Day: December 6, 2006

I have been evaluating what we do here on this blog to come up with some additional blog topics. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know by posting a comment. I would be happy to do some research, especially on homeschool, Linux, and investing issues. Kelly is doing better and better about writing down her thoughts and doings on the blog; she is especially good when she does poetry. I am going to encourage her to do excerpts from her book and from articles she and Christian write for their Kaktus Kids magazine. It dawned on me, though, that at any given time, most of the people who read this blog are wildly disinterested in at least a third of the stuff I write. When it comes to homeschool, programming, and investing–the things about which I write–I can imagine that our readership is interested in one or two out of the three. Nevertheless, the point of this writing is to have a dialog with our friends and eventually print out the blog and bind it into a diary for the kids to show their kids what it was like to grow up in our household. I really have enjoyed the writing. I hope we will enjoy looking back at it in future years.

So, right now, the thing I have been enjoying and finding very interesting is the development of my investment program. It is coming along quite nicely. My goal is to have it finished by the end of the year so that I can start picking stocks again for 2007. I am programming the system to run on both Windows and Linux using KDevelop as my IDE, the QT API to develop the GUI, and libcurl for internet access. I am successfully pulling the information down from the web now. I will try to add multithreading to application so that the GUI is a lot more snappy and the downloads happen in parallel, because it is dog ugly right now. After that, I need to extract the data I need from the pages and sort them according to the criteria of the investment program. I have done it once before, but I want to make it a little more automatic. The current program only stores the data in a comma-delimited file which has to be processed in the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet. My hope is to be ready to start posting my picks in late December or early January.

Update: Just a note on how the investing is going. Using the stock picking program to pick and buy (pretend) $1000 each of two stocks on February 15, March 13, and April 15 of 2006 for a total of $6000 and tracking equal purchases of the S&P 500 gave the following results:

Stock program picks
Initial purchase: $6000
Current value: $7225
Annual gain percent: ~27%
Feb. 15, 2006: 33.3333 shares of PONR @ $30.00
Feb. 15, 2006: 25.3165 shares of NSS @ $39.50 – merged with IPSCO on Dec. 1, 2006 – paid cash @ $66.00 per share
Mar. 13, 2006: 44.4444 shares of TNH @ $22.50
Mar. 13, 2006: 11.3310 shares of RS @ $88.25 – split 2:1 July 19, 2006
Apr. 15, 2006: 56.5931 shares of ITWO @ 17.67
Apr. 15, 2006: 34.5781 shares of PWEI @ 28.92

Equal amount of S&P 500
Initial purchase: $6000
Current value: $6617
Annual gain percent: ~14%