Money | Ady's Blog

Forex Trading In Malaysia

It was an interesting morning today, when a friend told me that his brother received a job offer in a Forex trading company in Shah Alam. It was great news that he was able to get something after searching for opportunities for quite a while. However since my niece experienced this more than once, I am skeptical about such companies in Malaysia.

I asked him to check with the Securities Commission and whether or not the company presented an offer letter to his brother.

At first I thought that Forex is administered by the Securities Commission (SC) but I was wrong. When called, SC said that Forex is administered by Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM).

BNM Foreign Exchange Administration said:

In Malaysia no company or individuals are given license to do forex trading except for registered merchant banks

Which corresponds to this List of Authorised Dealers of Foreign Currency. One thing that disappoints me the most is that BNM did not ask the company name, showing that they have no immediate interest in closing such fraudulent businesses.

Signs that a company might be working on something fraudulent:

They don’t really have a proper business sign at their office
They ask candidates to go to training first, before they provide an offer letter
They have options whether the employee would like to be paid based on commission or on a fixed rate

It is a great thing that my friend’s brother told him about it. My unfortunate niece did not share the news with me so she ended up wasting weeks without getting paid. And imagine if the office is raided by the authorities. I wouldn’t want to be a part of that, would you?

So the lesson to learn here is that you should always tell someone about your opportunities, and never immediately trust just any company no matter how desperate you are for a job.

And of course, always get an offer letter first before you start working. This is the most important thing of all, when getting a new job.

Malaysia PayPal Users Can Now Add Local Bank Accounts

My better half told me yesterday that we can now add our local bank accounts in PayPal. It was too good to be true so I decided to check. I went to check my PayPal emails first just in case I missed an announcement. However, I don’t see any. It’s kinda weird that when a new language is available PayPal sends us an email but not for something as important as this?

▼ A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Oh well, not a big deal. I am all hyped with this new ability, and am already thinking of ditching my Al-Rajhi account (debit card account used for withdrawals).

Adding a bank account is very easy. On your “My Account” page, click on “Profile” which will reveal a drop down where you select “Add/Edit Bank Account”.

malaysia-paypal-step0

Next, you just enter your details:

Details

Don’t put in the wrong routing code. Always double check. This routing code is also sometimes referred to as the SWIFT code. I am amazed on the considerably long list.

malaysia-paypal-bank-routing-code

And that’s it. The next thing you will see is that it’s listed in your bank account page:

malaysia-paypal-done

Please, be sure that you entered the correct bank name, account number, and routing code. As the fee list suggests, you will be charged RM15 for every rejected transaction:

malaysia-paypal-fees

You’ll be charged RM3.00 for amounts less than RM400, free otherwise. I think it does not get any clearer than this.

Enjoy your new ability! It does not involve in eating brains this time.

Shop Jusco or Carrefour

I have been doing groceries shopping alone for about 20 days now, and I have always done it at Jusco. However today since I had to pick up my spectacles from Focus Point I went to Carrefour instead. There were several differences between Jusco and Carrefour and to tell you the truth I prefer Jusco.

My personal opinion is that Jusco seems to have a better environment and it’s cleaner. Plus, service is very much better than Carrefour.

When I arrived home today I realized that the cashier scanned the large promotional pack (6 x 4) of Season’s Chrysanthemum tea as separate 6 packs:

carrefour-seasons-pricescan

When it should be at the promotion price of RM12.99 (I wasted RM6.57):

[singlepic=5,600,800]

But I guess it was an honest mistake. I hate it but they are still human. It’s also partially my fault for not checking everything (my excuse is that I was dizzy wearing the new glasses).

Comparing prices I found out that the price of Mamy Poko New Born (pack of 52) differs significantly! Since I bought 3 packs at Carrefour I wasted RM14.76 compared to buying them at Jusco:

[singlepic=4,600,800]

However if you’re a cranberry juice lover like moi, you’ll find that the price is cheaper by RM2.00 in Carrefour. So if you’re looking into buying bulk let’s say for a party you should head to Carrefour:

Carrefour:

Jusco:
Jusco

PayPal in Bahasa Melayu

I recently received an email from PayPal announcing that they now support additional languages. One of them is my native tongue, Bahasa Melayu.

