A word of caution for all autcion sellers: The bubble will burst.
For years eBay has sheltered behind a loophole in the law, claiming they were only supplying a market for people to trade goods, rather than actually selling products thenselves. Until now this twisting of the facts has worked and eBay has been reaping a fortune from the sale of counterfeit product sales.
In France, they have finally nailed eBay. Below is an extract from the ABC News item posted last night.
eBay fined for selling fake Louis Vuitton goods
A Paris court has ordered the online auctioneer eBay to pay 40 million euros in damages to Louis Vuitton for selling fake luxury goods online.
The commercial court ruled in favour of six LVMH brands which accused eBay of putting on sale fake handbags, clothes and other luxury goods and of illicit sales of perfumes in a case that began a year and a half ago.
eBay, the world’s biggest online auctioneer, was ordered to pay 19.28 million euros to LVMH and 17.3 million euros to its sister company Christian Dior Couture for damage to their brand images and causing moral harm.
It must also pay 3.25 million euros to four perfume brands - Christian Dior, Kenzo, Givenchy and Guerlain - for sales in violation of its authorised network.
The court barred eBay, which said it will appeal against the ruling, from advertising the cosmetic or perfume brands on its website.
(To see the whole article click here.)
Now that one court has found the chink in eBays defences, there is a strong chance that others will follow as businesses increase the political and economic pressure for their own courts to do the same.
This is quite likely to have a domino effect so if you are reselling ‘non-original’ designer goods, I’d look at getting rid of your stock and restocking with genuine items or “non-designer lable” brands.
Don’t take my word for it – see for yourself, they are:
AMP, JBH, MAP, MIG, SOO – all who lost money since we selected them but these ones more than made up for those losses: AGM, BSL, CII, IMD, IPL, JML, NCR, MMX.
The biggest gain is IPL which we listed at $25.00 a share and are now worth $172.19 per share.
Some of these shares were under one dollar each so a small gain per share, yeilded a large return because we had so many shares.
Recently I had a trial from a share investment company for a month. At the end, I declined signing up for their reports because our selections earned more than double their returns.
But before you run off and put your savings down . . .
If you invest in shares, you need to keep an eye on your portfolio. Because you have stacked the odds of having well run solid companies, you don’t need to chack daily. If a company drops too far, sell the shares, take a loss and reinvest what you get back in another company. What levels you do this at is your personal choice.
We have dumped a few as you can see (we started with 45 companies and today have only 13 left). The simple fact is you will never get every one to make a profit but if you have a selection, to spread the risks and a sound selection method, you can come out well ahead without paying thousands to so-called experts.
No great investment guru; I simply looked at the shares chart for each company. I figure a company that does well, is a soundly run enterprise and most likely to be able to weather out a financial downturn is one that has a steady reliable growth. The Chart will have a constant upward sloping line. If I find these companies and watch them for a few months, I could end up with a reliable investment. I can compare them to the so-called “Gurus” choices and see who comes out ahead.
Together my partner and I did this and we ended up with a group of 45 companies. It took almost three months to vet every company on the Australian Stock Exchange (over 1900 of them). We set up a simulated investment portfolio of $1000 of shares in each of these companies, in 2006.
Every so often we would log on to the CommSec website and screen the shares we had tagged and add up the growth of the whole package. At first it was boring and we struggled to do it every few days but in a few weeks we were out performing the experts and it became exciting to look up the results. By the end of the year we had turned our $45,000 hypothetical share portfolio into $184,000. Even taking 50% off for capital gains taxes, that made fools of the banks and most of the experts too!
In 2008 even with the stock market plunge this portfolio is till worth $257,839. Not bad for an outlay of $48,000 and we are talking US Dollar values too!
Those tough times taught me the value of having an Automated Savings Plan. It didn’t create any investments but I realised the value of putting a little away each pay no matter how tight things were.
I can’t imagine things being tighter, financially than they were then. We saw meat on the table once a fortnight and that was when we killed our own – usually a chook.
