Happy May Day to all

When I lived in England, May Day was for me the heralding of a new season. It was so easy to be caught out by the emergence of the crocuses and daffodils in February and March and those few sunny days about then too to think that SPRING was on its way. May Day with the extra daylight after the clocks moved - it was the beginning of a new season..  It feels a little that way here. I set out in my last post to stay sane and to stay safe. I also wrote down a bunch of things that I was going to do. It feels a little like some new beginnings: 

• Well I can report that I am safe. My hand is healing and the medical reports were that it did not require any intervention. Good news from that medical visit is that the plate that was inserted in my left arm (following a cycling accident in Switzerland in 2010) does not need to come out. The surgeon in Luzernkantonspital had intimated that it should come out in 2 years. Typical male - took me nearly 3 years to get that tested out. I did also see my doctor briefly to get the referral and will see her for a proper check up in May
• I have spent some more time working on my Industry Rockstar profile as a Business Coach. So far I have written a first draft of the proposition and have created a Facebook Fan page. I found a great way to get the focus to doing the writing. I spent time with a friend building out his business ideas. I wrote up my draft so that he could copy the outline for his business - love the concept of WIN-WIN or Two-for-One. I also embarked on the 30 day Facebook Fan Page Challenge run by Sue Worthington. Like all the things I do I have not really followed up on the challenge  but I do have over 30 likes on my page from the challenge and I can get the insights and choose my own vanity URL.



Facebook Fanpage



• I did start to do some cycling training. I moved my flights to Darwin a little earlier so that I can start Cycle Around Australia 2013 leg third leg from Darwin instead of Katherine. I had been holding back from changing the flights because I was not really sure that I was actually going to be in a position to do the ride. My hand does not feel strong enough to allow me to ride on the roads - so I have installed the cycle trainer. That was a bit of fun as my small wheeled bike did not fit and I had to retrieve my original road bike from storage. The last time I broke my hand in 2006, I trained while watching the Commonwealth Games broadcast from Melbourne. This time I have been catching up on the training videos for the Steven Essa Webinar Magic program, I bought some time ago. As I will be using webinars for my Business Coaching efforts, it is great use of time = Two-for-One again. And for anyone wanting to explore the power of webinars to get 10 times the conversion rates compared to normal channels, Steven Essa is your man.  Thanks Steve for being a great entertainer while you teach. So my fitness is improving. My weight has not really moved  yet and blood pressure seems OK.
• Cycle Around Australia 2013 has completed leg 1 from Melbourne to Cairns with 15 riders. It all seems to have worked well with riders enjoying the peacefulness of the Great Inland Way. 18 riders departed Cairns on April 29 headed for Darwin on The Gulf Ride. the tail end of Cyclone Zane has given them two wet days to start but day 3 is looking good. The blog for leg 1 is Melbourne to Cairns and for leg 2 is Cairns to Darwin. Kathy updates these pages every day or two - bookmark them to keep track of what the riders are up to. We are still actively looking for riders for legs 4 and 5 - Broome to Perth and Perth to Melbourne. I have ridden both of those legs before and can vouch that they are great rides. Have a look at http://www.cycleacrossoz.com.au and see if you dare. Our charity effort is coming along - you will see from the blog page that we have raised $800 - without any real big marketing effort. We have also collected close to $500 in the collecting tins the riders have with them. Our chosen charity is the TADVIC Freedom Wheels campaign. TADVIC’s highly skilled and innovative team of therapists, engineers and volunteers help children with disabilities to enjoy mobility and a form of recreation previously unavailable to them.  If your philanthropy budget allows, head to our My Cause page to make a donation. And my other contribution is I keep the websites running and our Page 1 ranking in Google remains for "cycle Australia". Quite happy with that.

