Nigerians are  fleeing  bakkassi in defence of themselves and their properties in the event of a handover of the peninsula to Cameroon on august 14^th . The

third mainland bridge in Lagos is up for maintenance  -causing unusual traffic and  hike  in transportation fares   in the Lagos Island /Victoria Island axis of the city.And the upper house! – the upper house is  divided about the handover of Bakassi to Cameroon .Possibly Nigeria might have to  go back to the International Court of Justice  .

Cheering NEWS !!The bulls chose just around these gloomy times to resurface at the stock market and the trend will likely last.

Through out last week, the market was consistently bullish.

Top gainers for Monday include Julius Berger -7.31,Flourmill-3.40,and Conoil-2.90

SEC,Approves AP `s N110BN Public Offer .Rights Issue  Too

One of Nigeria’s leading oil giants AP will soon come to the market to raise N110BN .

The public offer is being made at N250.00 while the Rights issue goes for N230.00.The fund is to strengthen the operations of AP.

AP `s 2007 financial reports were very impressive as the company posted a profit  before taxation of N7bn .Up more than 260 percent   from the previous year .The company’s net profit upped with about 250 percent from 2.1 bn in 2006 to 5.7 bn in 2007 . A dividend payment of N7.00 was issued to shareholders .

Cheers.

The  MONTH OF JUNE WITNESSED OF 9.8 BILLION SHARES WORTH 249.9 BILLION IN 330,332 DEALS.

• THE INSURTANCE SUBSECTOR WAS HE MOST ACTIVE WITH TRADED VOLUME OF 9.85 BILLION IN 51,523 DEALS.THE BANKING SUBSECTOR FOLLOWED WITH 7.25 BILLION SHARES VALUED AT 174.95 BILLION IN 161,357 DEALS .FIDSON ,OMATEK AND TANTALIZERS GOT LISTED THIS MONTH .ALL SHARE INDEX DECREASED BY 5.05 %  TO 55,949 FROM 58,929.02.

then this today

• top gainers included mobil -12.00 ,julius berger 6.96,guiness-3.90  and conoil-3.60

A bank that will be saddled with the long term funding of construction works in Nigeria will soon become a reality

Speaking to Financialquotientt in Lagos the chief pioneer of the bank ,chief Olusegun Ajanlekoko said all most all the requirements by the Central Bank has been met .The Bank will be the first of it’s kind in Nigeria and will primarily saddled with the responsibility of providing long term financing for the Nigerian construction industry  which hitherto cannot access long term funds from the commercial bank .The benefit of the bank according to Ajanlekoko the bank is being modeled after the China Construction Bank and is going to be run by professional bankers who have all it takes to manage an efficient and well managed bank   model which is the best in the world .The advantages of the bank include an improvement in the infrastrual development and the provision of employment  include the fact that  .Private placement is on going on the Construction Development Bank and is been facilitated by Future View Securities who are the issuing house to the bank

I was going through the net yesterday and decide to check on the author of our featured book for last week-Timothy Ferriss .Guess what I found –the guy is an unrepentant traveler ,a world class entrepreneur  and a guest lecture in one of the universities in the U.S .The book is his first  and it is a best seller .I thought that you ,like me might be interested in the bio of Timothy Ferriss so I looked up a brief bio .This bio is from J J Jacobs of Esquire .Right after the bio is a review of the book

Enjoy

Biography

Serial entrepreneur and ultravagabond Timothy Ferriss has been featured by dozens of media, including The

New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, NBC, and MAXIM. He speaks six languages, runs a multinational

firm from wireless locations worldwide, and has been a popular guest lecturer at Princeton University since

2003, where he presents entrepreneurship as a tool for ideal lifestyle design and world change.

Tim has been profiled in The Success Principles, the New York Times bestseller written by Jack Canfield, and is a

main character in the upcoming feature-length documentary “As Seen on TV,” produced by Emmy Award winner

Dan Partland.

As a professional polymath, he has amassed a diverse roster of credentials and experience:

Princeton University guest lecturer in High-Tech Entrepreneurship and Electrical Engineering Cage fighter in

Japan, vanquisher of four world champions (MMA) First American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in

tango Advisor to more than 30 world record holders in professional and Olympic sports National Chinese

kickboxing champion Glycemic Index (GI) researcher Political asylum researcher and activist MTV breakdancer

in Taiwan Hurling competitor in Ireland Actor on hit TV series in mainland China and Hong Kong

Since his debut presentation on The 4-Hour Workweek at the world-famous SXSW Interactive conference on

March 12, 2007, Tim has been invited to speak at some of the most innovative companies and universities in

the world, ranging from Google and PayPal to Princeton University, the Wharton School, and the Stanford

Graduate School of Business. He has also been invited to speak and keynote at world-renowned technology

summits including Supernova, FOO Camp, Community Next, and the Web 2.0 Exposition, where he shared the

stage with figures like Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board of Google, and Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of

Amazon.

