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I have been with Scottrade for almost six years. They are no frills, but they are cheap, charging only $7 for any kind of trade that I would make. Generally I don’t trade that much, keeping just a handful of stocks, maybe buying something when it seems like a good company is down. Then I follow my 20% rule where I sell when I make a 20% gain, or buy more of a stock when a stock I own goes down by 20%. In 2005 and in 2007 I made only one trade the entire year. I felt bad that Scottrade was making no money off of me, but one of their selling points is they don’t have fees for inactive trading. Other years were busier. In 2006 I made 4 trades, in 2004 9 trades, and 2003 was a big year with 11 trades. But 2008 was crazy. I made 45 trades as it seemed like there were a lot of good companies with low stock prices and I was able to buy and sell as stock prices went on roller coaster rides. Goldman Sachs was one of those: I bought it for $62 on Nov. 13, entered a limit order for my 20% gain price of $75.94 which it hit less than 2 weeks later. I then entered a buy order for the same old price of $62, which it hit Dec. 2. On Dec. 8 it triggered a sell for another 20% gain. That was 4 trades. Things haven’t been moving as much lately so maybe 2009 will be another slow year. I certainly won’t feel sorry for Scottrade after giving them $7 so many times in 2008.

The website enterprise has been reeling lately. In May I moved copies of the money-making web pages back to Speedfactory, my dialup provider even though in January I switched to DSL. This gave me a bump in traffic and I also got page rank back, including at the new iGirder site. But in September, Speedfactory took the web page down and haven’t brought it back after months of me asking and them promising they would do it.

So anyway, traffic has come back a little, but it hasn’t been great. Around 100 visitors a day. In 2007 Sitemeter counted 137,000 visitors and in 2008 I got only 61,000. Extrapolate 100 visitors a day and I will be down to 36,500 in 2009. Amazon revenues have been way off too: $581 in sales in the 4th quarter, generating only $27.70 in commissions for me. In November I actually lost money, selling two small items, but getting a return on a more expensive item. Amazon will send a payment each month as long as you have more than $10 in earnings, so some months I don’t make that. In December someone placed an order of about 12 items, so it turned into a decent month with $15 in earnings (though by comparison the previous December saw $53 in earnings).

The best seller was the Turbo iPod charger with 3 sold, displacing the Maxell iPod battery pack, with 3 sales, but one return. The most expensive item sold was an $89 iPod to car stereo adapter. The most unusual thing sold was a pound of almonds.

AdSense has been off too, which is to be expected since I only have ads on the Sony and DeJumbler pages. So for the quarter I had revenues of $8 and it will be years before I see another $100 payment from Google. The nice thing is my advertising deal continues to pay $52 per month.

This evening at work Paul was visiting a couple of the groups and looked out my window at the sunset. He pointed out a sundog. I usually kind of ignore stuff like that, but he asked if I knew what a sundog is. I didn’t. He said I should look it up, so I went to Wikipedia really quickly and found an article about them. Only then did I actually look out the window, and there in the clouds about 20 degrees to the left of the setting sun was a bright spot. He said that was the sundog and it was caused by ice crystals in the cloud refracting the sunlight back towards us. The hexagonal shape of a snow crystal bends the light, similar to a rainbow (except rainbows are on the other side of the sky from the sun). Today’s sundog showed a little bit of color refraction, reddish on one side and bluer on the other side. He said there was probably one on the other side of the sun too, so we walked around to another side of the building to go look. Not quite as bright, but there was a spot in the clouds on the right also.

I’ve been looking for stuff to watch on Netflix and one neat thing is they have lots of TV series on DVD. Two shows I’ve been thinking about are the Sci Fi channel’s remake of Battlestar Gallactica and NBC’s Heroes, which I never watched despite good reviews and word of mouth (I remember Kathy saying she liked it). I watched the first part of BSG this weekend, which was the opening miniseries (3 hours). It was good, so I’ll go ahead and get the rest of the disks. But this Sunday Target had Heroes on sale for $20, so I figured that was a pretty good deal. There are 7 disks and 23 episodes, so that’s less than a dollar an episode and now I can watch them on the train if I want. I watched the first two episodes and it seems like it could be pretty good. Season 2 was available as well, but because of the writers’ strike there were only 11 episodes, but it was the same price. So maybe eventually I’ll get those disks from Netflix.

Not worth it’s own blog entry, but this weekend I watched a documentary online from Netflix called Helvetica. Yes, it is a whole feature-length film about the font Helvetica. Made in 2007 on the 50th anniversary of the font, it covered the origins of the font in a modernist Swiss workshop, the impact it had and still has, and different graphic designers’ opinions about it. Some like its simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t draw attention to itself, others hate its ubiquity and how generic it is.

Recently I got a revised credit agreement from my credit card company, Citibank. Generally I don’t look real closely at those agreements because I pay off the card every month and don’t pay fees. So when they raise the fees or change the interest rate, it really doesn’t affect me. But it does make me mad that Citibank has gotten itself in a huge financial mess of its own making, has borrowed billions from the taxpayers, and now is going to take advantage of people during an economic slowdown by raising their interest rates. With interest rates on government bonds hitting new lows, an adjustable credit card interest rate based on the federal prime rate also goes down. But Citibank wants the rates to go up. Again, it doesn’t really impact me, but a lot of people are getting pay cuts or being laid off and those interest rate increases will really hurt them when they are down.

By the rules, you can opt out any time a credit card changes the terms on you. This is because you never agreed to the rules when you got the card. However opting out means that once the card expires, it will not be renewed. Today I called Citibank and they said that my rate would be going from 8.99% over the prime rate (currently 3.25%) to 14.99% over the prime rate. I opted out. My card doesn’t expire for almost two more years, so it’s not a big deal right now and I was thinking about switching to a Capital One card anyway.