• The markets have consumed a lot of my time - probably more than I would like and more than I need. The FX Markets continue to be difficult as the devaluation of the Yen has stumbled at the magical round number of 100 JPY to the US Dollar. My FX trading activity remains challenged - I lost 1.5% in my direct portfolio during April (a few bad trades in week one and a few in week 4). I am a lot more focused on the strategies I use and that is helping. I have paid the price of having too many strategies in my armoury. My robot is a much simpler person than me and it managed close to 4% in April (and it too had a bad week in week 4), And my outsourced portfolio managed 2.2% in April after a horror start. FX Options trading is working a little better with new positions added on JPY pairs and a few more short on the Australian Dollar. The prime focus during the days has been trading breakouts on ASX listed stocks and long dated options on the US market at night. With options volatility at pretty low levels there is no shortage of opportunity to position well. With my trip coming up during June and July, I have spent a lot of time in the last week or so extending expiries on short term positions to the time I get back from Perth. That has been fun - new skills learned and not fully mastered (2 nights ago rolled 3 contracts incorrectly and had to retrace at some cost)
• Internet Marketing activity has been sporadic and not as focused as one needs. I have joined in a new mobile apps network marketing programme called Rippln. Like all MLM's it is grabbing its share of attention and detractors. What one cannot argue about is the impact they have made in getting 300,000 members signed up in two weeks. The basic idea is to build a platform so that members can benefit when mobile apps are shared rather than handing the cash to Apple or Google through their App Stores. If you want to join in my ripple just click on the image and collect your invite code. What I can say is my network has produced a reasonable number of members as I learn how to market.

 

 

The next few weeks has to be about FOCUS on getting fit - as we ride typically over 100 kms every day and it will be hot, I need to get out on the bike for several hours at a time. A few things will have to slide. I will pick one Internet Marketing initiative and get it going well enough so that it can run solo while I am travelling - in 3 weeks that should be a good target.

 

• 

2013 Q1 Passes By

Daylight Savings ended this weekend in Sydney  I wrote last around Valentine's Day and was not a very happy camper then.  Well I can safely say that the two months that have passed have not been filled with great stuff. Well maybe that is more a picture of the way things stand right now - first piece is typing this with a broken right hand does not help. That is part of a long sad story which is probably best left to the halls of silence. All I will say it has been a re-run of an old movie - 7 years ago almost to the day I broke my right hand when all the emotional turbulence boiled over - that was the start of a journey out of a 25 year marriage which has brought me to where I am now. The lesson my counsellor used to hammer into me - we do not have to re-run the old movies. It is in our hands to change the endings of the movies as they play. It is a crazy man who lets a movie run the same way. I must be the crazy man - it is happening all over again. CRAZY MAN

So in no particular order, this is what has been going on:

• Travelled to South Africa at the beginning to March - you will recall that my mother (aged 88) had taken a fall and was in rehab mode. My sister had spent a few weeks with. We arranged for a live-in carer to cover the time before I could make a trip. That worked well so that by the time I arrived there she was mobile again and cleared by the doctor to drive her car. In fact I did not have to do very much at all other than get on top of her financial matters and do the filing. I did  take a pilgrimage out to the Magaliesberg mountains to the north of Johannesburg to pay tribute to my friend, Beresford Jobling, who died there last August (http://breatheyourdreams.blogspot.com.au/ for a tribute I wrote)

• Followed that up with a trip to Pattaya Thailand to attend David Cavanagh's Best Coaching Programme. I had been lucky to win that trip during the Jeff and Kane Industry Rockstar Intensive course I had done at the end of January. While I fancy myself as a bit of an IT geek and quite able to find most of the things I need to build my Internet Marketing businesses this struck me as a way to turbocharge my progress. The training program was brilliant in content but especially in the group of attendees. Pretty well all of have been through a Jeff and Kane event - so a bit of self-selection produced a group of people ready to make go of the things they were learning. The content was jam packed with practical hints on things to explore; tools to use; products to sell; traffic methods to apply. I signed up for the next level program to further accelerate my Internet Marketing efforts - and to leverage the outsourcing models that David applies in his business. The video below was based on stuff learned in his course - a first attempt for me at filming and editing a video - and a subject I love - airlines and flying. There is a lot of stuff to follow in this whole area. If you ever get a chnce to do one of David's courses - do it. It will pay for itself in weeks if you take action.

