New Year’s Day, 2012

December 31st, 2011 by Potato

I was going through my archives, trying to find out exactly when I started BbtP, since it’s been lost to the fog of memory. I know when I first got the holypotato.com domain (November 2001), and when I first got the current incarnation running on WordPress (October 2005)… but all I could remember was that I started working on something approximating the current blog format — with regular updates — sometime in early undergrad (back then, it was all done in Notepad), and that the title dated back a year or two before then (the original concept involved more humour & creative writing and fewer parentheses). Well, I’ve found the answer: Potatomas break, 1998 is my oldest site backup. So this would be my 13th anniversary (or 14th, depending on how long the site languished with just a few html files and no backups). Let’s say 13th anyway. Hurray!

Now for a little retrospective.

What a hell of a year 2011 was.

I started off by looking at some alleged stock frauds, then by the middle of the year got caught up in one myself, losing a fair bit of money. We fought UBB and won. I realized that the internet is far more interested in a 1-minute photoshop filter of a panda bear than a year’s worth of thoughtful short-form writing. Japan was rocked by an earthquake and tsunami, but it’s the nuclear accident we remember. I wrote a book, and a guide for TD e-series. I wrote a lot more about real estate than I ever thought I could fit into one year. I had my first problem with the Prius.

I got my doctorate.

2012 will likely be even bigger, as I’m going to have to find a new job. And we’re expecting our first child in the spring!!!!11one!!

So you know that of course, things are going to change around here. I’m going to have to round off and pad all the sharp corners on the theme, and all future posts are going to become exclusively about cleaning up puke, stroller reviews, and complaining about sleep deprivation. Which is fitting, seeing as how the site started as a result of (and complaining about) severe sleep deprivation.

Here’s to a great 2012, everyone!

The Story Behind The Book

November 24th, 2011 by Potato

Note: the book discussed below has been superseded by The Value of Simple: A Practical Guide to Taking the Complexity Out of Investing.

In case you forgot, I wrote a short book about investing on your own, and now it’s time to contrive all sorts of ways to oh-so-casually talk about it.

What inspired you to write a book?

Wow, that is a surprisingly long story, but the short answer is that it happened quite by accident.

You see, I was helping a couple friends out with their investments, guiding them towards a do-it-yourself approach with index funds. On several occassions I sat down with someone and went through a little hour-or-two long tutorial session, after which they would know enough about index funds to get going, and perhaps read one of the many existing books on investing. The problem was, when I’d check in weeks or months later, these guys wouldn’t have changed anything about their investment approach.

They might fully agree that they wanted to save fees, that they wanted to do index investing, and that they weren’t necessarily thrilled with the value-for-money they were getting from their “advisors” (or worse, bank branch mutual fund salescritters). The problem was, they didn’t need a 300-page book explaining why index investing was a smarter approach, they needed someone to hold their hand and guide them towards taking the first few steps on their own. Less theory, more practical how-to. One huge “service” provided by the advisors and the 2.5%-MER mutual funds was that all they had to do was walk in with a cheque on “RRSP day” and that was it. Someone was there to hold their hand and say that they were going to make it so terribly easy and painless to go through the process. My friends were getting hung up on taking that first leap towards setting up an account, and needed someone to show them how to make a trade, what a limit vs market order was, all that sort of thing.

So I helped guide them, standing over their shoulder, or on the phone, or even just available by email if they had a question so that they could take that first step to becoming a DIY-er in confidence. At that point I realized that there might be a call for just such a service: not necessarily an ongoing relationship, but someone to bounce ideas off of, to help reconcile conflicting information they may be getting from their “how to invest now” books (which get especially confusing for Canadians reading books from American authors telling them that the first thing they absolutely must do is set up a 401k, and no idea how to do that in Canada…), and to help show them how to execute transactions on their own.

Not a financial planner, or a sales position: I didn’t want to touch their money (except for a small fee for myself), I wanted them to have full-control. More like tech support and education. And that’s exactly the service I went and set up: investment education & support services.

I was in the process of setting up my new website for this little education & support service side-business when I decided I should have a robust and helpful resources section. So, largely cut-off from the world at the cottage, hot off handing in my PhD thesis, I started to write those resource articles. And write, and write… until pretty soon I was looking at a book.

And that’s the story of where the inspiration for writing a book came from: helping my friend out who “had a guy” and didn’t really want to keep paying “his guy” hundreds of dollars a year to do the investment stuff for him, but just didn’t know how to do it himself. And me realizing that his story was absolutely typical, and that lots of people could use exactly the same kind of helping hand to boostrap themselves towards full self-directed status.

