More on AAPL, EDA, DIVX and RRSPs

Both Apple and EDA/American Apparel are up quite a bit since we bought in. My next picks are DIVX which is down today and who's releasing numbers soon and Intel who is also down because they're in a vicious price war with AMD.

On DivX
DivX is a great company, I met Jordan Greenhall a long time ago in the muddle of a failed acquisition where my company was the target. Subsequently after that fiasco, he started his own thing and asked me to merge my company with some new unknown new entity. I didn't pay much attention and nothing happened. That entity was DivX which is now worth three quarters of a billion dollars. The company makes a living with software, licensing, content and web traffic revenue. Lots of people use their stuff, lots of their stuff is ending up in TVs, DVD players, media players, gadgets of all types and software of all flavours. Almost every torrent in the world uses DivX but DivX has no apparent liability yet has seems to have an upside in customer/device/traffic/content adoption. I like them, I like Jordan so I'm already fully loaded with DivX stock.

On Intel
Intel is a little worn out right now because of shrinking margins but their processors are great and they've pulled ahead of AMD with quad cores. I think that they are not going to let up and they're ready to get serious about AMD. Vista is coming out soon so there should be a bump in new computer sales and both AMD & Intel will see a boost. The price war will hurt both of them so this is the only dirt in the salad that I am watching for.

On Apple
Apple release their earnings tomorrow night and should blow everybody away. Even without the phone hype, they have a new OS coming out soon, lots of software upgrades and some new pricey quad core computers and luxury laptops imminently being readied for release. There might be a lull after the earnings call this week as things go quiet for aw while and the euphoria subsides but it should bump up again when the new stuff rolls out and the cash rolls in. This one's a long term keeper.

On RRSPs
If you don't have a clue where to put your money this year, consider China and India funds like Excel. I am doing great with them so far but if regional politics (Pakistan/N. Korea) get sketchier then things might get messy. I'm young enough to take that risk with 5-10% of my portfolio.

You might be getting bored of this financial stuff but its pretty important at this time of the year when RRSP dollars get put into seemingly random funds with exciting financial sounding names. For a long time I had no idea about what I was investing in and had no real control over what happened to my dough. The money that I put in was real but the numbers moving up and down every 3 months on my statements weren't. It was like some kind of quarterly lottery. Now I do understand and control my RRSPs better with some of my dough in a self managed RRSP account and I'm finding that I'm growing my money easily and relatively quickly outside of my day job so I am passing on what I know so maybe you can take an interest in your finances at some point if you care to do so. Oh yeah, I like doing it too so that makes it a lot easier.