I thought this was a really interesting take on a declining share market:

Stocks are crashing, so you turn on the television to catch the latest market news. But instead of CNBC or CNN, imagine that you can tune into the Benjamin Graham Financial Network. On BGFN, the audio doesn’t capture that famous sour clang of the market’s closing bell; the video doesn’t home in on brokers scurrying across the floor of the stock exchange like angry rodents. Nor does BGFN run any footage of investors gasping on frozen sidewalks as red arrows whiz overhead on electronic stock tickers.

Instead, the image that fills your TV screen is the facade of the New York Stock Exchange, festooned with a huge banner reading: “SALE! 50% OFF!” As intro music, Bachman-Turner Overdrive can be heard blaring a few bars of their old barnburner, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” Then the anchorman announces brightly, “Stocks became more attractive yet again today, as the Dow dropped another 2.5% on heavy volume – the fourth day in a row that stocks have gotten cheaper. Tech investors fared even better, as leading companies like Microsoft lost nearly 5% on the day, making them even more affordable. That comes on top of the good news of the past year, in which stocks have already lost 50%, putting them at bargain levels not seen in years. And some prominent analysts are optimistic that prices may drop still further in the weeks and months to come.”

The newscast cuts over to market strategist Ignatz Anderson of the Wall Street firm of Ketchum & Skinner, who says, “My forecast is for stocks to lose another 15% by June. I’m cautiously optimistic that if everything goes well, stocks could lose 25%, maybe more.”

“Let’s hope Ignatz Anderson is right,” the anchor says cheerily. “Falling stock prices would be fabulous news for any investor with a very long horizon. And now over to Wally Wood for our exclusive AccuWeather forecast.”

Taken from The Intelligent Investor revised edition, by Benjamin Graham with added commentary by Jason Zweig.

For a long time I had written Twitter off as a pointless concept, designed to allow people with nothing better to do to express themselves with boring phrases such as “I am going to bed now” and “I’m watching TV”.

Chris and I got talking about Twitter a couple of weeks ago for some reason or another and I decided I’d register to see if I would use it.

I gained a new appreciation quite quickly once I realised that Twitter is, more or less, an abbreviated blog.

For someone that doesn’t have a desire to dedicate too much time to writing, Twitter is a great compliment to this blog. I can post summarised random thoughts (hoping that they are interesting) that I would never usually bother to write about in full because the effort required by me exceeds the reward to the reader.

So, follow me on Twitter – you’ll find that I’m alive after all.

As I alluded to at the end of last year, I’ve bought a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS fitness watch which has now been in possession for a couple of dozen workouts. The thing is brilliant. Combined with a heart rate monitor (included), it will log every important facet of your running, cycling, or other distance-vs-time workouts.

Here’s some assorted statistics from my workouts so far:

Running:

• Workouts: 15
• Total distance: 89.36km
• Average distance: 5.96km
• Average speed: 11.27km/h
• Maximum speed: 24.9km/h
• Average heart rate: 156.33 beats per minute
• Total elevation gain: 3484 metres
• Average elevation gain: 232.27 metres

Cycling:

• Workouts: 7
• Total distance: 93.6km
• Average distance: 13.37km
• Average speed: 21.66km/h
• Maximum speed: 53.1km/h
• Average heart rate: 151.43 beats per minute
• Total elevation gain: 2051 metres
• Average elevation gain: 293 metres

From an individual workout point-of-view, here’s a few examples of the data yielded from one of my cycles a few weeks ago.

As you can see, the data is reasonably comprehensive, including things like heart rate, elevation changes, pace, distance and time. The watch records this information every four seconds I believe, which results in some really good data.

It’s all quite intriguing stuff, because as well as tracking progress with real statistical accuracy, you can use it to identify weaknesses. Comparing speed, distance and elevation may illustrate a specific difficulty with hills of a certain grade or length, for example, and you could use this information to make training decisions.

I’m not quite serious enough to worry about any in-depth analysis, however, but I am definitely enjoying the logging functionality. It’s going to be interesting to compare workouts this time next year.

If you’re after one of these watches in New Zealand, they are available online from Bay Marine Electronics amongst other places. The price at time of writing is a rather hefty $439; but if you’re a regular runner with a mind for statistics, I don’t think you’ll regret it.