I Found it!

Remember how I was puzzled over some odd behaviour on the stock exchange the other day? Well, a bit of the answer arrived yesterday in the form of a sample of the newsletter that hit me by accident last week. I'd accidentally got an e-mail summary of the thing and one of the BUY recommendations was Leighton, which tallied well with my own research. I bought up $20 000 worth, which I happened to have in OneSteel, which they had recommended as a SELL. Made a few hundred dollars on the deal.

The next day, on opening time I was astonished to find about a hundred parcels of around a thousand BUY orders for Leighton sitting on the market. Lots of little orders. Little in the sense that normal parcels are around three or four times bigger, these were still seven or eight thousand dollars worth each. As I mentioned, they got snapped up by someone who sold all these shares in precise lumps, which was odd, because the stock had onle spent a few days below that price in the past year so to make a profit you'd have had to bought at the right time and price.

Anyways, I got the full printed newsletter yesterday. They have various sample portfolios for their subscribers, recommending shares to buy and sell for Starter, Growth, Income and Defensive investors. They had four BUY recommendations for Leighton at 766, 894, 1 020 and 894 shares respectively. Obviously there are about a hundred subscribers who follow this advice religiously and they were the ones who showed up when the market opened.

The thing is, there is the e-mail summary, the version on the website, and the printed copy mailed out to subscribers. The printed version is mailed out, so what I reckon happens is that someone checks out the web version, takes note of the recommendations and makes purchases or sales in the expectation that the following day a hundred people will be leaping into the market, having arrived home, read their newsletter and made their BUY/SELL orders overnight.

This could be worth knowing a few hours in advance that a million dollars worth of shares are going to be bought or sold. The newsletter comes out fortnightly - will take note of what happens next time around.

Pete's printer

Finally got jack of cheap inkjet printers with a choice of expensive refill cartridges or messy refill kits. I've been promising myself for a long time that the next one I got would have those refillable ink tanks, and today I went and got one.

Canon i560 which just happened to be the most convenient model in Dick Smith's when I went in. Apparently it has a high print quality and ppm - and my initial experience is that it's a lot better in both departments than my previous models - but I'm really pleased with the ink system.

It's got four cartridges, one each for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and a big Black, you can see how much ink is in each cartridge and you can refill them seperately by just peeling back a bit of tape and squirting in a resupp. The cartridges themselves are fairly cheap, about $10 each, and they don't come with those bloody built-in print heads.

I was saving a tonne of money by refilling my cartridges, and had found a supplier of decent sized squirter bottles, but it was the colour carts that were pissing me off. You never know just how much to put in of each colour, and as the cartridges are opaque, the only way to know when it's full is when ink starts dribbling out the other end, and after a few reloads the bloody things start to run into each other and the resulting colours aren't what they could be. Plus no matter how careful I am, I usually wind up with a few drops of ink where they shouldn't be.

Of course, I could eliminate the mess by buying a new cartridge each time I ran out, but although black is easy enough, the colour carts always have one colour running out first, so you are chucking away perfectly good ink of the other two colours in the same cartridge, and the damn things are expensive enough that after a few goes you've spent more than the original cost of the printer in replacement ink cartridges.

I had a Lexmark that was a lovely printer, but fair suck, just one set of replacements was more than the dam' thing had cost me, so it's languishing under the house because IBM cleverly designed it to be unrefillable.

I was thinking of getting one of those all in one jobs, but they don't come with ink tanks, so it's the same problem all over again when you run out of ink, and that's just more hassle than it's worth.

Anyways, this thing was a reasonable price, it's got a USB port on the front for direct printing of pictures from a digital camera, a few software goodies and the reviews I've found on the net seem to be pretty positive.

I managed to install it successfully despite having dozens of windows open and blatantly ignoring the set up instructions about turning bits on and off, so it's pretty bombproof. Comes with USB and parallel ports, and all in all I'm well pleased with it.

Pete, keen on "no-fuss" printing

Old Arms

I found a UK writer's site yesterday, signed up for a free trial, and uploaded my Old Arms piece, which drew some flattering comments. I'm including this piece in Bookcrossing Through Oz and if I can make the rest of the book half as appropriate as OA, I'll be very happy indeed.

Moved my bird feeder around to the side of the house where it's easier for me to see during the day. So far the birds haven't noticed the change, but I'm looking forward to seeing the parrots and chasing away the pigeons and Indian mynahs.