Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Andrew Horowitz, noted author, podcast host and MSN Money TopStocks contributing blogger, has been named the champion of the 18th round of the Strategy Lab on MSN Money, a stock-picking challenge in which six top traders run mock $100,000 portfolios for six months and document every move they make. Winning by a margin of over 20% over his closest competitor, Horowitz credits his investment strategy of “QuantaFundaTechna,” detailed in his book, for his strong performance.
In celebration of his win, Horowitz is offering a free download of his book, “The Disciplined Investor – Essential Strategies for Success,” for a limited time to all MSN Money registered users. The book contains several tips and tricks that Horowitz used in developing the “QuantaFundaTechna” strategy and is a great resource for both the novice and more experienced investor. Each chapter details the core disciplines that make up a complete portfolio strategy. Copies of “The Disciplined Investor – Essential Strategies for Success” will be available for a free download on the MSN Money site February 18 – 20.
Celebrating the MSN Strat Lab Win: My Book for FREE! | The Disciplined Investor.
I’m a regular listener to The Disiplined Investor podcast. I don’t have any money to invest but he does a great job of explaining what is going on in our economy in these turmoltous times. While it’s free, download his book and check it out.
Tags: Andrew Horowitz, book, finance, free, MSN, Strategy Lab, The Disciplined Investor
Posted in In The News, Software, finance | No Comments »
Monday, April 21st, 2008
A few days ago I wrote an article on PayPal’s plan to target unsafe browsers. Today I saw an article from PC World about how PayPal states they plan to not block current browsers.
According to 9 to 5 Mac:
PayPal Corporate Communications spokesman, Michael Oldenburg said, “PayPal is developing features to block customers from logging into PayPal when using obsolete browsers on outdated or unsupported operating systems.
So this seems to let off the hook whatever the current version of Safari is on the current Macintosh OS but may still mean that Safari on older versions of the Mac OS may be considered as dangerous. I’m not going to rehash my previous post as it is still mostly relevant. I am still curious if Apple will change some of it’s past practice in regards to updating Safari on older versions of the OS. I don’t believe you can run Safari version 3 on anything but Mac OS 10.5. So anyone still running 10.4 or even 10.3 is out of luck?
We shall see…
Tags: finance, PayPal, Security, web browser
Posted in In The News, Software | No Comments »
Saturday, April 19th, 2008
eWeek has an article about plans by Paypal to ban user from using unsafe browsers. PayPal‘s plan is to block its users from making financial transactions from web browsers that don’t have support for blocking identity theft-related Web sites or support for Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer (EV SSL) certificates.
EV SSL Certificates are similar to normal SSL Certificates with the addition that the party requesting the certificate must prove they own the domain and be validated as authorized to request a certificate. And a web browser must recognize and demonstrate the difference between a standard SSL certificate and the new Extended Validation certificate. With the idea that the end user has an added trust in the identity of the certificate holder and therefore the web site.
Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is basically a security measure to ensure a secure, private, connection between your web browser and the server. It’s the little lock you see when you visit your bank or buying something online. My explanation above is very much in layman’s terms. Please do your research if you are more interested.
PayPal is basically stating that if you are using a browser that does not support EV SSL then they will protect you by not letting you transact with PayPal and warn you to update your web browser.
This is good! Requiring a secure browser is perhaps a bigger step than last years addition of the PayPal Security Key, which I also highly recommend. Many ignorant users who don’t or can’t maintain there own security are at risk. This forces them to recognize their ignorance and hopefully educate them some. Hopefully banks and other financial institutions will consider adopting this approach in the next couple of years.
The bad news is that currently Microsoft IE7 is the only major browser to support EV SSL. Firefox and Opera have announced support in their next release. But Apple’s Safari has not announced this support. Hopefully, when Apple does announce support they will also announce support for the previous version of Safari and update that. Traditionally Apple ties Safari into the Macintosh operating system so tightly that they don’t upgrade Safari to work with previous versions of the OS.
I’m a regular user of PayPal. I wish that my bank would support the idea of a PayPal Security Key instead of the silly authentication schemes they make me jump through now. I’m glad that PayPal is taking this step. It could cause some trouble and confusion if they roll this out too soon but in the end I hope it encourages greater security across the internet.
Tags: finance, PayPal, Security, web browser
Posted in In The News | No Comments »
