Food for Thought

"What! No E-mail?"

An unemployed man goes to apply for a job with Microsoft as a janitor. The manager there arranges for him to take an aptitude test (Section: Floors, sweeping and cleaning).

After the test, the manager says, "You will be employed at minimum wage, $5.25 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address, so that I can send you a form to complete and tell you where to report for work on your first day."

Taken aback, the man protests that he has neither a computer nor an e-mail address. To this the MS manager replies, "Well, then, that means that you virtually don't exist and can therefore hardly expect to be employed."

Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and having only $10 in his wallet, he decides to buy a 25 lb. flat of tomatoes at the supermarket.

Within less than 2 hours, he sells all the tomatoes individually at 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 before going to sleep that night. And thus it dawns on him that he could quite easily make a living selling tomatoes.

Getting up early every day and going to bed late, he multiplies his profits quickly. After a short time he acquires a cart to transport several dozen boxes of tomatoes, only to have to trade it in again so that he can buy a pick-up truck to support his expanding business.

By the end of the second year, he is the owner of a fleet of pick-up trucks and manages a staff of a hundred former unemployed people, all selling tomatoes.

Planning for the future of his wife and children, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan. At the end of the telephone conversation, the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order to send the final documents electronically.

When the man replies that he has no e-mail, the adviser is stunned, "What, you don't have e-mail? How on earth have you managed to amass such wealth without the Internet, e-mail and e-commerce? Just imagine where you would be now, if you had been connected to the internet from the very start!"

After a moment of thought, the tomato millionaire replied, "Why, of course! I would be a floor cleaner at Microsoft!" Moral of this story:
1. The Internet, e-mail and e-commerce do not need to rule your life.
2. If you don't have e-mail, but work hard, you can still become a millionaire.
3. Seeing that you read this story via the internet, you're probably closer to becoming a janitor than you are to becoming a millionaire.
4. If you do have a computer and e-mail, you have already been taken to the cleaners by Microsoft.

Stock Update as of November 24, 2013

Wow…the PSE has been like a roller-coaster ride recently, and this has caused many of us to panic and want to sell. I don't blame you. After seeing your port go red and the image of that negative balance lingering in your head just won't go away.

My advice to you is to compartmentalize it, but its gonna be tough. You must make a conscious effort of not to think about it. Find a distraction or discipline your mind. Always remember that you are investing for the long-term. From the beginning of the PSE until today, if you had been invested, you would have had an annual growth of 12% even through the Asian Financial Crisis, and the global financial crisis in 2008.

Keep that in mind and stop looking at your portfolio everyday!

Last Friday we saw the PSE plunge from 6,165 to 6,085 at the close.

For the stocks that is on our list, see the table below:

As you can see, I've added the P/E ratio for your guidance. The lower P/E or Price-Earnings Ratio, the better, but this only applies if the company has a steady growth in sales, earnings per share, and has manageable debt.

From the list, we can see that now is a good time to buy MBT (with a P/E ratio of 6.5) and CPG (P/E of 7), but remember…the stocks highlighted in yellow should be the stocks you prioritize when doing your Peso Cost Averaging.

Let's see how this plays out and remember that we are investing for the long-term.

May God bless your investments,

~Crimson