 

• Spent a weekend in Thailand after the course - Lorraine flew up and we spent a few days together. We rambled around Pattaya a bit. The highlight of that was that we were having dinner with a few members of the group at one of the seafood restaurants on the pier. It had been a bit of a challenge to get everyone to agree to a spot but I knew where I wanted to be. We sit down at a table and I hear a voice over my shoulder "that explains why you did not respond to my e-mail". The last time I had been at the restaurant was with my friend of 18 years from Basel Switzerland. We had spent a week celebrating his 50th birthday and playing some golf. And there were Daniele and Heinz. Another lesson learned - when the universe sends signs, FOLLOW them. Got to spend a night in Bangkok - that was nice to reconnect with that city - great to revisit some old haunts and to remind ourselves how hot hot it gets.
• Markets have been interesting to say the least. The period of retracement and consolidation that started in January has persisted. The events in Cyprus put a big spoiler into what was proving to be a nice run-up in European Equities. At least I felt I was well positioned when I took off on my travels - and it seems to be holding out fine. The beauty about the markets right now is that everyone is so scared that Options Volatility is quite low - hence cheap to get into position. The FX markets have shown similar results to January - so in March my robot outperformed my own account which outperformed my outsourced account. All of this was put in the shade by the massive action announced by the Bank of Japan last week. I am pleased to say I was positioned for that and even managed to get some FX trades on to add to the long dated options I have running. Looking good so far. Now we need to worry a little about the politicians in Europe and the President of North Korea. They can between them very easily make a mess. And then there is a new outbreak of bird flu in China. Still waiting though for the markets to work out that investing in fixed interest at yields lower than inflation is not CLEVER
• And the big cycling news is that Cycle Around Australia 2013 kicked off with an on time departure from Melbourne on March 23. day 17 in and all seem to be doing well. The blog can be found here http://melbourne2cairns2013.blogspot.com.au. The riders are supporting a charity for this ride. The charity (TADVIC) provides modified bicycles for disabled children - a worthy cause. Have a look at the video I made for the cause - a first attempt too with a new piece of video editing software I do not understand. Head here to make a donation http://bit.ly/YxEHlc

What next:

• Focus on building my Industry Rockstar profile as a Business Coach. This is going to be a webinar driven business and the focus is going to be Internet Marketing Business and building an Internet Marketing Engine. 
• Start driving some serious traffic efforts leveraging the software tools I have already amassed - Facebook Formulas;  D4U Twitter (that is going well); SocialSpeed; Spiders Web; Traffic Amplifier; and more.
• Build my own brand presence - probably will drive two Mark Carrington Business Coach and Mark Carrington Affiliate Marketer. 
• Keep on finding good market opportunities for the investment markets.
• I do need to get on the bicycle to do some training as I am currently scheduled to depart Katherine for Broome on June 4th. Lorraine has had to withdraw from supporting that leg of the ride - that means I will most likely ride from Darwin 4 days earlier. The tricky part is I have a broken hand - will have to do the first 3 weeks of training on a cycle trainer. Will be watching tons of webinars in that time.

Above all I need to stay sane and stay safe. I do not feel either of those right now - hence one broken hand.

Heading to Valentine's Day

It is hard to believe that January has gone and we are well into February. Been a while too since my last post and I am struggling to find a positive spin to what is going on. Here goes in no particular order:

