Entries Tagged 'finance' ↓

Recently I’ve been noticing TD Canada Trust pushing a marketing campaign that they are the superior bank because they have the longest hours. They are open “8 until late”, which is apparently open 50% longer than any other bank. I’m sure this sort of campaign might be very useful for a company like Wendy’s (ughh), with their “Eat Great, Even Late” campaign, but I fail to see the relevance for a bank in 2007.

When is the last time you actually had to see a teller? The fact is, more and more people are doing all of their banking online, or through a bank machine, neither of which depend on a branch’s hours. One of the only reasons to see a person at a bank, is for opening an account. Oh wait, you can apply for that online now too. I think their marketing dollars would be best used elsewhere, such as continuing to promote clients to use online banking. Not to mention, TD Canada Trust has one of the worst fee structures of any Canadian bank. Even students are paying $3.45/mo. if they can’t keep a minimum balance of $1,000. How many students do you know with that kind of money?

Considering they are one of the most popular banks around, it’s hard to believe they aren’t adapting as well as they should be. We don’t want longer hours, we want cheaper banking! Everyone knows that bankers work from 12:00pm-1pm every day.

One company that I’ve been tracking for the last little while is D-BOX Technologies. They’ve designed a system, in which your can watch a movie, and your seat will move along with it, giving a more realistic element to the movie. I assume that this would be similar to something like you would experience at a theme park, without Spongebob jumping out of the screen are you.

The D-BOX™ Integrated Motion System (IMS) is the next dimension of your cinematic experience. Taking you into the movie, you actually feel the rush of flight, the bumps in the road, the pulse of ocean swells on the shore – all of the on-screen action is brought to you as never before.

By the sounds of this, it is looking like it is going to be a very promising technology in the future. Several hundred movies are already set up to use this system. The technology itself is very adaptable because the cues are programmed directly on to the DVD itself.

Their stock has also been doing very well.

Although it is a very speculative stock right now, it is looking very promising. It all depends on the management’s ability to sell this technology and if they will be able to make the right deals with the right people.

Yesterday was a very interesting day in the world stock markets. The Shanghai stock market dropped over 8%, marking one of the biggest sell-offs in the market in the past 10 years. This caused a lot of havoc amoung investors as shareholders in Chinese companies, or investors in companies with shares in the latter, began to re-evaluate that section of their portfolio. A lot of cash yesterday tended to convert into bonds. Today was slightly better in the markets as they started to recover. The markets will likely continue to recover in the next couple of days.

I don’t have a lot of investments right now considering I’m spending most of my money on school, but I do keep track of a few. I personally wouldn’t invest in emerging markets such as China because frankly, they’ve been doing too well. I’m more interested in the American and some of the European markets that have some promising Web 2.0 companies.

If you actually look at the performance of the markets at the beginning of the year, they are almost identical to after the drop in the Shanghai markets. This isn’t so much of a drop in the markets. The markets are just starting to even out. I wouldn’t be particularily worried with my portfolio if I was in the market.