However when I clicked on the Malaysia flag it directs me to the same page as Bahasa Indonesia. Although many part of the Internet has already acknowledged and are well aware that these two languages are different, I am a tad surprised that PayPal is not one of them 🙂

[singlepic=3,420,800]

Chitika Oh Chitika

On 10 April 2007 I tried to apply for Chitika eMiniMalls just to try out my luck even though my number of visitors is much lower back then. I received a reply which I totally understand and accepted:

In an effort to bring value to our publishers, we carefully consider each submission. During our review process we have determined that Chitika | eMiniMalls might not be a good match for your website.

On 27 June 2008 I received an email from Chitika:

Hi Ady,

Great news! There have been a lot of changes over at Chitika recently – so although our ads were not a good match for your website in the past, we believe that we may be a much better fit for you now. Why? Because the Chitika network now serves Premium ads for ALL types of site content like: Finance, Health, Travel, Family, & more. (Previously we focused mainly on product-related websites.)

We now offer a LOT more than eMiniMalls too – our new Chitika|Premium ads target your search traffic, and are showing extremely high CTRs and eCPMs for our publishers. So if you have a good amount of US search traffic, Chitika|Premium will be a great fit for your site!

Re-open your Chitika application here, to get started. (You will be able to edit your information such as website, email, and PayPal info before you submit) or head over to the “Chitika | Premium” page for more information.

And I received a reply:

Hello,

The email address you used doesn’t match the domain that you submitted, and it also does not match the email that was used to register the domain, so we cannot tell if you actually own this website.

If you do own this site, please re-open your application using the link below and supply an email address from the domain, or the email address that was used to register the domain.

If you cannot do this, then please re-open your application and tell us why in the “Comments” field. Thanks. Looking forward to your comments.

This is because I used my GMail address for the registration. If I enter my email address for this blog domain I immediately get “Invalid Email ID!”. I stated in the comment field of the registration form but I guess it was not taken into anyone’s attention. But then again, the reply did mention “If you cannot do this, then please re-open your application and tell us why in the “Comments” field. Thanks. Looking forward to your comments.” WTH?

Not that Chitika is bad or anything but as an Internet user I expect an established site updates the list of TLD frequently. I also had the email not matching problem with Nuffnang but they received my application without any problem.

Nuffnang Error

Today the site loads very slow, and as I was about to blame the network when I saw this:

Nuffnang Error

It seems that Nuffnang may be currently experiencing some difficulties. Since the ad block loads inline, the whole site waits for it. Oh by the way visitors from outside of Malaysia & Singapore will not see this as it is a geo-targeted block (AdSense is there instead).

And Nuffang site is down as well, with these errors:

Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Lost connection to MySQL server during query in /home/nuffmy/public_html/Connections/nuffnang.php on line 9

Fatal error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query in /home/nuffmy/public_html/Connections/nuffnang.php on line 9

Quick guys! Fix it! 🙂

Advertlets Performance

From other Malaysian and Singaporean bloggers I can see that they experiencing very good performance with Advertlets. Unfortunately it is not the same case for me. Since having the widget for quite a while, and I remember that I am in the first batch of advertisement as well when it started but I only received RM0.20.

I don’t know how well the Advertlets ads are receiving clicks since there is no proper stats page for it like AdSense does.

For me, my AdSense performance for this blog has dramatically increased in the year 2007 to the level I have never expected.

So should I remove the widget, or should I wait. I am still evaluating what to do. It is a very good opportunity for bloggers to have an extra stream of income but not everything works for everyone.

How well is your Advertlets performance?

You Can Make Money Online

For the skeptical, here’s a post as a simple proof that you can indeed make money online. During early March 2007 I introduced my better half to Pay Per Post. Since then she has been happily blogging and earn around USD15-25 per day. Within two month’s time she accumulated more than USD1000 in her Paypal account with money from paid posts.

As the money comes from her hard work, she is very proud with it and so am I. For the first USD500 she withdrew, she decided to buy a big screen TV for our bedroom since our old TV was fried by lightning earlier this year. Since we don’t want to spend all of the money, or too much money we decided to buy a slim TV instead of a LCD. We got a LG Slim TV and a DVD player:

LG TV and DVD player

They are not state of the art equipment but good enough for us to watch DVDs and downloaded DivX movies.

There you go. You can make money online. This is a proof that with hard work you can get some extra money from paid posts. But do remember to not fall into the trap of any fast money scheme or work at home scheme that will usually causes you to lose money instead. Be wise.

As for my better half, she is as happy as a clam and I am very very impressed and appreciate her effort especially since she is extremely busy with her business these days… 🙂

Oh by the way if you bought or thinking of buying the DVX162 DVD Player, it is useful to know that it does not read DVD+R/RW as the box said. It only reads DVD-R/RW.