• Had a great training ride for Cycle Around Australia 2013. We drove down from Sydney to Bairnsdale for the start. Its a long drive made a little longer by ignoring the GPS not far out of Cooma. the price was a ride down the Bonang highway which has a sign near the start saying winding road for 105 kms. Was a great road but a hard drive. Was great to meet a few new faces and the long time friends in the campsite. Cycled from Bairnsdale towards Omeo - would have been a great ride but for the heat with 48C on the road. I surrendered to the sag wagon at 104kms some 14 kms short of target and one big hill not ridden. Happy with that as it was my first ride over 100 kms in over a year. Next day was hoto too and very windy and I could only make 25kms of the road up to Mt Hotham. We stayed in a ski lodge there - unique in the summer. Ride down to Bright the next day was great - mostly downhill and some great descending opportunities. Great weekend. On the ride itself, it is all systems go with 15 riders signed up and fully paid to depart Melbourne on March 23. Blog can be found at Melbourne to Cairns. We will be supporting Freedom Wheels programme as our charity - it provides modified bikes to help disabled kids to get riding. Our cause link can be found at Freedom Wheels
• At home life has a few twists and turns, some good and some bad. My mother (aged 88) had a fall which she chose not to tell us about. All was well for a few days and then one morning (the day I called her) she could not walk. My sister-in-law organized for her to go to hospital where she stayed for a few days. My sister flew out from UK to stay with her. Now we are exploring options for in house care while we wait for an opening in a nearby retirement village. We shall see what transpires - all a bit worrying but thank heavens for family. 
• My soon-to-be-18 daughter headed off to Canberra this weekend to commence her university life at Australian National University. She has decided to enroll for a PPE program (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) - the first time it is offered and a small programme with only 30 spaces. While she does not live at home with me it is a bit of a wrench.  Also good to see her brother sign up to drive her down there - as part of his learner driver training. By all reports she has settled in and met a few new people which she is happy with.
• It has been a week since finishing the Industry Rockstar Intensive course run by Jeff & Kane I signed up for a few months ago. This was a 4 day training session designed for consultants and coaches to ramp their businesses up into more of a speaker platform driven business - essentially to go from a 1 to 1 client model to a 1 to many coaching model. And once one gets the one to many model working with strong demand, one can increase the rates charged for one to one coaching and consulting. I must say I was a little skeptical as the model seemed very focused on the consultant model - and I spent 25 years doing that and was not keen to go back to it. The selling grind of that business just killed me. What became clear during the sessions (we did a lot of group coaching) was that I have a huge reservoir of experience and a unique ability to help other people solve their challenges. It was great to be able to help and enjoy people grow in my hands. I came out of there with a lot more focus and will apply that to my own internet businesses. I was lucky enough to win 3 training programmes - one on strategy ; one on marketing and one on technology delivery - and I bought into the Industry Rockstar Trainers course. This has produced some bi timetable pressures - that might be a good thing. The course is definitely worth it and if you get a chance to go to a preview event you will be doing well.
• I came out of that training quite motivated and more focused.  Instead of getting to work on that I slid back into doing what I have been doing for ages. And I am back to wrestling with the depression demons on and off - they have been building since coming back from the training ride. Have found it very difficult to focus. I did set up to do two tasks last week one of which was to set up the charity pages for the Cycle Around Australia website. Got that done. The other one did not happen. Did not do any riding either. Relationship pressures are not helping as Lorraine and I struggle to undo the old behaviours we exhibit. Big lesson - new relationship means time to leave old behaviours at the door. the black dog can growl at them.
• And then there are the markets. Have spent a lot of time on these - my personal portfolio has now been transferred across. Only took 3 and a half months. It would have been faster in  the old postal days. January was interesting - we were expecting some consolidation on the JPY pairs and on the EUR and many people got caught when the consolidation did not happen. For example of the 4 FX portfolios I have. My active one lost 3.5%; my outsourced one lost 4.1%; my robot one gained 4.3% and my FX options almost doubled. It tells me quite firmly that I am better off working out macro trends and positioning myself for those. And stock markets went up in the big rally - well positioned for all of that. For the next few months the focus is on positioning for the great rotation as investors discover that yields are lower than inflation.

Focus and Depression

Another week goes by and another Monday rolls around. It is all a big struggle - everything is telling me to Focus and the vast range of things that need doing scream out STOP because you do not know where to start.  Then when the small things do not work out, the black dog that crouches in the shadows is just waiting and growling and saying "told you so. You are a loser!!"

So it is time to get back to one thing at a time to work out a winning way that brightens up the dark corners and encourages the black dog to sneak back into the shadows a little further out of reach.

So in the spirit of making life even less focused, I spent a whole afternoon with friends, Dean and Yvonne mapping out a strategy for launching Dean's new book, The Nine Human essences for Business Success.

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Dean has self-published the book and now wishes to get it published on Kindle and run a full scale online launch. Here I am thinking I can help with this launch. It creates a forcing device to keep me pushing forward on leveraging the tools I have bought and the things I have learned. And after all this is why I signed up to join The Number One Book Club. Step One - work out how to publish to Kindle. As it happens this does not look like a major task - take the basic Word document; convert to HTML; add in the right Headings for SEO purposes and work out how and what to hyperlink. There are a few technical things to worry about - document needs to be less than 50Mb in size and graphics are size constrained and tables do not work. The marketing programme is all about building an audience and establishing Dean as the authority in his field. Well he ought to be as he has been preparing this text for over 15 years.  Still waiting to hear back from Dean and Yvonne but it is radio silent.