Why isn’t the book available on the Kobo store?

You may recall when I first announced the project that the Kobo store was at the top of the list of where I wanted to sell the book. I’m still working on that, though maybe not all that hard at the moment. Basically, Amazon’s self-publishing route with Kindle was really straightforward and automated: once I had the book written and converted into the proper format (ironically, ePub, though the Kindle itself doesn’t read ePub), I just had to sign up online with them and upload my file. Within a day or so, I was live on the Kindle store.

For Kobo, it’s a manual process, and they’d prefer to only deal with people with more books. They said they would be willing to host me if I could help streamline things by providing them with a properly formatted XML file with all the meta data for the book, which I’m happy to do… except they don’t have a template to work from. They did refer me to the standard, but after about an hour of trying to understand how to create a file from scratch I gave up. They recommended that I use one of their publishing partners to get my book into the Kobo store, but all of them charged a not-insignificant fee to get listed, and so far I have no idea if my book will ever make that much, and I’d prefer to not be out-of-pocket trying to get this thing out (especially with recent budget issues here). Now, these partners do have some value-added services, notably getting the book into a bunch of different online stores (like Barnes & Noble, Apple, Sony, etc., etc.) and converting the book from a Word doc to an ePub file. Except my market is Canada only — if it was a novel or something more universal, those might be useful features, but they’re not. I was mostly interested in the Kobo store because the major Canadian bookstore owns Kobo, so it has good penetration here (whereas the Nook and Sony e-reader, not so much). And, I had already done all the hard work of converting the book to ePub, including tracking down and stomping most of the inevitable bugs. I didn’t want to pay someone else to repeat the work, and possibly have to go through the bug-stomping exercise again. So for now, I’m not worrying about Kobo, though I would eventually like to be available there, as well. If you have a Kobo, you can buy directly from me and included in the package is both a PDF that’s formatted for a 6″ e-reader, and an ePub file.

Note that Kobo changed their practices, and PSGtDIYI did appear in the Kobo store, as will The Value of Simple.

How’s it going so far?

In absolute numbers, the book sales haven’t been stunning — I’m not exactly positioned to quit my job or even pay my hosting bill from them (and indeed, if I had paid to get an ePub created and get into the Kobo store, I’d still be underwater). But considering I haven’t really started promoting on other sites at all, I’d say that’s pretty good. Really the only mention of it at all was here, and at the 3 link-round-ups at CC, MSB, and FU. What’s interesting is that I spent so much time learning an open-source e-commerce thingamajig so that people could go through the checkout themselves and get instant digital download, and so far nobody has chosen that option: all sales have been through Amazon (~40%) or through the one-step PayPal buy now button (where I then email the files later, ~60% of sales). More importantly, so far all the feedback has been really positive, some of which I’ve been allowed to share. Of course, most people don’t provide feedback spontaneously (and even those I asked haven’t all replied). Perhaps it would be fair to assume that some of those that didn’t like the book just didn’t want to say so, but so far I’m really feeling good about the fact that people are liking it and finding it useful, even if it’s not making me rich in the process :)

The cover image to the book

Investing Book

September 15th, 2011 by Potato

I’ve been productive with my long weekends: I wrote a book! It’s a book aimed at beginner investors, and recommends a passive indexing strategy. The main strengths of the book are:

  • It’s a short book.
  • It covers the basics in plain language.
  • It’s written by a Canadian for Canadians.
  • It has pictures of bunnies.
  • It has step-by-step instructions for how to apply the basics of index investing to actually get starting investing, including how to set up an account and how to place a trade, with some key screenshots to help.

Though it’s only been about two months from when I first started to now, IMHO, the book is done. The formatting is there, the text has been revised a few times, and I even sacrificed a counterfeit $10 bill Tim Horton’s passed to me to mock up a cover image. If you’d like to review the book (preferably to post on your blog and the Amazon/Indigo reviews when available) please send me an email at holypotato@gmail.com and I’ll send you a copy. I have two formats at the moment: regular letter-sized (best for reading on a computer or to print in hard-copy at home) and Kobo/Kindle formatted PDF (not quite as smooth as an epub or Kindle native format, but looks really sweet on my Kobo), both as DRM-free PDFs.

