Successful People are Proactive

Every hear you boss say the word proactive, or reaching out etc. These CEO buzz words used to make me giggle. I've met many Entrepreneurs and Business owners. What successful share in common is that they are proactive. They have an idea and they are relentless in going after it..

They follow through with it, by making phone calls assigning it to their employees etc. Then they keep following through by checking up on the progress and hounding the person working on it until the work is done. In other words they go and act on their ideas. They are proactive.

In my opinion being proactive is more important to success than being smart. How many people are smarter than their boss, many. If you look at technology companies you'll find very smart engineers working for some guy with either a business degree or sometimes no degree at all. These proactive dumb dumb's surrounded themselves with smart people and so do not need to be smart themselves. That is why being proactive is more important to success than being smart.

RIM is the next Nortel ? Nope, Not at all, Buy RIM now.

I went to Future shop to check out the playbook. Though I would never spend 600$ on a gadget playbook or Ipad as you can see my previous post. Other people do buy such devices and pay a lot for it. I took a look at the device, played a game of tetris on it, watched some movie previews. it seems like perfectly good tablet. 

I also spoke to my cousin, who is a doctor that does not know anything about investing his money other than buying high MER mutual funds. When I suggested RIM to him he said that RIM is going to go bankrupt like Nortel. so that makes me think that the sentiment is very very negative.

Now here are the reasons why you should invest in RIM at 26$

1. Each share has 5.48$ worth in cash.

2. The remaining 21$ of valuation is 4.3 P / E

For those who do not understand P / E it means assuming that RIM does not grow its earnings 1 cent more, even thought the smartphone sector is exploding. Each share will earn the remaining 21$ in 4.3 years.

This compares with 4.9 P/E for nokia ( RIM is now cheaper than nokia !!! ) and 11.8 P / E for Apple

Here is what The CIBC analyst had to say, with a price target of  65$ :

At these depressed levels, we continue to recommend buying the shares. Our view is that the product transition is now well advanced with delays
already anticipated in the share price. The product refresh will help restart
shipment growth later in F2012.

so to recap, go buy some RIM shares,
you have panic,
you have good valuations
you have experts calling it cheap
you have limited downside

Disclaimer I have a covered call position in RIM

Luck Favours the Prepared

How often do you come across a great opportunity that you cannot take advantage of either because you were fully invested in something else. or because you were too slow to react because of the many distractions that eat up your time.

That is why I believe that being prepared to take advantage of these lucky opportunities that present themselves is just as important as the opportunities themselves. It doesn't matter how great the price of this property because the owner is an ignorant divorcee wife or the panic that is going on with RIM at the moment. If you are not prepared to take advantage of the situation you will not gain anything.

Many people got rich from the recession, Think about it, was it luck? The same opportunities were available to everyone. However only the prepared were able to take advantage of the panic. Now we call them Lucky.

How can you be prepared? It is simple. never be 100% invested. always keep some cash or credit available. you could tie it up for that 3 or 4% returns, or you can sit on it and wait even for 1 or 2 years for that great deal that will give you 20% or 30% returns.