Based on the latest inflation figures, money market funds are a great, safe way to consistently lose money!

Morningstar.ca states that

“If present trends hold, 2006 will become the third year in a row, and the fourth year in the past five, that returns in the Canadian Money Market category will have lagged inflation.”

This means that the money saved in your money market fund is slowly losing purchasing power.

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Well, I knew it was going to happen at some point. And that day finally arrived today. I had to sign over my shares of Dofasco Inc. - a Canadian steel company.

A few months back, a crazy bidding war started between Arcelor and Thyssenkrupp for Dofasco. Anyways, not knowing that there was going to be all this crazy bidding going on, I sent my 3 lowly shares (I had *just* started dripping this company) to the transfer agent (CIBC Mellon) handling the Thyssenkrupp bid. The bid was offering $63 per share.

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Although I was a little nervous (and I made sure that I made a backup of my whole site!), I took the plunge and upgraded from Wordpress 2.0.1 to 2.0.2. Ok. It wasn’t so much as a plunge, but more of a dip.

This is a security upgrade and I recommend that everybody go ahead and upgrade.

It took me approximately 5 minutes to perform the upgrade. It was fairly simple. All my custom plug-ins continued to work after I was done.

You can find the instructions here.

I recently had a poll asking readers what they thought of my site. Unfortunately, the results were not what I was hoping for. Fifty percent of my readers said that the site “Looks busy. Hard to find the content.”

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Warren Buffett warns of frictional costs coming between investors and their money. Too many middle men taking a small piece of the pie until there is nothing left for the investor. The classic line “Where are the customers’ yachts?” is the perfect example of how the middle men are all getting rich while the investor - who takes all the risks - is still poor.

Being cost conscience, I am an avid dripper. I buy stocks directly from the companies (or should I say, their transfer agents) at no direct cost to me. For example, I can send $100 to Bank of Nova Scotia. At the end of each month, they will buy me as many shares as my $100 will buy - and that includes fractional shares. So my whole $100 is working for me. Sounds great, right?

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