Posts Tagged ‘tsx’

Are We Gold Bug?

May 28th, 2010

Gold

As we saw lately, gold price has been soaring. It is not traded at above $1,200 per ounce. Are we (we = 1stmilliondollar.net) a gold bug? Are we buying gold?

We used to like keeping money in gold. However, we have changed our strategy since last year, i.e. not to invest in gold at all. Why? First of all, we read Warren Buffett’s quote about gold:

[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head

Basically he is saying that why invest in something that has no utility. Gold will do nothing for us. This quote keeps us thinking, why we are investing in gold then.

The second reason is because gold is just a currency. The value will never go up or down. It is just our dollar that goes up or down in value. If we can buy a car with 1 bar of gold today; we should be able to buy the same car with 1 bar of gold in 20 years from now. The price of the car might be double or triple; but in terms of value, it is just the same.

As summary, we don’t invest in gold at all these days. However, we invest in some gold companies indirectly through Canadian index. The two largest gold mining companies in the world are Canadian companies; and they are included in Canadian’s S&P/TSX index.

(Picture is from Mykl Roventine @ flickr.)

How to Display Country Stock Index on Google Docs?

February 18th, 2010

Our previous posting discusses on how to display stock prices on Google Docs. How can we display stock indexes, such as S&P 500? We might need them if we want to compare our portfolio with those indexes, don’t we?

Here is the trick: you can just type the same function as you normally use for stocks, i.e. “=GoogleFinance(index)”. Type without quotes. For example, to display the current price of S&P 500 index, type “=GoogleFinance(“.INX”)”.

google_docs3

How do we find the ticker symbol of popular indexes? There are a couple of places on the Internet that has this information. Yahoo! Finance provides them on their home page; but they use a different convention with Google Finance. Instead of prefixing the ticker with dot, they use ^ symbol.

Here is the list of popular stock indexes around the world.

  • S&P 500 Index: .INX
  • Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) Index: .DJI
  • Nasdaq Composite Index: .IXIC
  • S&P/TSX Composite Index: .GSPTSE
  • FTSE 100 Index: .FTSE
  • Hang Seng Index: .HSI
  • Nikkei 225 Index: .N225

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