My building blew up (Total disaster) - Mike Swanson (08/14/08)

What you are looking at below are two photographs of total disaster.  Andy and I have been working on a secret project with a friend of ours for the past few months.  Our friend owns a body shop that makes lots of money a year and his business is growing so much that he is now planning on expanding it into another store and if all goes well into multiple stores.  Our project just blew up, sending one guy into the hospital and almost killing a couple of people who were working on it.

We have been building a new thousands of feet shell building and it got hit by a tornado a few days ago.

You think of natural disasters as things that happen to other people until one hits you.

Several men were working underneath this roof when a horrible storm brought a tornado down on it.  Luckily they ran out of the building just in time, but one guy barely made it.  The roof almost caved in on him.  If that would have happened there is a good chance he would have been killed.  The foreman was standing outside of the building and a board flew in the air and hit him in the head.  Knocked him out and put him in the hospital.  When he woke up he couldn't remember his name, but he is fine now.

The most important thing is that no one got hurt.  The insurance can pay for the rest.  The damage will be rebuilt.

Andy has real estate rental properties that he has bought over the years and I decided to start to diversify a little bit into other projects and businesses outside of the stock market.  I make almost all of my money from the stock market so have figured that it would be good at some point to invest some of it into other businesses or real estate properties.  I do not believe in buying real estate as speculation, but as an investment if it more than pays for itself through rental income, which this building we are constructing will do once it is finished.

I'm not looking to buy lots of real estate now, but in a year or two or three when the real estate bear market is over it will be a good time to do that and it is good to start just a little bit now to get started - other than my house I've never gotten involved in real estate before.

What really influenced me though was a book titled Trading Rules that Work by Jason Jankovsky.  It's really a good book and you should check it out.  It consists of 28 "essential lessons" from stuff about using stop losses, when to take profits, to some more advanced topics.  Most people have no rules at all and if you just suffered through the gold stock drop and never want to do something like that again this book will help you prevent that.

But one of his rules is if you are making money in the stock market to use some of it to invest in other businesses or ventures.  So that is what I'm slowly starting to do.

Most people I guess do the opposite - they make money elsewhere and put it in the market - whereas I'm making money in the stock market and looking to take a small portion of it into other things from time to time. 

One other venture I'm getting involved in that you can be a part of too is a new website called SmallCapNewsRoom.Com put together by Mike McGowan.  On the site he has free content paid by a few sponsors so it is totally free for you.  If you go to it you'll see articles by other newsletter writers and top news stories.  Every Thursday morning the editor of the site puts together an email that consists of the top 10 or so news stories that are impacting the stock market every week that we need to be aware about.  I highly recommend that you sign up to this weekly email by clicking this link:

http://smallcapnewsroom.com/scnworldreport

I have often in the past wanted to have a website in which I could make a lot of free content available and have multiple writers on it, but found that I don't really have the time to devote to building or operating such a site, because my own site takes up too much of my time to want to do the extra work.  You really need someone that can scour the internet for the most important news stories to link them to the site, talk with contributors, and take of the day to day operations. 

McGowan and one of his partners in this project are doing all of that work.  But I have decided to help them and be a partner in the project as a way to be a part of a website that has totally free content like I had thought about in the past.  I like playing on the development side of things.

We have just launched the site so if you sign up to the weekly email for it you'll be able to see how it evolves.  It is going to be an interesting venture and you should be a part of it.  Check it out: http://www.smallcapnewsroom.com/scnworldreport