Top 5 Ways To Get Rich ? ? ?

Did you mean this? The Five Laws of Gold from The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clayson

1. Gold cometh gladly and in increasing quantity to any man who will put by not less than one-tenth of his earnings to create an estate for his future and that of his family.

2. Gold laboreth diligently and contentedly for the wise owner who finds for it profitable employment, multiplying even as the flocks of the field.

3. Gold clingeth to the protection of the cautious owner who invests it under the advice of men wise in its handling.

4. Gold slippeth away from the man who invests it in businesses or purposes with which he is not familiar or which are not approved by those who are skilled in its keep.

5. Gold flees the man who would force it to impossible earnings or who followeth the alluring advice of tricksters and schemers or who trusts it to his own inexperience and romantic desires in investment.

Vindu's View: Kids gain financial literacy
By Vindu Goel

Mercury News
Article Launched: 12/02/2007 06:22:25 AM PST


We teach our children to read. We teach them about the hazards of drugs and the importance of safe sex. We teach them how a bill becomes law and how elections work.

Somehow, financial literacy doesn't get the same attention, even though adults need to deal with money far more often than we vote or have sex.

The Stock Market Game is one small effort to change that. Funded by the securities industry's charitable foundation and approved by state education officials, the program provides computer tools and lesson plans to help schools teach students in grades four through 12 about the stock market and the basics of investing.

Teams of three or four students each get $100,000 in play money to manage. They compete with other teams in the region and the nation to get the biggest return on their investment and win prizes. About 60,000 Californians and 600,000 students nationally are participating this year.

I dropped into Agnes Kaiser's seventh and eighth grade math class at Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View last week to see the game in action.

Camped out in the computer lab, 11 teams were busy studying stock charts and placing trades.

"We just bought another 100 shares of Apple. Love it!" said Marissa Taylor, 13, who captains the current top-performing team. Taylor's four-girl group has been buying and selling Apple for weeks and also holds Coca-Cola, Nike and a Vanguard bond fund.

These kids don't look at sales or earnings - they start with companies they know and buy and sell based on which way the stock is moving.

"If it's been doing good for the last couple of weeks, we buy it," said Aye Myat, 12, who heads another team. "If it's losing 3 percent to 6 percent a day, we sell it."

I'm not sure that formula is a recipe for long-term success - ultimately, a stock's value tends to reflects the underlying fundamentals of the business. But since Kaiser's class started the game in October, most of her teams have beaten the S&P 500, the benchmark index of large stocks, by a few percentage points.

"They're feeling good about themselves," said Kaiser. And well they should - mutual fund managers would kill for that kind of performance.

Kaiser, a former chemical engineer who's been teaching the game in her math classes for three years, said the students' pace of learning is especially impressive because some of them barely knew how a savings account worked when they started.

It turns out that studying the stock market is a surprisingly good way to learn middle-school math: percentage changes, positive and negative integers, graphs. The students also learn a lot about teamwork. "The most challenging part is working with a lot of people and coming to consensus," Kaiser said.

The students even learn computer skills that will come in handy when they're older: They have to chart their stocks on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and make a PowerPoint presentation to their classmates.

It's a lot different from when I was a kid. My school tried to teach us about the stock market by giving us a pot of fake cash, telling us to "buy" some random stocks from the newspaper's listings and see where we stood after a few weeks. I didn't really learn anything about the markets until I graduated from college and became a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

The Stock Market Game, found at www.stockmarketgame.org, doesn't cost schools anything. It's funded by securities firms and their Foundation for Investor Education. (In Silicon Valley, the Mercury News has partnered with Merrill Lynch to supply free newspapers to participating schools.)

In the 30 years the game has been running, nearly 10 million students have participated.

The securities industry obviously has a vested interest in helping people understand stocks and bonds. But frankly, everyone needs to learn about investing if they hope to fund their children's college education, buy a house or make smart decisions about their health care benefits and 401(k) plans.

Yet student financial literacy is shockingly low. Just 14.2 percent of high-school seniors thought stocks would outperform savings bonds and bank accounts over an 18-year time frame, according to a 2006 national survey by the JumpStart Coalition, which regularly tracks student financial literacy.

Good financial habits get set when we're young. So as you think about holiday presents for the children in your life, consider giving them a share or two of stock and spending some time teaching them about the markets.

It's a gift that's a whole lot more valuable than another game for the Wii or an iTunes gift card.

What moniker? BOINK? M? I don't know. I have another Tribe friend named M too. No big deal. I just wanted to distinguish as there was some big deal that went down on Tribe a few weeks ago and I want people to know that I have only one profile and no alts. The friends I have named Marvin are separate people too. And Marvin in Spain is really cool. : ) I thought it would be funny to find everyone on Tribe with the name Marvin and befriend them and we could call ourselves "The Marvins." Maybe start our own tribe. lol Like that rock band The Donnas. Do you think they are really all named Donna? I doubt it. But theyre still cool anyway. : )

Colombian's don't consume the drugs, it's American's who do, and it's American drug users who give the cartels here their fiancial support which allows them to keep terrorizing inocent and good people here.

if Americans stopped using drugs, then there wouldn't be a "market" and the coke growers and cartels would have to find another way to make money and then there might finally be peace in my country.

if you know nothing about Colombian politics, then please don't comment about our Government.