The email focus saga continues - piece by piece I am pegging away at getting rid of emails though an Inbox which has 1,215 unread emails does not look like a focused Inbox. I had written a stack of rules in Outlook to streamline the inbox into a series of other folders. This was not really working for me as I use more than one device to access email (PC; iPad and Android Phone). So today I have been migrating rulkes across to my mail provider. I buy in a service from Fastmail.Fm to manage my emails rather than using free service from Hotmail or Gmail. The service is relatively inexpensive; provides me a lot of data storage and a range of supporting features which I use for Domain Name forwarding for example. The best feature is the wide array of aliasing that is possible. I can set up an alias account from any domain name I own and send and receive emails from there - no need to do that in the domain registrar. Today I discover a nice set of filtering rules to add to Fastmail's spam filter. before long my Inbox will be more streamlined - and I can then process emails I want to read in my time.

Day's getting short before the training ride for Cycle Around Australia 2013. Have been doing some training - a little less than I had hoped on account of some tough weather interventions (excuses really). Have equipped teh bike with new brake blocks and tyres. Tyres ordered on Wednesday last week were ready in Sydney for delivery on Friday from BicycleHero.com in Seoul = awesome delivery and free shipping for orders over $100. One more day to prepare and it is onto the road to drive to Bairnsdale, Victoria = things to do

Last item - markets have been my area of focusing too - been itchy with some massive profits on JPY trades as the new Japanese government takes action to protect their export economy. Just waiting = good news when the trades are positive. Keeps up this way I will have paid for my extensive training programme at Trading Pursuits and recovered a good slice of my investment in FX Trading - turning a corner (though this is always a dangerous game to call before the big boys have finished their part of the play.

Email Marketing pet hates

I had promised myself that I would start 2013 with a whole lot more FOCUS and some more active blogging. Cannot really say that is what I have achieved but hang - it is only January 9 and the year is but a puppy.

Step one is underway. I had over 2,000 unread emails in my Inbox collected over the December period

Followed some key advice to reduce the amount of emails one could be tempted to read. I am steadily taking myself off mailing lists, left, right and centre. I have also been writing some rules into Outlook to filter emails into buckets for processing later or for deletion. Thinking I need to create these rules at the mail server end so that I do not see them on any device that I can access. Would be great if I could copy rules from Outlook to my mail server. I am guessing I may be able to. Setting up some email management principles along the way that I will build into my outbound email activities. My pet HATES for email marketing are the following and the PENALTY will be as follows:

Immediate consignment to SPAM and DELETION folder

• No Unsubscribe opportunity on the email - immediate consigment to SPAM and DELETION folder and I mean Immediate

 Unsubscribe

• Using different names even though they come from the same place/person. 
• Subject line all in Capitals
• Subject line that does not match the content
• Passing off as email from Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; Clickback
• Email addressed to Hey You - I have a name or you can just politely write Dear Sir or Colleague or Customer or Friend or something simple like that
• Email with no genuine and usable content - add some value to an already cluttered life

Three strikes and you are out

• An unreasonable amount of emails. This is a vexed question as clearly some people are offering incredible value for each email and they are worth reading. I was led to believe that 1 a day is a good benchmark. For example Gary L has sent over 200 emails since November 14 - that is more than 3 a day
• Emails for which the subject matter does not fit the original basis for me agreeing to receive your emails. If I have subscribed to your newsletter on FX trading, I may not be interested in Wordpress themes
• Emails from Support area that are not Support emails but selling emails.
• Emails where the hyperlinks do not wrap and have to be cut and pasted to be usable
• Email about a product I have already purchased - I will ask for a refund of purchase if you keep doing it.

Feel free to add your pet peeves to the list- when i have a good list, I will publish some principles of good practice

PS I have done a few more things on my list of Focus. Most importantly the Cycle Tourist has been seen on the bicycle building up some leg strength for an upcoming mountain ride next week

Thoughts for the Holidays

The last few weeks have been a big challenge for me - seem to have slid into a cycle of depression. One never knows what brings these cycles on. I just don't seem to be making any progress on a lot of fronts and this is raising my frustration levels. I do suffer from what the psychologists call a low frustration threshold. Failing (or not succeeding to my standards) at a few things does not help.

