Know what’s bad for business? When a customer comes to your Web site three days in a row, looking to buy something you sell, and all three days he sees the same page saying that the online store is closed.

I’m heading to Japan in six days, and I wanted to find out if I could get a map for my TomTom GPS unit - and TomTom is giving me the finger. Ironically, I found torrent listings for the map - is that what it’s going to come down to? If the store isn’t open for the customer, he has to get a “hot” version of the product? Idiotic. TomTom, get it together!

The Wall Street Journal has published an excellent article about Bill Gates and the work he’s starting to focus on after his full-time job at Microsoft has finished. He’s promoting the concept of “Creative Capitalism”, which involves not only the pursuit of profits, but also improving the lives of others. In discussing this article on the private Mobius discussion list, I shared my views in response to a post by Jeff Kirvin about the way Wall Street and public companies work.

“I remain convinced that when a company goes public, it sells its soul to the investors and hands it’s brain to the board of directors - it can no longer do what it wants, pursue it’s own vision, or run a “just enough profit” style of company that encourages fair treatment of employees (with profit sharing, fair wages, and other elements found in responsible corporate behaviour). I have tremendous respect and admiration for companies such as Kingston that do not go public. I wish more companies were kept private.

I’m a believer in capitalism, but always tempered by compassion and generosity - things that seem foreign to most public companies who (necessarily so, sadly) need to be focused on the non-stop, quarter after quarter growth. Yet as an investor with mutual funds myself, it’s not like I can excuse myself from wanting ever-increasing profits either. We live in a screwed up world, that’s for sure.”

In the span of my lifetime, I fully expect Bill Gates to accomplish more for the world’s poor than anyone else in the past 100 years - I’ve always admired him as a computer geek, but the past couple of years I’ve come to admire him even more as a human being. I think this quote says a great deal about what drives Gates (in response to William Easterly’s comments about how the money sent to Africa over the past few decades has done nothing to raise the economic status of the region):

“”I don’t promise that when a kid lives it will cause a GNP increase,” he quipped. “I think life has value.”

On the opposite end of the quote spectrum, you have this assclown.

On Saturday, February the 3rd, I spent six hours in a investment seminar put on by Wealthstreet, a Calgary company that I’d been hearing about for years and meaning to get in touch with. I’m better than most with finances, but I have a firm belief that you should do what you’re good at and avoid what you’re not good at - and for me, that means seeking advice from people who do this for a living. I bought stocks all of one time in my life, and I lost money on it.

We’ve done some work with World Financial Group (WFG), but over the past year I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with them. Our consultants are the nicest guys in the world, but niceness does not a balanced portfolio make. The WFG plan had us sink 100% of our money into a single mutual fund, and after a few months I gave my head a shake and realized how exposed we were because we had almost no diversification (Enron stock holders unstand this now). I took some steps to correct that, but ultimately things still aren’t right - and that’s why I found this Wealthstreet seminar so fascinating. I’m indebted to my parents for inviting Ashley and I to attend this with them - it was a real eye-opener. After the first half was over I made an appointment to meet with a Wealthstreet advisor to re-work our portfolio (meagre though it may be).

I’m publishing my seminar notes for two reasons: first, so that people searching for Wealthstreet can find this blog post and see my positive experience with their seminar. Secondly, even for those people reading this blog that live outside Calgary (which is most of you), I think you’ll find many of the basic financial concepts to be sound no matter where you are in the world. It’s certainly worth thinking about your financial future no matter how young you are, and simply shoving all your money into RRSPs (or 401K’s if you’re in the USA) isn’t a good long-term solution.

I’ll make one caveat about my notes: they might not be 100% accurate, so don’t take them as such. There was a great deal of information, and I may have gotten some of it wrong. Besides, what kind of a person takes financial advice from a blog?

Dave Jones, Wealthstreet CEO

• Family is important, the allocation of time should be focused 99% on everything else in your life, 1% on focusing on your investments
• “You don’t get a mulligan when it comes to your retirement.”
• You should have four to seven income streams in order to retire
• 40% of Canadians have made an average of three withdrawls from their RRSPs
• IBM sold to Lenovo because they couldn’t afford the pension for their own people
• Pension Crisis is looming: too many people retiring, not enough growth in the funds to compensate for the amount of draw from pensioners
• Bullet Proof 50% of your portfolio, Growth & Income 40% of your portfolio, 10% speculation
  If you speculate with 10% of your portfolio, and only 5% performs, it might out-perform the rest of your portfolio
• Your house an as asset must be put to work – you can’t eat a doorknob
• 1 in 7 Albertans will be the victim or attempted victim of mortgage fraud
• House rich, cash poor: people who own a house worth a great deal, but they can’t afford the property taxes
• Personal savings as a percentage of disposable personal income is -5%. Someone who earns 100K a year is spending 105K
• 10% of the world owns 90% of the assets…Trump and Kiyosaki worry that 1% of the world will eventually own 99% of the assets (more…)