First of all, happy new year to all of you!

It’s been a while since we updated this blog. Yes, we were so busy in the second half of 2010. First of all, we bought a resale house in Ontario as our primary residence. After that, we did a little bit of renovations to our house. Then, our tenant in British Columbia told us that they also bought a house. This means we have to either find a new tenant or sell the property. We finally decided to sell the property.

Finally, we are now in the new year of 2011. We hope that we can write blog more often this year. Finger crossed…

(Picture is from stock.xchng.)

Is 1-800 toll-free number is always free? We just learned today that it is not the case. We put a copy of our last payment in the screenshot above. As you can see we paid some amount of money to call 1-800. For example, the first line shows we have to pay $2.80.

How can it be? We called Rogers, our mobile provider, to check what’s going on here. Apparently, calling 1-800 numbers is considered an air-time. Currently, we have 250 minutes air time; so once our air-time exceeds 250 minutes, we have to pay for 1-800 numbers.

It is really a good lesson. We have to be really careful now…. call 1-800 number only when it is really necessary. We are not sure with other operators in Canada though.

As of today, Apple is valued at $234 billion. It is now official that Apple has larger market capitalization than Microsoft, which is at $226 billion. How high can Apple go? Will it hit $400 in the near future, as predicted by Morgan Stanley?

Personally, we can hardly imagine that Apple will hit $400 in the near future. The largest company is now Exxon Mobil with market cap of $284 billion. Should Apple hit $400, their market cap would be almost $400 billion. It would be much 1.5 larger than today’s Exxon Mobil, 2.5 times larger than today’s Johnson and Johnson, and 5 times larger than today’s McDonald.

Will it happen? We don’t know. However, we think that Apple won’t hit $400 in the near future based on market cap. Will Steve Jobs be able to turn $200 billion company into $400 billion company in the next 1 – 2 years?

Let’s wait and see….

Today, we had a little bit of pullback in major market indices all around the world. S&P 500 is down –3.9% today. The return of S&P 500 year-to-date is now –3.9%. It’s not too bad considering we had a pretty nice run last year.

Let’s take a look at the return of major indices around the world:

• S&P 500: –3.9%
• Dow Jones Industrial Average: –3.45%
• Nasdaq Composite Index: –2.87%
• S&P/TSX Composite Index: –2.9%
• Shanghai Composite Index: –21%
• Hang Seng Index: –10.64%
• Nikkei 225 Index: –4.89%
• FTSE 100 Index: –6.28%

So far, North American indices beat other major indices; while emerging market indices seems to be lagging. Will we see another bear market ahead? Nobody knows…

If you’ve been reading a couple of our last postings; you might be wondering: are we stock picker? We’ve been talking about stock picks, see here, here and here. In fact, we have never talked about ETF or mutual funds.

The answer to this question is: yes and no. We have a diversified portfolio; a large amount of them are invested, surprisingly, in ETFs and index mutual funds. We allocated only about 10% are invested in individual stocks. We’ll discuss more about our assets allocation in future posting.

Why don’t we just invest in index funds and do nothing? Isn’t investing in individual stocks very risky? There are a couple of reasons. One reason is because we want to find ten-bagger. We don’t normally find ten-bagger in index funds, do we? Another reason is because we want to improve our investment skills. We’re still beginner in the investment world; there are a lot of things we need to learn. That’s why; we don’t want to risk too much capital in individual stocks (for now).

(Picture is from stock.xchng.)

We just created a new twitter account for our blog. The address for our twitter is:

http://twitter.com/1stmilliond

Why not 1stmilliondollar? We just learned that twitter doesn’t allow user name longer than15 characters. That’s why; we have to choose shorter name. It’s not the best, but we can’t wait for twitter to support more than 15 characters.

Feel free to follow our twitter.

Well, we don’t have much to say in our first posting other than please subscribe to our feed. Feel free to link to our blog; and we’ll add a link to your blog/site in return.