Pettit Funds

Well, I had every intention of helping some struggling “Third Worlder”, but, as it turns out, my first experiment with obtaining freelance help online ended up being with a fellow American doing the work.

A year or so ago I read the highly recommended FOUR HOUR WORKWEEK, by Timothy Ferris. That was where I first really learned about and gave some thought to delegating tasks to folks more capable than I, but who will work cheaply.

I signed up–for free–at a site called eLance, but never followed through with posting any projects.

Meanwhile, over this last year I’ve been mulling over the idea of coming up with an Excel spreadsheet that could duplicate some screening features I used to use back when I was good at picking stocks–but that have not been available for the last couple of years from my current screen provider at Investools. As I’ve gotten poorer and poorer, I became more and more desperate for this “lost feature” and decided to bone up on Excel and its Web Query and Macro possibilities using Visual Basic. Well, it hurts my head just to even read that last sentence, let alone actually do the programming that would be necessary and so, over this last weekend I decided to farm the project out.

During my GOOGLING for Excel-related help, I had accidentally come across a freelance site called GetAFreeLancer. I looked around and saw that there were a number of capable Excel gurus in lands far, far away–so I did the free signup. I then posted my project last Friday evening (which I believe you can see here–although perhaps you have to sign up and login to see it, I don’t know; be sure and click on the “View Project Clarification Board” button to get a better understanding of what I was after).

The next morning I had a dozen or more bids in my mailbox, ranging from $30 to $150. I had expected to pay $50-$100 for the project and ended up going with a guy (American) who quoted me $50. (I think he lived to regret it, since it ended up being a little more complicated than he had expected. Hey, that’s business!)

Anyway, 24 hours later I had the worlds best Secret Spreadsheet for fine-tuning my future stockpicks.

And I am simply delighted!

I can’t wait to do something like this again, although I don’t know what that would be. All I know is if I was younger and still in the workforce I would be all over this stuff. If I was using Excel or any number of other programs in my work, I would be outsourcing the heck out of it.

Any future websites I put up will be done through a freelancer–for a lot less than past websites (including this one) have cost.

Take a few minutes to check out the above-referenced sites, just to see what’s out there. Bookkeepers are emailing tax information overseas to have math whizzes complete tax returns. Doctors are zapping xrays over to doctors far, far away who are able to interpret them overnight for less than a local radiologist would charge. People with excellent English skills are doing research and article writing.

Like it or not, the world is flat. We can complain about work going overseas, or…we can take advantage of it.

This was a terrific experience for me, and I hope you will all keep the possibilities in the backs of your minds.

…Sigh…

I’m not sure anyone “follows” these picks any more, now that I have fallen out of the Marketocracy Top Ten–but even though this last year was a wretched one for me I still outperformed the market, as measured by the S&P500, by 6 percentage-points: as of my writing this, the market has lost 40% of its value in the previous 12 months, but I have only (!) lost 33% or so. I’ve put a link to my long-term performance over in the right sidebar under “Links”.

If you do click on the link to “My Investment Performance” (right under the Twitter box), you can see I’ve done consistently well–but results were more mediocre during 2008.

I’m beating the market handily so far this year, so I thought I’d get back on the horse and share my recent purchases with you.

I’ve just bought some Cal-Maine Foods, Inc. (CALM), which is an egg distributor, and some Companhia de Saneamento Basico do Estado de Sao Paulo (SBS), which provides sewage treatment for Sao Paola, Brazil.

Why? Well, for one thing I like the fact that each company produces a similar-smelling product.

They both showed up on my “Magic” Screen and have nice low price-earnings ratios. Each stock took a tumble half a year ago. I think they are due for comebacks.

In a nutshell, if I can just invest in a “CALM” manner I’ll soon be “flush” with money. (I promise never to say anything like that again).

Good Luck and Happy Investing!