Taken a while to recover from the passing of my friend, Cate Clewett who died a few weeks back following an extended struggle with cancer. I went to her funeral - with 500 people in the church for the service, I got to thinking about the impact one makes in life. I was wondering how many people would come to my funeral and what they would say. I can tell you it would not be 500 people unless one found a way to magically transport people around the world from all the places I have lived in. You see, Cate grew up in the suburb the church was in; she went to the local school next door to the church; she went to high school down the road; she went to university in the city; she lived and worked down the road. For me the failure is I have not made enough friends in each of the places I have lived in - because I have always been moving, I protect myself from future pain by not making friends. Cate's funeral was a strong reminder to me to keep in touch with the people I do make as friends. The wake was a good opportunity to put some of that in place with reconnections made to Cate's husband (Gene) and a few other mutual friends. the other big action step coming out of cate's untimely passing (she was just 60 and had been ill over the 12 years i have known her) was to nominate a Breast Cancer charity as one of the two charities my businesses will support. We have some great initiatives here in Australia and also some great research capability - I will find a charity that supports research - that way the benefits can spread wider than these shores.

I did attend a 40th birthday party for a former colleague (Tom Sonnen) last week. This was a grand example of not keeping in touch. the last time I saw Tom he was in his 20's. easy to make excuses as he moved from London to San Francisco before I moved from London to Sydney. I last saw his wife, Amy, even further ago than that. The bad part of the story is that Tom and Amy moved to Sydney about 18 months ago and I have not made one single call to plan to meet up. I guess I am a whole lot more comfortable writing rather than phoning. We had a grand birthday party as it was a chance for me to catch up with a few other former colleagues. The others i had seen more recently - for example, had dinner with Ron Chernin in Bangkok a couple of years ago when we were living there. Sad to say, Ron has been in Sydney a while now.  The best part of the party was meeting Tom's daughters. Jade especially impressed me - at age 11 she was very switched on to the value and importance of life.

She was explaining to me the 5 keys to a successful life:

• Getting along
• Resilience
• Persistence
• Organisation
• Confidence

She could articulate how each applied in different situations - e.g., if you were being bullied at school; if you had a lot of jobs that needed doing.  I did suggest she add a few - imagination/creativity will be key to making changes to life if things are not working as well as you like was one.  I was cross examined about what I do. When I explained that I no longer had a job or needed a job, she was a little taken aback. She did say that if she was in that psotion she would like to travel the world a bit and write books - to create things. Very switched on young lady and a delight.  Made me happy to be in her presence.

My daughter received her final results for her Higher School Certificate and her university admission score (called an ATAR) this week. With an ATAR of 96.3 she is in the top 5 % of all students in the state. That means she will be able to do the university course of her choice. It also brings to an end a chapter of schooling as all 3 of my children have competed school. there is no doubt that Katherine carries the 5 keys to success that Jade talked about - I just need to find a way to bring that back into my life.

I have been able to get on the bicycle and have put in a few kms of training with 4 rides completed since my last post. The plan is to ride 3 or 4 days a week with rides of about one and a half hours for a couple of weeks. Then I hope to be able to add in one longer ride a week. We are blessed to be living close to one of the National Parks which makes a large part of each ride a traffic free experience. Weather has been a bit strange - one hot day followed by one cool day. Riding the cool days is working well for me. It's all a bit strange as we are in an El Nino cycle - the low temperatures are not consistent with that though the lack of rain is. The big challenge - displace a few surplus kilograms from my waistline (currently weighing in over 90kgs).


FX trading continues to be a problem. Have lost 13% of my main trading account over the last 3 months (in roughly equal proportions). Last week was a great example - I made about 5% in the first couple of days after recovering a 1% loss on the first trade of the week. I promptly then gave almost all back to the market on Friday. 2 trading rules in place not followed - no trading on Fridays is one; the other is no trades on Monday until full review of market is done. It is not all bad: My trading robot is up 4.4% for the month (has a maximum of 3% at risk at any time). My outsourced service produced 2.4% in the first month and is up 4% this month so far.

