Andy posted a comment on my recent eBay shopping experience revealing to me that there is more to eBay than just entering a maximum bid value and hoping no one comes along at the last minute and beats you by mere pennies.

Introducing eBay sniping.

Sniping is really a method of having a program automate your bidding.  As I mentioned in my previous post, with two days to go I placed a bid for a set of sun visors for my wife’s Honda Accord.  In reality, I just jacked up the price on myself, allowing others to see that I’m interested …

No matter how many times I’ve heard it, no matter how many times I’ve said it, every once in a while I have one of those “Doohhh” moments that reaffirms my faith in the saying:

“You get what you pay for.”

Once thought dead, the saga of the washer and dryer for my rental unit lives on.

Yesterday I got an email from one of the students in my rental stating the dryer was burning his clothes and ripping the buttons off his shirts.  In a previous investigation, I found the dryer drum was not turning true on the spindle and created a gap between the …

The other day I wrote a post about how consumers are labeling the latest drop off in oil prices as a “plunge” of a whopping $12 per barrel, even though this type of retracement is typical for this time of year.

Now, the market is propping up the price of oil once again due to speculation that OPEC may cut production to allow the price to stabilize.

“Something needs to be done to steady the price…” - Edmund Daukoru, OPEC President  (Source)

Oil prices have dropped recently because of cooled tensions over nukes in Iran, higher supply in the U.S. and lower …

 
TD Ameritrade has a new feature coming out for Apex customers called Level II with TotalView. 

Level II quotes show the market liquidity and if used correctly, can give you a very short term direct to the market sentiment of a stock.  Orders are shown for both the bid and ask (buy/sell) along with the order sizes.

The new TotalView features will include:

-All the liquidity for NASDAQ-listed securities at each price level from every market participant, not just the top prices from each participant.

-A timeline showing the best bid/ask prices from individual market participants, making it easier to see interest in a given stock depending on …

Read more…

I’m in search of a drivers side sun visor for my wife’s ‘95 Honda Accord.  Our local Honda dealer wants naming rights to our first born, and the local salvage yard wants naming rights to Honda.  Get my drift?

I’ve found that a great place to find old auto parts is, none other than eBay.  But there’s a trick to not only finding the parts, but getting a good deal on them as well.

I found the parts I need with a few days left to go in the bidding process.  The one and only bid was for $0.99 for both the …

Over the last few years, I’ve come to realize a few things about change.

A few bumper stickers I’ve seen:

“Change is good!”
“Fear change”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same”

Many times changes in the workplace get the most attention, as there’s typically an outside force that promises changes that those on the inside don’t really want to see.  A takeover or a merger are a prime example.  Merging Company ‘A’ with Company ‘B’ is never as seamless as people want it to be.  Integrating cultures into a single Company ‘C’ power house takes time.  The problem? Time is money.

Company executives would prefer to integrate operations overnight because the longer …

Today the energy department said crude oil supplies were down again for the third straight week.

Supplies dropped by 2.8 million barrels to just over 324 million barrels in storage.

On another note, there is now fear that OPEC may cut supply as a result of a production and supply review in December.  Some speculate that with oil basing around $60, a cut in OPEC production is a good bet.

This, coupled with winter weather forecasts being all over the map (pardon the pun), could drive oil back to $70 per barrel.

Only time will tell.

A quick quote from the recent BusinessWeek:

“Cheaper oil is helping to offset a cooling housing market and may persuade the Fed to hold off raising rates through the fall”

It’s interesting how quickly we forget how cheap oil really was just two and a half years ago.  At the end of 2003, a barrel of crude oil sold for under $30 per barrel.  Over the last several months, we’ve seen a plunge (as BusinessWeek calls it) of over $13 per barrel, and they question how low oil prices can go!  They even have a cute little chart with a gasoline hose portraying the downward slope of the price …

I found this video clip during a search through YouTube.com.

Something tells me independence of foreign oil is closer than we think…

A reminder to those who watch their credit, (or are in the process of repairing their credit), the place to get your annual free credit report is at: AnnualCreditReport.com.

A recent Red Tape Chronicles at MSNBC has listed the FreeCreditReport.com site as a convenient way for its  parent, Experian, to make money after you’ve signed up for their free credit report.