Little Bits Wonders
I know what to get our 10 month old son for his first birthday.
Here it is.
Something tells me his favourite will be the sound brick…
I’ve been toying with the idea of trading on the Malasyian stock market for a while now. After a few months of procrastination, I finally took the plunge and opened my trading account this morning. I’m really looking forward to following a few chosen local stocks over the next few months now !
For those who don’t have a trading account in Malaysia yet, here is how to open one.
- Check the Bursa Malaysia website and choose the broker(s) you wish to deal with.
- Prepare your documents – IC or passport, bank account information, income statement.
- Visit your broker’s office so their representative can answer your question, verify your documents, and help you fill up the forms.
The representative will help you open a CDS account and a trading account. You need both to be able to trade on Bursa Malaysia.
The CDS account is an electronic account maintain by the Malaysian Central Depository (MCD). It works like a bank account, but instead of cash, it holds shares. The stocks you buy and sell will be credited and debited into your CDS account.
The trading account is the one managed by your broker. You will pass orders and manage your operations from the trading account. You can do so either by using their online trading platform, or contacting your remisier so he does it on your behalf.
Happy trading !
Education in Malaysia
Strong passwords
The Economist has a very good piece on password security this week: Speak, friend, and enter. A good password has to be both easy to remember and hard to guess, but in practice we often go for the former over the latter. They even recommend a few techniques to create passwords that do both.
While their techniques may give you strong passwords, I think there is a better method of constructing unguessable but memorable passwords. Here it is.
First, you need to memorize a very strong password with a mix of letters, capital letters, numbers and symbols. It could go something like GwxTi8$. Don’t worry, you only have to memorize it once. The second step is to adapt it to every website you register to by adding the two first letters of the web url to the password. For example, if you register on Facebook, your password would be faGwxTi8$, and if you register on Yahoo!, your password would be yaGwxTi8$. This way, you end up with a different very strong password, that is different for every website you visit.
Easier than having to remember many passwords, and safer than having one password to rule them all, don’t you think ?
Malaysia is Peaceful
Many Malaysian will tell you that their country is not as safe as it used to be. They will go on and tell you about their friend(s) who got snatch theft recently, or the horrific crime they just read about in the newspaper. I usually nod, and empathize. I then tell them that France is not much better and that I actually feel much safer here than I do back in my birth country.
While Malaysia has its problem, I believe many living in Malaysia make them worse than they really are when it comes to crime. Of course, some pickpocketing, snatch theft and burglaries do happen. Many of these criminal activities may even be directed against foreigners as they are seen as “having the money”. But overall, I feel very safe in Malaysia.
So I was happy to discover this morning the recent Global Peace Index ranking Malaysia as the 19th most peaceful nation in the world. This will give me some tangible link and fact to share next time I discuss the subject with my friends and acquaintances. It may not be perfect – who in their right mind would believe Malaysia is more peaceful than Singapore ?? – still, it provides a decent estimate and goes some way towards proving that the Malaysian perception of insecurity is overblown. After all, if it is prepared by a reputable organization like the Economist Intelligence Unit and is recognized by the World Bank, the OECD and Wikiprogress, it must be somewhat relevant.