Have pretty well got my personal investment portfolio in place for the expected big market moves. With the view that the US would find a solution for the Fiscal Cliff, the portfolio positioning was looking really good. The news today that the House of Representatives had delayed voting on the Fiscal Cliff matter has put a bit of a dent into all that positioning. The worst part is I have a few option contracts expiring at the end of December - they were in positive territory and now are not - prices have dropped dramatically. Luckily we have a few days to go. Just sitting tight here heopiong that the US Govt does more than kick the can down the road a little way. That would place the time element of my options-based strategy at some considerable risk.

Hard to pass through this weeks affairs without mentioning the Newtown, Connecticut massacre.  That so many young people should lose their lives in this way beggars belief. What has heartened me is the ground swell of support that is growing to tackle the gun issue in the United States. There are always a set of factors that drive these sorts of events which are linked in a much more complicated web than we ever can fathom (or the journalists will never dig into). Fareed Zakareer writing for the Washington Post summed it up quite well in his article The Solution to Gun Violence by comparing the rate iof gun homicides across countries adn comparing also social factors that drive aberrant behaviour. His conclusion is that it is not the social behaviours that are the problem, it is the access to guns. Having lived through the troubled times in South Africa when it was easy to buy an AK47 assault rifle on the street for $10, I can relate to what he is saying. I was exposed to a sinister side to that story too. I posted a tribute on Facebook to one of the teachers (Victoria Soto) who laid down her life to protect the children. I copped a heap of abuse from a Facebook friend about the fact that we did not tribute the loss of life in Afghanistan in the same way; about he American way and about the fact that my post was a publicity stunt. I was not happy - so much for the freedom to speak.

Well we are into the final days before the holidays. We have survived the end of the current round of the Mayan calendar. Now it is time to hope that the US House of Representatives reminds themselves that their obligation is to the world economy, not just the US political scene and hope we all have a happy holiday. For me it is time to take stock of all the things that have passed me by this year and to reflect on a year that has had its moments, continues to have its moments but has been filled with a lot of love from close and afar.

Tough getting focused

I wrote last in June this year and mentioned the word FOCUS. As I look back on the last 5 months in which Lorraine has been back at work and at what I have actually achieved it does not feel like a lot.

