When a Stock Market Analyst or a Fund Manager chooses shares for their portfoilio they should look at a number of criteria, including: future earnings potential, present and past earnings, the quality of management and their strategies, sales and potential sales growth, innovation and creativeness, the debt of the company, cash flow, industry trends and worldwide macro-economic factors… to name a few of the important issues.

They love numbers and crunching them to get all sorts of ratios.  They look at all the aspects of the financial statements and end up creating fancy models based on future earnings, to see if the share price is over or under priced.  All very mathematical and based on supposedly sound principles…

But where has it got them?  Its still a gamble.

Sure you look at overall trends, apply some common sense etc… but buying shares on the stock market is gambling.  You can remove as much element of chance as you can, but you still gamble on whether the share price will go up or down.  Some factors are out of your control!

Highly paid people who gamble with other people’s money!!! Getting bonuses for making more money and payouts to get rid of them when things go wrong… they win on both sides of the equation!!

Maybe thats why traders look like crazed gambling addicts… they love the thrill of gambling on the stock market!

Mastering poker – there are many sources for learning poker.  I have been trying to master the game of poker for quite a while.  I have tried using many online strategy guides, and found several to be effective in improving my game and my understanding of poker.

Several of the most comprehensive guides I found, provide information regarding all aspects of poker and especially helped my online poker.

They contain well written information that deals with all aspects of poker.  They include the popular games like Texas Holdem, Omaha and Stud – also rules and strategy articles for the less popular games such as Razz or HORSE.

I hope to find more poker guides, written by poker professionals.  For basic game rules I use Wikipedia, the world-famous knowledge sharing platform, but it just doesn’t cut it when searching for more advanced poker strategies.

Mastering the game of poker by reading online strategy articles, takes a lot of your spare time, but once you have found some useful material, your poker will improve.

Are you prepared to lose everything when you play blackjack?

When you walk into a casino or play your blackjack online, are you prepared to lose all your chips?

I was chatting to a friend who is an investment advisor and he is struggling because people don’t trust the markets anymore – can you blame them?  The first thing that he does is ask people whether they are prepared to risk losing all their money.  He does this to help determine their risk profile.  Do they like to take risks and are they gamblers… or do they like a steady income with low risk?

Now of course with the current stock market situation, no-one is happy that they went for the “high risk – maximum return option”… which ended up turning into the “no return – lose everything option!!!!”

Age also comes into it because if they are near retirement then they can’t risk losing their investments… although it seems like that hasn’t stopped some people from taking huge risks and losing their retirement savings.

Mastering blackjack tries to advise you to maximise your returns playing blackjack.  But one thing you have to be prepared for is losing all your chips.  It is good practice to only take into a casino, the money that you are prepared to lose for that evening.  Or to deposit online what you are prepared to lose.

Be honest with yourself…. I know its hard but try…

We never want to stop when we lose everything, the first urge is to reach for the wallet and go and try again…. “I know I can win this money back…. if only I get the cards and get lucky…”

It is best to prepare yourself for loss, after all blackjack is a game of chance and anything could happen.  Then when loss happens you accept it and go home or log-off.

Or… of course you could keep improving your blackjack skills and reading the mastering blackjack blog so that you don’t lose as much….

We all went off to watch the latest Bond movie the other night, ‘Quantum of Solace’.  Yes I know it has been out for ages, but we just never had a chance to see it.

I was very disappointed that there was no gambling in this Bond movie, after the previous one – Casino Royale.  I suppose that it might have been overdoing it a bit by having gambling in this one too, but still it would have been nice.

In fact to be honest most of the time I was a bit confused during the movie, because it had been so long since I had seen its predecessor Casino Royale, that I couldn’t remember the detail of the plot.

Watching Quantum of Solace was like watching a sequel to Casino Royale, but if you couldn’t remember what happened in the first movie then you were a bit lost for the second one!

So now I have got out the DVD of Casino Royale to go back and see what happened again and piece together the pieces.  Then I’ll have to go back and watch Quantum of Solace again to put more pieces of the plot together….

Clever marketing, you end up seeing everything twice just to follow what is going on…

Then of course they leave it open ended, with unsolved mysteries so guess what… there is another Bond movie coming along with Daniel Craig doing his stuff…

Today I want to talk about mastering what you do – be it your job, your hobby, your sport, playing blackjack… whatever it is.

What inspired me last week is the heroic act of Chesley B. Sullenberger, otherwise known as “Sully”, who piloted the US Airways plane that crash landed into the Hudson River.  What a hero – Well done fella!

It was described as a “masterful landing“, but knowing a little about flying, it was not just the landing but also the quick thinking and decision making that he made, under pressure.  The plane lost power in both of its engines because it hit a flock of birds, just after take off.

With a loss of power the plane will still glide, but it will lose altitude quickly and as the plane had just taken off, there was not a lot of time before the plane hit the ground… or the water in this case.  Pilots are trained to think quickly about where they will crash land.

In this case he was faced with deciding whether to try and turn back to La Guardia Airport and risk not making it, with a very built-up and populated area that he had to get over, or try to find another airport closer, or find somewhere safe to land nearby.  He chose to turn and follow the Hudson River and put the plane down in the river.  Thereby minimizing any harm or damage to people on the ground, and in this case to the plane and passengers!

Apparently crash landings onto water are rare and it is even more unusual that the plane was intact and that everyone survived – masterful indeed.  When they removed the plane from the Hudson, one of the engines was still attached to the wing, incredible considering the force against the engines on hitting the water.

Captain “Sully” must have kept the nose of the plane right up and the wings exactly level so that the plane could skim across the water and land safely.

But lets get back to my point… and that is mastering what you do.  Capt. Sullenberger is an example to all of us, he has over 40 years of flying experience and has become a master at his profession.  His pilot training has probably repeated the safety aspect over and over again.  And, I suppose most pilots hope that they will never have to use their safety training!

You just never know what lies around the next corner.  So it is better to cast away mediocrity and become a master at what you do!

All the best for 2009!

By now you should be back into the swing of things.  Its taken me a while to get back into mainstream after a busy festive season.  Perhaps too much partying!

I want to write a lot more this year and bring you exciting gambling and gaming news.  Contact me if you wish, I welcome comments.  Let me know what you want to see on this site and I’ll try my best to bring it to you.

With focus on a change of government on 20 January, with the new president taking office.  We hope that changes are made to gambling legislation, that our leaders come to their senses and more realistic, practical regulations are put in place.

Let’s hope for change.  But let’s also do as much as we all possibly can to write to Congress and get your opinion across.  I think that the Poker Players Alliance are doing fantastic work in putting together a professional, organized and co-ordinated argument against the UIGEA.  Have you joined them?

Do your part for change in 2009, don’t just sit back and watch.  It’s not only going to take a major effort from everyone, but also a very well organized and planned offense on this legislation.  We all have to apply our minds and work together, if we want change.

Good luck for the year ahead!