How Will Check 21 Affect You?Written by Shannon Jarvies
You may already be familiar with Check 21, a federal law that goes into effect on October 28, 2004. If you're like me, this may be something you hadn't heard about until just yesterday. The Check Clearing for 21st Century Act, otherwise known as Check 21, is process of turning checks your write into images and transmitting them by computer.What does this mean to you? Expect time your check clears to decrease drastically. If you live paycheck to paycheck and often count on a one or two day "grace period" to get funds into your account after paying bills, you'll need to re-organize your budgeting process. Checks will clear in a matter of hours now, not days. You will no longer be getting your cancelled checks back with your bank statement. If you get anything at all, it will be a "substitute check" which is a certain kind of copy of your original check. You may be charged extra fees. It's possible that by using this method, your check will be paid twice: once with original and once with scanned image. Or there may be an error made in amount a check was written for in process of turning an paper check into an electronic check.
| | How to Analyze the Veracity of Investment NewslettersWritten by John McKeon
When trying to analyze whether a promotional ad for an investment newsletter or a market timing investment trading system is worthy of investigation, following questions should be asked:Does strategy have a track record? Without this you are really allowing your emotions to be in play. All of us want to believe that if someone says something it must be true. Yet sad fact is truth is probably just opposite. Most ads and promotions are put in print for self interests first, and all else second. One has to view anything on web with a skeptical eye. The minimum that an investment strategy should give you is a previous track record. The longer track record is better. Something that has worked for a matter of months is usually not long enough in trading world to be considered successful. Some promoters do not release their track records because they say that “past performance is not an indication of future results”. This is true but certainly no performance is not an indication of future results either. Some promoters do not release their track records because they say “we used to do a track record but subscribers got upset if strategy lost money when they subscribed even though it made money over a yearly period.” That may also be true but it is also part of game. Subscribers can not expect to make money from day one when trading a long term strategy. However, that should be self evident in track record. And some promoters do not release their track records simply because they don’t have one or they have a bad one. It’s as simple as that no matter what they say. Is track record that they are promoting in real time or was it simulated in a computer based on past data? What does this really mean? Real time means that trading signals that were used to produce track record results were actually generated at that specific moment in time. In reality. Most track records on investment web sites are not real time even when they say they are. Even if they did not use a computer and it was done by hand, if data taken from last five years but web site is only a year old then it can’t be so. Why is this so important? Because trading is not trading if human emotions are removed. No greed, no complacency, no panic, no hysteria. Almost all computer-generated trading programs fail miserably when actually implemented because either data was too short a time period or human factor was ignored. That is assuming human that input data did it without human emotion. I once had an acquaintance who told me he had a system that returned 80% per month for last 6 months. He said he implemented it 6 months in real time. I asked how much he had invested in this strategy. He said nothing because he was paper trading. I said that there is no such thing. He proceeded to tell me what paper trading was. I replied that I knew what he thought paper trading was but it is not trading because when you paper trade your emotions are not in play. Human greed and ego has a way of making you believe something to be real without looking objectively at data. But once actual real money is at risk complexion of situation dramatically changes.
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