I seem to be making a lot of mistakes

• Invested in too many Internet Marketing programmes: the market is full of compelling offers and there are so many new ways emerging to do things. I have more gizmos than you can shake a stick at in the realms of affiliate marketing and traffic generation and niche website projects. The time has come to put the resources to full use and to make it stick. There are some successes going on here. I have outsourced my Twitter management for 3 accounts and D4USocial are doing a good job building followers for @MarkSCarrington and @Stratocharge and @Go4ForexProfits. I have started my program for building Facebook traffic - just need to follow up to complete that process. It is all a bit dependent on building the website properties. I have changed direction a little on some of those properties principally because the affiliate products did not stack up that well.  Progess is happening on http://www.go4forexprofits.com (RSS feed working using Commission Hack plugin but not to my satisfaction); http://www.train4cycling.com (focused on cycling training for endurance); http://www.cycle4health.com (focused on cycling for health without all that endurance stuff); http://howtodealwithtoddlertantrums.net (a new area in a microniche arena with a view to selling my own eBook); http://www.go4internetmarketingbusiness.com (this will become my main affiliate marketing site)
• Trying to do too much myself.  I have always been a technology junkie and I have been keen to learn how things work. My preferred style is to understand something by doing first before I outsource. I am also kind of waiting to earn some income before I start incurring fixed cost. Have spent a lot of effort getting rid of fixed cost and it is slowly racking up with many of the Internet services requiring ongoing costs (e.g., autoresponder; domain registrations; hosting; webinar service; Twitter service; etc)
• FX trading continues to prove a long and slow learning process. I am learning a lot about my own trading psychology. As a trader I am not good at seeing negative numbers - I tend then to pull trades off because I doubt the strategy and/or tighten stop losses too tight. I have not really pinned down what the trading problem is though I can cast some of the blame onto my first trading coach - she confused me on the choice of strategy - and one of my teachers who confused me about selectivity in choosing trades ("if it fits the rules of the strategy take all the trades" Other coaches introduced rules of excellence). Where I am now is I have full command of too many strategies and I have not yet found a consistent model that works for me (trading strategy; trading plan; trade management are all not firmly bedded down).  So I have invested time in two different directions. 1. Outsource the trading to some good traders who earn a percentage of profits and trade my account the same way they trade theirs - still on trial but they are doing better than I am. I will learn from their trading style too. 2. Continue working to refine the trading robots I have trained. With the exception of October which was a choppy month, the robot is trading profitably each month - still work to do as one robot is making fewer and smaller winning trades it should to overcome the losing ones. Just started testing a new one - picked one of the rated ones from Clickbank - Megadroid - will post views when I have them. Also acquired FAPTurbo in the 85% off anniversary sale - (only have to recover a much smaller price to breakeven). Also will look at Milion Dollar Pips - it's a scalping robot. I kind of like training machines to do my work. BUT is is also a break in FOCUS
• Not sure this is a mistake but I have now taken over management of my own personal portfolio. This was a longer term plan and I have just completed a 6 month coaching programme with Trading Pursuits based here in Sydney. The mistake in there was not committing the time to get the best out of the learning - I did find the weekly webinars a bit repetitive. That is probably no surprise as the markets and the media have been singing the same old song all this time. Media says: CRISIS. Market says: MOVING UP - STEADY AS SHE GOES. One good thing is Trading Pursuits did organize an extra full day event at the end of the programme which served well to bring a bunch of things together. It's been a little longer to get my portfolio finally moved across from HSBC Global Asset Management - took just under 3 months to get that moved. I am sure pleased I did the portfolio tidy up early on and could hold on while the market drifted steadily upwards and could be safe with no interventions needed. I have continued with a mentorship process with Brad McFadden of The Daily Trading Report. So far that is working well with a weekly webinar and a scheduled weekly call. Get on well with Brad as he spent several years in South Africa and understands me and is not filled with the Aussie bloke thing (he's a Kiwi). So far the market moves that we have followed are shaping the right way - not all but it is positive. Once I have that shaped up, I can focus a little more on other things.  I have learned a huge amount and feel better equipped to build an investment portfolio that is wider than a "buy and hold" thing and it is leveraged to asymmetric wins and covers a wider range of instruments. It's pretty scary what I have learned in the last 6 to 9 months. And I now know how to make my portfolio grow when the market is going down.
• Done next to no cycling - this is a sad indictment for a blog called Cycle Tourist. We have had a really cold winter and it has been hard to get motivated to get out to ride. I guess what is happening is that I have got so busy doing other things that I do not feel that going out for a ride is justifiable. That needs to change as I have committed to ride 2 legs of Cycle Around Australia 2013 (http://www.cycleacrossoz.com.au). Have been successful on getting the web presence built and ranked. If you Google Cycle Around Australia we are on page 1. What I really like about that is our main competitor is buying Google Ads to appear above us. Still got work to do to get Cycle Tours Australia to bring us to page 1. There is not a lot of pressure to do this as the ride is filling up quite well. There is a training ride scheduled for mid-January in the Victorian Alps - I have committed to ride that and must train as it includes one big climb over Mt Hotham. Looking forward to that ride - a few mates going and Lorraine is coming along too.
• Have not seen enough of my children this half of the year. Easy to make excuses as I did travel a bit and they have been busy with university and final year at school. Truth is it hurts as it reminds me of what has gone in the past and it just reminds me of FAILURE.
• Have spent some time on my South African venture

It's not all bad

• Married life goes well
• Markets are drifting up - better than down.
• Health is good
• Some of my actions are producing results. Look at @MarkSCarrington and @Go4Forexprofits on Twitter to see the followers
• My world of friends around the world grows.

With luck I will become a little more regular in the blogoshpere. The plan is to hone in on two areas:

1. Breathe Your Dreams - a blog about all the lifestyle things that work in my life - fitness; health; cooking; natural health
2. Stratocharge your wealth - a blog about building your wealth through passive residual income business and investment approaches.

The broad idea is to talk about the things that I have tried and used and found to be successful. With a long track record of building a successful life I hope that there are lessons that will be of use to some of my readers