Google Wave invites

If anyone’s still interested… First come first served. :-)

A landmark day

I’m talking about yesterday. I have two reasons to say it was an important day:

1. Yahoo mercilessly killed Geocities with my first ever website on it. No way to easily backup my stuff (as in download an archive with everything) but at least I managed to grab a few screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6) – too bad none of my screen grabbing software manages frames well. Unfortunately there’s not much on archive.org either.

2. I upgraded my ancient Orange service plan that had 180 Orange and 25 national minutes to a brand new one called Delfin 8 – which is cheaper than what I had and has (hold on to something) 700 Orange minutes and 125 national ones. I could have gone for a cheaper plan as I’ll never talk that much, but it’s also nice to have the peace of mind that I can if I want to. All this upgrade happened after I called customer service because I wasn’t able to confirm my payment. Me the phone power user. Not.

Template Monster = Bad

I’ll post this here because this blog is less volatile than Twitter:

I fucking hate working with Template Monster templates. To characterize them as lousy would be a huge understatement. I’m imagining the so called “designers” as they throw element after element on the page pretty much freestyle without caring about pixel size, spacing or other stupid things like this. Why should they, after all? Let the poor web developer slap himself when he’s on the job and the client expects the work to be done.

That’s what I’m doing now…

And it keeps snowing…

It’s starting to look dreamy up at Cavnic, but wait, it’s the 15th of October, where’s our autumn?

To register or not to register…

… this is the question.

Tonight a thought that has been circling in my mind for some time returned with a vengeance: let’s register Tweetie and NetNewsWire! But then I remembered that the slight inconvenience about having these apps unregistered are the ads delivered via Fusion and The Deck respectively. Which both serve quality ads and actually helped me discover a couple of cool applications and services I might have missed otherwise. So please Mac developers, pick worse quality ad providers if you want me to register your apps. :-)

Webcast + me = FAIL!

Romanian knowledge not only preferred but downright needed. If you want to understand what I’m babbling about that is.

Is eToro a scam?

Or the fastest way I ever lost $50. Actually “only” $25…

But first of all the I’ll answer the question posed in the title of this entry: no. eToro is not a scam. However it’s very easy to lose money if you’re not careful. And unfortunately I wasn’t that careful.

And now on to the story. I discovered eToro accidentally and I’ve spent quite a few days on the demo account to familiarize myself with the system before commiting to deposit. Unfortunately there are some differences when you’re dealing with a real account. Differences I didn’t know about until after I actually made the deposit. If you read around about Forex trading systems, there are warnings everywhere to only invest money that you afford to lose. And I heeded them, although the $50 required as the minimum amount to be deposited is at the top of my “I can gamble that” threshold. On the demo I wasn’t actually trading currencies but commodities, more specifically gold and as it was going very low I thought hey, I can’t go wrong with this, it has to climb back to a “normal” rate sometime and that could earn a bit of money. I could even set a “take profit” limit and have the computer work for me…

This is where I went wrong. You see, on the demo account they give you 2000 virtual dollars to play around with (and you can request more by contacting customer care) and this gives you the ability to use low leverages. To be short: leverage gives you the ability to “move” a large sum of money by using a small amount of money. So I made my deposit and clicked the commodities tab only to find out that the minimum amount of money I should have had to be able to start one trade with gold was $200. Nasty. Clicking back to the Forex tab I received another blow: with $50 deposited one could only initiate two trades and these trades are incredibly risky as you’re using a 400x leverage. You can indeed win big with this leverage but it’s a lot more likely that you’ll lose big. You see when you initiate a trade there’s a “stop loss” defined and with a 400x leverage it all becomes very sensitive. What I mean is that if the exchange rate suddenly moves by a few thousandths of a unit, you’re not there to close your trade in time and your trade’s stop loss is tipped you lose all the money you invested in the trade. Even if the rate later returns, your money is gone. Lower leverages give you less profit but the currency can fluctuate quite a lot without risking too much. But lower leverages require more money. With 400x trades you’re practically playing an action game watching the 1 minute charts, keeping a close eye on the slightest modifications in the exchange rate and hitting the close trade button at the right time.

And this is where another downside of eToro comes into play. While the interface is butter smooth in demo mode but there are serious lags when switching to real money trading. And it’s not my imagination, many others are also complaining about this around the web. And these lags can cost.

I stopped when my balance went under $25 and I couldn’t initiate another trade. Now we’ll see if my withdrawal request will actually yield because the process sort of started out on the wrong foot as I requested the withdrawal to be made via PayPal yesterday and today they’ve sent me an e-mail requesting my bank account details and stating that I’ve requested the money by wire transfer. I politely replied that they’re wrong, and even their interface confirms this. (I’ll keep you posted on how this all progresses – watch this post for updates.)

I wrote this post to give others a chance to learn from my mistakes before commiting to deposit. Hopefully…