Did Zimbabwe really just introduce a 100 trillion dollar banknote? WTF?
That looks like this: Z$ 100,000,000,000,000.00
There are more dollars in one of these notes than there are atoms in the observable universe. (Just kidding).
Seriously, they need to be careful because when you pass ‘trillion’, you might as well just say ‘zillion’ because nobody is going to want to use ‘quadrillion’, or even know what it means.
This comment from Hacker News is also interesting:

Remember that Zimbabwe redemoninated in mid 2008 and took 10 zeroes off the bills, and it hardly seems worth mentioning but they took 3 zeroes off in 2006. That makes this new bill 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 which may or may not be 1 nonillion dollars. It’s a lot of zeroes, I may have missed a few one way or another.

My Million Zimbabwe Dollar Homepage site is completely worthless now - good thing I sold the pixels when I did.

I posted before about how I have very little time these days and have limited my rss reader to only a very few feeds. One of them is mymoneyblog. This blog has made me a steady amount of money. Recently, from reading the blog, I opened an optionsxpress account (I funded it with only $1000) and will be credited $500 in six months - just for opening the account and making one trade. Also, tonight I opened up a Schwab credit card with 2% cash back on all purchases, with no limit on the cash back.
This blog is also where I got the idea of opening credit cards and getting cash on 0% interest promotional rates (and no transfer fees) - to put the money in a high interest savings account.
The only hard part about all of this is that you need to be organized and make sure you stay on top of everything and do certain things at specific times (e.g. don’t hold that credit card balance past the promotional 0% interest period). But this has become a whole lot easier for me lately, as the web startup I’ve been working on helps with exactly this problem. I’ll post more about the startup in the next few weeks.
But if you want to make some easy money and get some great deals, you should definitely read Jonathan’s blog.

All you have to do is send about a billion spam email messages every day.

After 26 days, the Storm worm sent 350 million e-mails advertising the researchers’ counterfeit pharmacy sites. Only 28 would-be sales resulted, and all but one of the potential clients ordered male enhancement drugs. The average “buy” from each “sale” was about $100, which would have totaled roughly $2,731 for the researchers.

“Under the assumption that our measurements are representative over time, we can extrapolate that… Storm-generated pharmaceutical spam would produce roughly $3.5 million dollars of revenue a year,” the team concluded.

But this is the scary part:

“By the same logic, we estimate that Storm self-propagation campaigns can produce between 3,500 and 8,500 new bots per day.”

“One in 10 people clicking through to receive the malware is a pretty sobering number,” said Stefan Savage, associate professor in the systems and networking group at UCSD and one of the lead researchers on the study. “That suggests that the ability of the worm’s authors to grab even more victims is little more than a marketing issue.”

I just ordered his book.

This article about the success of some website traders is interesting.

Davis says he generally holds on to websites for at least a few months before flipping them. Sometimes, though, the process is much quicker like the time he bought a forum about day-care centres for $US1500 and sold it six hours later for $US3500.

“I used to make my own websites and sell them, but then I realised, hey, this is much easier than making them,” he says. “It’s as simple as buying a website from someone and making it more attractive. It’s about creating value where there was none.”

This past week, Zimbabwe has introduced a 100 Billion Dollar Bill, which can buy about two loaves of bread (but interestingly they are selling on ebay for about US$100 each). Daily expenses for Zimbabweans are now in the trillions.

Only last week, the Harare Herald advertised the Lotto bonanza prize being offered was 1.2 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars. At the time, that was equivalent to around 4,000 US dollars.

“What is confusing is counting of the figures on your cheques as you try to make sure you are not under or over paying someone, or the struggling to read price tags in shops that have not yet knocked off zeros and so on,” she says.

Tills throughout the country have been struggling to cope, as have banking computers, and accounting systems.

As a result, the banks recently agreed to lop six zeros off transactions and documentation.

Amazingly, this is not the largest note ever printed - Yugoslavia “was forced to issue a 500 billion dinar note in 1993.” And in World War I Germany had a banknote with a face value of 100 trillion marks.
Only two years ago, Zimbabwe introduced the $100,000 bill, which made headlines. It’s nothing now.
Good thing I cashed in my million zimbabwe pixels when I did.

I found this article about decisions and the brain interesting as it relates to trading.

Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices — which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take — appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.

Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a decision, the more likely the unconscious brain handled it all better, they reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science in 2006. “The idea that conscious deliberation before making a decision is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us,” Dr. Dijksterhuis said.

They were able to accurately predict decisions, with brain scans, 10 seconds before they were made.

Today was a good day because I worked the entire day. It’s now 2:00am and I woke up at around 9:30 and I worked the whole time except for a brief break to go for a run with my wife and eat dinner. I made potatoes with rosemary. Rosemary is my favorite herb. Life without rosemary would be a lot less enjoyable.
I hadn’t been paying attention to the market at all for the last few months because I wanted to make sure that I concentrated on work. But the person I’ve been working with has been talking to me about the market and so I am becoming more interested. I had no money in any stocks for months, but I may start to get back into it as long as it does not interfere with my work.
I looked over a list of stocks from a scan that I created and trust, and there weren’t many charts at all that I was enthusiastic about. I think the only one that I made a note about was Woodward Governor Co. (WGOV).

I’ve decided that I am going to post every day, just to keep a record and to let others know what I’m up to - even though I have very little time these days. So most posts will probably be short.
My sleep schedule has been really off lately - I keep getting to sleep later and later. Last night I didn’t get to sleep until 4:30am.
I have been working on different automated trading systems. I’ve been spending a lot of time tweaking and backtesting. And then I get up in the morning and run the system on a paper trading account with IB.
I’ve also been attending the DreamIt Ventures seminars every Tuesday. Tonight Jason Olim spoke. Some of his advice about leadership and management I remember from my classes - but other stuff that he has learned from his experiences was really interesting. He highly recommends the book, “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t” - I’ll have to add it to my list.
Qualities of successful entrepreneurs: drive, intelligence, don’t fit in with corporate world, optimism, good work ethic

A single Z$5,000,000 note is selling on eBay for about $50. That is about Z$100,000 per US$1, which is a zillion times better than the current black market rate of US$0 per Z$infinity.
Since the upside is limitless, there must be a way to arbitrage and make some money. But how?
I called my bank and they said they do not sell Zimbabwe dollars.
You can buy Z$20 bills here, but I don’t think they would be much of a collector’s item, as people seem to only really value the very large denominations.
I checked craigslist and a couple of smart arbitrageurs have already beat me to the punch.
After launching the Million Zimbabwe Dollar Homepage, I have received a lot of email asking for the notes, but I can’t find a supply. If any readers have access and would like to partner up, let me know.
It is interesting that they have become so worthless that they are now rare and unique, and therefore are increasing in value.