I recall hitting a hare with the car on the way home one night. I backed up and (while balling my eyes out), put the poor thing out of it’s misery, bundled it in the boot and we had rabbit stew the next evening.
All this time I was searching for some way to increase my savings through investment. It didn’t take long to realise that the banks were not the answer. Banks are fine to save money but not to invest it. They are too greedy and will pay you little more than the inflation rate, unless you have more than $5000. Frankly if you have more that $5000 why would you invest it in a bank?
When times improved and I found good work, my automated savings raised our investment capital.
As soon as I reached $1000, I bought a block of shares that were doing very well. Every $1000 saved, was invested in another block of shares.
I studied the Share Market. I had a distant Uncle who made his ample fortune on shares, so I knew there was money in there somewhere, if I could only see through all the corporate jargon and sort out the relevant information from the gossip and propaganda. I met people who were supposed financial wizards, who showed me fancy formaulae and explained the wonders of Candle Charts and Contracts for Finacial Difference (CFD’s). I paid good money for every variety of manure and fairy dust to do with the share market, only to drown in confusion and surface with the realisation that it was really a matter of simple logic.
Let’s just step back and look at the big picture for a moment:
Our goal is to create an income.
We have very little finance so we are doing this on a shoe string.
We understand that we need to create a diversified income – one that does not rely on a single income source - so that it is reliable and more likely to withstand changes in the marketplace.
This will require the creation of a business which will require funds (that we do not currently have).
This means we need some legal way of raising funds without getting into serious debt. In our current state of finance we are not a good prospect for a loan to get working capital either.
I do not like using borrowed money for business. Generally there is some risk in business and to break even you firstly have to make enough to service the fees on the money you borrowed. To make this plan work you have to be sure that you will make a lot more than you borrowed plus a lot more than the interest.
So to limit the amount we need to borrow, we need to start by saving and that has been our strategy up till now. Of course with our Automated Savings Plan, this will tick away in the background as the money we have saved, is put out to work. We have two wealth creation strategies in force now:
Now while our capital grows, we can start to work on creating a credible internet presence - building a traffic flow for our new business.
For the next 5 years all I could find in the way of work was short term contracts, Temp work and casual jobs. With a wife, children and a home loan, it should have been impossible to survive. Each time a large bill would come in that should have meant financial disaster and my compulsory saving scheme would be emptied as once more the wolf of bankruptcy was chased from our door.
I recall one case when I had just complimented myself on how well we had coped over the last few months, when a white Holden Commodore with writing on the doors, pulled into our driveway. I read the words “Sherrif” emblazoned on it’s doors with a sinking defeated feeling.
Apparently while on one of my short contract jobs I had earned a parking ticket two years ago, not paid the fine and they had come to arrest me!
It turned out that the notice had never been sent to me and they dropped all the legal fees if I payed the original fine of $80.00. At this time there was $7.90 in the bank account. Thank goodness I had 7 days to pay it and once again was able to raid my Automatic Saving Scheme.
So even though things were tough and I was not able to keep those funds in the account, I had created an emergency fund that repeatedly saved us from bankruptcy.
When I finally landed a long term contract, my first move was to up the ante and I increased the Automatic Savings amount to $80 a fortnight.
In 2000, I opened an online bank account and set an Automatic Savings Plan. (That’s bank jargon for “allowing a regular deposit into this account, from another account”).
I chose an online bank that took me at least 3 to 5 days to access my money. That’s crucial – it removes that emotional spending factor. You may burn for it today but in 3 to 5 days time you are looking at spending a little more level headed.
Things were really tough back in 2000. I was laid off work and because it was contract work, there was no severence pay – just a “Don’t come back tomorrow” seminar with all us contractors. With a wife and 3 children, I went straight to the dole office and signed up while I looked for another job. Everyone said I was “too qualified” or not in their ideal age range (at 45 years old).
I lived in the country and knew I needed the car if I was to find work. Being mechanically minded, I could do my own repairs but the real killer would be the annual registration and insurance due in 6 months. To combat this I set up the Automatic Saver and had $40.00 a fortnight, deducted from my bank account when the dole went in, to cover the coming car expenses.
