My daily obsessions [money and the GRE]
Two things in particular have dominated much of my time recently: stock market and the GRE.
I signed up for the GRE and the CS subject exam. I'm taking the subject exam at the start of next month, and then the general exam two weeks later. I've been trying to study lots of words so that I'll do well in the verbal section, but the words are not sticking in my head. Based on sample exams online, I expect to do somewhere around average for verbal. This worries me and makes me want to study harder somehow. For the CS exam, I've found that my CS education skipped details in most of the topics tested on the exam, most notably CPU caches and the Chomsky hierarchy. I wasn't even able to tell if a language was regular or not. I'm learning a lot, albiet slowly, from this whole GRE prep obsession.
In other news, I'm now fairly heavily invested in the stock market. I've thrown about half my cash into the market. The daily ups and downs of the markets have me memorized. My understanding of the markets is worrying. I don't know what it really means to own stock in a company. When I buy a stock, am I buying from another trader or directly from the issuing company? Why does everyone want useless rags of paper? To have a say in voting at shareholder meeting? To get dividends? It seems like a huge sham, but I know that many people make money with it.
My investing strategy is to put about one third of my money in foreign index ETF, another third into domestic index ETF, and the last third into companies stocks for companies that I like (currently Lenovo and Apple). I think that energy stocks (Exxon?) will be my next investment.
The other question that I should ask a financial adviser is if I should pay off my car loan. The pluses are that I wouldn't have to pay interest on the loan, but the negatives are less liquid cash and more risk of my car gets totaled.
I signed up for the GRE and the CS subject exam. I'm taking the subject exam at the start of next month, and then the general exam two weeks later. I've been trying to study lots of words so that I'll do well in the verbal section, but the words are not sticking in my head. Based on sample exams online, I expect to do somewhere around average for verbal. This worries me and makes me want to study harder somehow. For the CS exam, I've found that my CS education skipped details in most of the topics tested on the exam, most notably CPU caches and the Chomsky hierarchy. I wasn't even able to tell if a language was regular or not. I'm learning a lot, albiet slowly, from this whole GRE prep obsession.
In other news, I'm now fairly heavily invested in the stock market. I've thrown about half my cash into the market. The daily ups and downs of the markets have me memorized. My understanding of the markets is worrying. I don't know what it really means to own stock in a company. When I buy a stock, am I buying from another trader or directly from the issuing company? Why does everyone want useless rags of paper? To have a say in voting at shareholder meeting? To get dividends? It seems like a huge sham, but I know that many people make money with it.
My investing strategy is to put about one third of my money in foreign index ETF, another third into domestic index ETF, and the last third into companies stocks for companies that I like (currently Lenovo and Apple). I think that energy stocks (Exxon?) will be my next investment.
The other question that I should ask a financial adviser is if I should pay off my car loan. The pluses are that I wouldn't have to pay interest on the loan, but the negatives are less liquid cash and more risk of my car gets totaled.