Most of the material is not exactly unique to me or new for an investing book: basic stuff about why saving/investing is important, what’s a stock/bond/fund, what’s an RRSP/TFSA, etc. What is unique is that it’s written by me, and that it includes the kind of hands-on material that I’ve never seen anywhere else that’s needed to actually get started on your own (how to open an account, how to enter a trade, where to go to find CC’s rebalancing spreadsheet), and just inside, written in large, friendly letters are the words “Don’t Panic.” (Though in contrast to the HHGTTG, the words are not all-caps.) It is, as I mentioned, short: just 37 letter-size pages once you discount the pictures and things like the title page and ToC; in kobo format, just 89 screen refreshes including all the filler.

If you’d like to buy a copy right now (just $5) before I sort out publishing, again just send me an email at holypotato@gmail.com and I’ll sort out PayPal with you and email you both PDF form factors.

So I have just a few main questions that maybe you all can help me answer (whether you feel like reviewing the book or not):

  1. Do I go for a self-publishing model, or try submitting to a traditional publisher? If self-publishing, e-book only, or physical copies too? If a publisher, which one?
  2. Should I publish under my “real” name, or Potato? On the one hand, I might want to offer education services alongside the book, which is really a real-name kind of thing. On the other, I have more “brand recognition” for investing discussions as Potato… though people who aren’t familiar with my writing might take it somewhat less seriously with the pseudonym, and those who do read enough to recognize Potato as being a serious force in Canadian personal finance probably don’t need a beginner’s book.
  3. If I do publish under my real name, do I “out” myself in the process and use this site to promote the book, or do I just not mention the book again here and hope the connection isn’t made?

Another option (Wayfare’s sage suggestion) is to just split BbtP: do all the finance stuff on a new blog with my “real” name, and keep all the video game/political ranting/science/random stuff here.

Weird Guest Post Request

September 11th, 2011 by Potato

I got a strange email today. First off it was to the wrong address (I have a preferred gmail contact address in the sidebar, this person had figured out how to get my host to forward an email to me). It quite simply was from a person claiming to be a follower of this humble blog, and asking to do a guest post.

She said “I really liked the following two articles” [and linked to two posts] I have about 5 years of experience writing about similar subjects and would love to provide a detailed post that matches the tone of your blog…” then went on to link to some of her articles, which even from the URLs looked like search engine robotext.

Now what makes it hilarious was the two articles of mine that she chose to link to and to try to match the tone of, and had “experience writing about similar subjects”: they were some of my more random posts that did not have any kind of subject to them. One was “on Q-tips” and the other was my shot-gun catch-up post after I finished my PhD (“It’s Over!“).

Note to Jennifer: if you are real and that was genuine, I’m sorry for not responding by email, but your request was really weird.

Fiddling with the Site

September 5th, 2011 by Potato

Posting has been light, but I have been spending time on the site lately, just mostly fiddling with the back-end. The spam comments have crept up from nearly 100/day to almost 200/day over the last few months, and that’s just getting ridiculous. I skim the spam filter so quickly to try to get through them all in a decent amount of time that I’ve lost some false positives (sorry to those of you whose legitimate comments were eaten). So I put in a quick javascript check (which you can see now), but that only cut out about 20% of the spam. So I’ve tried a new method I found referred in the wordpress codex, and that cut out about 30% of the spam. So I’m back to the tide of spam I was facing a few months ago — more than I’d like, but a manageable amount.

Most of it comes from the 173.2** range of IP addresses, and I’m tempted to block the entire range in my .htaccess file. But that would also deny access to any legitimate users that might be in that range, and I’d rather deal with spam than accidentally keep actual readers out. One other feature of spam is that it tends to focus on the older posts, and seems to hit only certain ones (I think) so what I’ve been doing is closing comments to posts that are more than a few months old as the spambots find them. If for whatever reason you do want to comment on an old post, you can either email me, or comment on any post that does have comments enabled, and I’ll move it.

Now, part of doing this manually is to continue to learn about how my platform works, and part is because all the modern plug ‘n play spam tools for WordPress are for the newer versions, and I figured it would take less time to hack at the guts of my current install than to try to upgrade to the current version of WP. Maybe that was a mistake, but I’m so used to the way this one works (and it does work for me) that I’m loathe to change it.

I also wanted to create a new archives page that might work better than the current method of sifting through the archives 10 posts at a time by category or date (via the links in the sidebar). I wanted to group the posts by category, then have the full list of post titles under that. I couldn’t quite get it to work, but I do have a simple list of posts under the page BbtP Archives in the sidebar now. The formatting isn’t quite there either, but it works, and I think I’m going to stop wasting time trying to improve it.