another job. (If you have a secure slacker day job, please let me know when you have an opening.) It is important to scale back on what you think you can accomplish during your “off” hours instead of pushing hard at building the next Pyramid of Egypt; setting unrealistic goals give you an excuse for failure.

What are you doing during your other 8 hours?

It’s been quite a while since I’ve put real money down at a poker table. Lately I have found myself fiending for some action and decided to fire up some play-money online poker. It took me a while to get back the hang of it; but very quickly it got very dull.

Playing poker well is sometimes described as “hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” The boring part is easy to see: Why else would all these poker players listen to music while they are playing the tournaments? (Or maybe they’re listening to motivational tapes so they’re making good use of their dead time?) The sheer terror part of the game is how you can lose all your money in one single hand.

I think that TV makes playing poker look glamorous, but in reality, those poker tournaments are really about how much mental toughness and stamina you have. You only see the final table, but not the hours of sweat, blood and tears it took to get there. I respect the skill.

I think that the years of developing my ADD makes it hard to play correctly and well for more than half a hand. I think I will stick to my random blogging; at least I have something to show for at the end of the day.

I previously wrote about Predictalot – and managed to organize a fun no-money bragging-rights only contest with a few of my co-workers. Here are some of my impressions.

At first, I tried day-trading on just the current price noise on final tournament result winners. I mean – no transaction costs at all – this is a no-brainer thing to do. However, not being able to put “limit” orders pretty much prevents you from profiting reliably in this manner. This is not a bug – it’s a feature!

Next, I day-traded on a game as it happens (i.e. team A will advance further than team B; where A and B are playing each other). In the USA vs Ghana game, I started into the USA, then shuffled to Ghana after their first goal. Then shuffled back to USA after things were tied up. Then finally loaded up on Ghana as the final minutes tick down. Predictalot was still predicting Ghana to win at about 60% right up until the very end, whereas it is really more like 95% in the final minutes of the overtime. (Perhaps it is the hardcore fans that are propping up the market.) The payoff reflected this error even though it was unlikely USA would be able to tie things up again. It felt like it was in violation of the principle of the market, but I loaded up and scored the easy money.

So what do I think? I think that crowd-sourcing answers is a useful exercise which cranks out reasonable results. Having Predictalot beside me while I am watching the game is fun – it is like seeing Hold ‘Em Poker odds while the action is going on.

Predictalot, however, is not a useful mechanism of capturing every single nuance of the game as it happens, especially a fast game like soccer. I think that this is a practical problem and not a theoretical problem: if the market is liquid and efficient enough, then every single kick, pass, and penalty would turn into information on the market immediately.

Predictalot fun factor? Definitely! Buy buy buy! Sell sell sell! Gooooooooal!

I am in a World Cup pool. There are six people and we each had to select a team to win it all. Because some teams are more contested than other teams, there is a bidding process to resolve the team that is under contention. You must have a team at the end of the process for a minimum of $5; if bidding is needed to resolve the ownership for a particular team, then the bids must go up by increments of $2.

Given that I am a newbie in the going-ons of the World Cup, I determined that my best strategy is to go for the favourite, Brazil, and hopefully haven’t severely overpaid for the privilege of having the best team.

The process for bidding and team selection was kind of hap-hazarded and would make any rules-lawyer cry “objection” pretty much every step of the way (which I did). But it is done to everyone’s satisfaction in the end to some degree.

So in the end, I have $17 invested in a $69 pool for Brazil to win. So I am at 3-1 which is honestly over-paying, but not so far out of wack that it is ridiculous. You can get as good as 5-1 on some gambling sites. The other people in the pool got their teams for anywhere from $9 to $5. (The cheapest team, England, went for $5.)

On a totally unrelated note, I got a letter today from UBC thanking me for a gift I gave in 2004 and asking me to make a donation by August 1, 2010 if I can. Their timing couldn’t be better.