I’d love to lie that I didn’t notice it being deducted- but it really hurt at first – until the bill for the car registration arrived! By that time, I had learned to live without the $40 a fortnight.
That set me wondering – why am I saving to pay someone else?
Why not save to create an investment that will pay me?
After the car registration and insurance were paid, I kept the Automatic Savings Plan going. (What’s the big deal! . . I’d kind of got used to being poor anyway!).
I figured by the time I had enough to invest, I’d have found some profitable way to put my small investment to work for me. As I saw it, I had two years to research it because after this catastrophe it would take me 2 years to get back on my feet!
We all hear about interest, dividends and royalties involving large sums of money. No-one talks about the small sums invested but these are the seeds of those larger investments. Just by starting a loose change jar we can create one of those seeds that will grow into a large investment. The problem is if we had invested $50 to earn interest, then interest of it’s interest and so on, when we were working a part time job way back at the age of 17, we would have a lump sum investment today of over $520.00 (assuming 45 years have elapsed).
Not a lot you say? What if we had done it once every year; saving $50 into a bank account for the last 45 years?
Today you would have over $8490.00. That’s not a bad lump sum for a deposit on a block of land or a fistful of shares (investments that earn seriously more than the pathetic interest on a bank account).
The simple fact is we didn’t do it. We don’t have $8490.00 today either. So when will we start so we have some money in the future?
Today the interest rates are far higher than they were back then so; what we have lost in years of investment, we can help make up with higher interest per year and with careful budgeting we could squeeze out a little more than $50.00 a year too.
My Grandfather used to say, “From tiny acorns great oak trees grow”. It’s a matter of scale – when you are broke, $50 is a large sum of money. It is also capable of generating a large sum of money too. Our problem is we see the forest today; not the handful of seeds that were sown years ago.
????????Today is the day to sow the seeds of success.
There are two ways of making money:
- Conversion – using a job or business you convert time into money. The amount you make depends on the amount of time you put in to the process and the rate at which you get paid (conversion rate). Thus a laborer can make as much as a doctor if he is willing to not sleep, eat or do anything except work 24 hours seven days a week. Before long he will collapse – burned out and become the doctor’s next patient. (The moral of the story is we all limited by the time we have.)
- Leverage – we use our money to earn money through investment. This involves deprivation and risk. We first have to restrain our spending and deprive ourselves today, of some of the non essentials, to save the money to invest tomorrow. Tomorrow we will invest that money for a reward. The size of that reward will depend on how risky the investment is. If I lend that money to the government (Government Bonds) I will get a minimal reward but I can be certain that the money and the interest it earns will be there at the end of my investment. On the other hand, I could lend that money to a sharp businessman who is ruthless and unethical with a questionable history of repaying loans, and earn a massive interest because no-one else wants to lend him a bean. Will he repay it?
Most people will become hooked on the conversion method because it is instant and tangible but relies totally on you working to convert the time into money. If you don’t work - you don’t earn.
They overlook the Leverage method which is slower but keeps working when you stop.
Let’s put away the textbook for now - there is a much greater risk:
You may have received a warning notice if you google this blog - don’t panic.
We were stunned to receive a message from Google that out site was compromised. Their robots can spot badware in a site but they don’t give you the type of ware to look for or where it is hidden.
The culprit was a link to an online gambling casino that was smuggled into the blog through a comment. It put a popup window on your computer but did no actual damage. It did not transfer throuh RSS feeds either.
We have reacted, traced the cause and eradicated it. It was a link from an online Casino site that slipped an internet popup window advertising the online casino. Although the link was annoying and done without our knowledge, it was not harmful to your computer.
When I found the link, I was aware the blogsite was old and due for a facelift, so I updated the lot with a new blog engine (much more secure) and a complete rewite of all the programming so it is absolutely clean.
We have informed Google of these upgrades but it takes a couple of weeks before they can check the site and give an all clear - removing the message.
Meanwhile we sit wait and watch all our new readers get scared off!
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