Dear readers,

For the two weeks of March 2009, the Dow Jones has recovered at least 1,000 points due to the rally of financial institutions and real estate companies. These were caused by concurrent news that became known to the public showing profitable results for the first two months of their operations. In my last posts I told you about the charts, but then, in the example above we see that business news and current events have a direct effect on the market. Well, put it this way, what is the market composed of? -- People, and by nature most people go with their gut feel and based on their emotions. So, if you yourself read those news, don't you think you would agree in buying that stock at a higher price because you would think that it will go up further? Maybe yes, or maybe no. Some did, some did not. For those who did, they got the gains and also losses depending on how long they have waited. For those who did not, well it's a lost opportunity but no loss nor gain.

The charts can only guide you so much, the ultimate factor should be on your feel of the market and on how knowledgeable you are with what's happening in the news and in the companies you are investing in. You must also consider your plan whether it is long-term or short-term. By this, if you are on a long-term basis then you should be caring for simple fluctuations in the market like what is happening now. Of course you would now if your doing short-term trading which is basically buy and sell of stocks for gains. Depending on how you play the stock market both plans have different leverages and different risks attached. So either way, you should study and observe first before you make a decision to buy or sell.

It's a friday today, the end of another trading week. Let's see what's gonna happen next week and just hope some good news will come our way! Cheers everyone! :)

In my last post, we talked about the effect of your computer's RAM memory as to the performance of your computer. In this post, we have how the Harddisk capacity affects the speed of your PC.

Basically, the Hard disk (HDD) is the logical drive where all your data is stored. A computer may have multiple HDDs on it or only one. Laptops generally have only one HDD when distributed by their manufacturers. As for desktop computers, a knowledgeable person may have more than one HDD at a time which usually ranges from 2-4 pieces (at least in the old days, people tend to have 4 HDDs because of lack of storage, these days you have 1 HDD more than equivalent to 500 times than the old ones). Going back to my introduction, HDDs store your data in them. Storage capacities are then classified into a measurement item called "Bytes". Many people see this but doesn't really understand what this is. Most of them know only MB and GB (Megabytes and Gigabytes) but if you go further back, here is a conversion schedule:

A simple illustration to understand this better is this, for those who listens to music from their ipods or simlar gadgets, your mp3 music files are usually 3-4 Mb in size. So using the schedule above you know how big is a harddisk.

Going a little bit technical, a data is not just stored in your HDD like a bunch of items scattered everywhere with no dividers or anything. The HDD is actually segregated by divisions called "sectors". These sectors are numbered and are identified by the computer's operating system (OS) using those numbers. When a data is copied from an external source or is created by a program within the computer, a specific sector is used to store that file (data file). Accordingly, when a sector is full then the OS uses another. A minor setback is created when because of this system similar items are stored into different sectors which are logically far from each other (e.g. sector 1 vs. sector 1111111). The OS then reads these separated data going back and forth the disk to process what it needs to process. And this is one factor that slows down your computer.

Luckily, operating systems like Windows have a built-in "disk defragmenter" which arrange these files into order. Except for system files used and runned by the OS, files or data are basically arranged by the disk defragmenter program into the most efficient way it can, thus making it faster for the processor to read those files when needed. The disk defragment may be found (for Windows users) at Start > Programs > Accessories > System. It is generally adivisable to defragment your HDD on a periodic basic for maintenance (semi-annual or quarterly). Other programs related to security also have disk defragmenting functions which may also be used for this purpose.

As I said, that is only one factor that can slow down your PC. Another factor is when the HDD is near its full capacity. As shown above HDDs are measured by the "byte" system. It is to follow that HDDs can be full. How? To start with, the HDD when purchased with an already setup computer system, is already used by the operating system. The basic Windows will usually consume Gigabytes off your harddisk which depends on what version you use. Accordingly, when I said capacity it is not only pertaining to the size (Tb) but more on the % used. A 1Tb HDD is already 80% used up when it reached 800Gb (remaining 200Gb) while a 500Gb HDD is only 50% used up when it is at 250Gb. one must be consious enough to know the capacity of his harddisk so as not to risk damaging it. A 90-99% used haddisk has a high risk of data loss and so I will advise my readers not to come to this point. HDDs these are not that expensive along with other more affordable storage devices like the flashdrives or DVDs. Of course aside from data loss the computer significantly slows down when it reaches this capacity threshold due to the simple fact that the processor has more data to read before it can find what it's looking for.

In my next posts, we will have the effects of your computer's Processor, Video card memory, Network speed, and Internet Speed.

Thanks to all my readers and I hope you learned something from this blog! Cheers people! :)

In my last posting about the US markets I was saying about the government's plan to rescue the economy by the stimulus bill they have approved. That was two weeks ago and evidently we have seen that the markets aren't recovering yet and in fact the indexes even went lower... But this is all I can say, we can't lose hope. The US Government is doing its best to maintain and recover the markets. Time and time again, the US government has proven that it is capable of it.

As to the indicator charts for those who are trading, be careful because the fluctuations are not in the normal. Charts shows almost straight lines for the past week and therefore we can say that it is very unpredictable. Oil prices rose but there are still uncertainties. The finance industry is still dropping but with the help of the Government and the plans being made by the bigger finance companies to maintain their market values, we can just hope that it will recover over the coming weeks or months.

The effect of the stimulus is not yet evident as it was just approved recently. When the money starts to be distributed to the taxpayers then it is expected for some economic recovery which is the main goal of the stimulus bill anyway.

As a closing statement, all I can say is for those who want to go into high-risk, high-profit trading, now is the time to go into the market. But for those who are not very familiar with the stock market or those who wants to start trading / investing now, you might want to think twice before doing so.

Cheers everyone!