Tim received his BA from Princeton University in 2000, where he studied in the Neuroscience and East Asian

Studies departments. He developed his nonfiction writing with Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee and formed his

life philosophies under Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe.

He is 29 years old, and The 4-Hour Workweek is his first book and magnum opus.

Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek

When I picked up The 4-Hour Workweek, I was worried it was some sort of “get rich quick” book. The first few pages didn’t do much to change my mind. The author, Timothy Ferriss, makes a lot of bold claims, such as: “How do you create a hands-off business that generates $80,000 per month with no management? It’s all here.”

But something happened during the first few chapters. When I read a book, I use small sticky notes to mark interesting passages. After the first 100 pages of The 4-Hour Workweek, the book was thick with stickies. By the time I was finished, I had used an entire pad!

Ferriss does make a lot of bold promises, and some of the details along the way doread like the confessions of a get-rich-quick scammer. But I believe that an intelligent reader can easily extract a wealth of useful ideas from the book. For me, it’s a keeper. I’ve read it three times already, and will probably read it again before the end of the year.

Let’s Make a Deal
After college, Ferriss took a soul-sucking sales job at a tech firm. He left to start a soul-sucking business of his own. He went from working 40 hours a week for somebody else to working 80 hours a week for himself. He hated it. The pay was good, but the business left him drained.

After learning about the Pareto Principle(more commonly known as the 80-20 Principle), Ferriss had a revelation: he streamlined his business, eliminating distractions and automating systems until it was not only more profitable, but also took less of his time. Much less. He took a “mini-retirement”, and then decided to write a book about “lifestyle design”, about creating a life that balances work and play, maximizing the positives of both.

The 4-Hour Workweek is divided into four sections, each of which explores one of the components to lifestyle design:

• Define your objectives. Decide what’s important. Set goals. Ask yourself, “What do I really want?”

• Eliminate distractions to free up time. Learn to be effective, not efficient. Focus on the 20% of stuff that’s important and ignore the 80% that isn’t. Put yourself on a low-information diet. Learn to shunt aside interruptions, and learn to say “no”.

• Automate your cash flow to increase income. Outsource your life — hire a virtual assistant to handle menial tasks. Develop a business that can run on auto-pilot. (This is the weakest section of the book.)

• Liberate yourself from traditional expectations. Design your job to increase mobility. This could mean working from home, or it could mean using geographic arbitrage to take mini-retirements in countries with favorable exchange rates.

The 4-Hour Workweekdescribes the specific actions Ferriss took to implement these steps. Sometimes these specifics aren’t particularly useful. However, I think it’s a mistake to let the details get in the way of his broader message. If you’re able to look past the details, to look at their meaning, you may discover principles that can change your life. For example, I don’t like much of what Ferriss has to say about automation. I question the virtue of virtual assistants, and I think that his business model works for his business but probably isn’t applicable to most others.

However, it was while re-reading this section the other night that I began to think about automating my personal finances, about making them paperless. By absorbing Ferriss’ ideas and not his specific details, I was able to apply this to my life.

A Kick in the Head
Most of the time, The 4-Hour Workweek is like a kick in the head. The flow of ideas is relentless. Here’s one of my favorites:

Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses. Most people are good at a handful of things and utterly miserable at most. [...] It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.

Maybe this is obvious to most of you, but it’s a revelation to me. I spend a lot of time worrying about my weaknesses. Yet when I look at my life, it’s clear that everything rewarding and profitable comes from enhancing my strengths. Here’s another example:

Relative income is more important than absolute income.Absolute income is measured using one holy and inalterable variable: the raw and almighty dollar. Jane Doe makes $100,000 per year and is thus twice as rich as John Doe, who makes $50,000 per year.

Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours. The whole “per year” concept is arbitrary and makes it easy to trick yourself. Let’s look at the real trade. Jane Doe makes $100,000 per year, $2,000 for each of 50 weeks per year, and works 80 hours per week. Jane Doe thus makes $25 per hour. John Doe makes $50,000 per year, $1,000 for each of 50 weeks per year, but works 10 hours per week and hence makes $100 per hour. In relative income, John is four times richer.

Of course, relative income has to add up to the minimum amount necessary to actualize your goals…

I want to believe that if I had to choose between $70,000 per year earned with 70 hard hours per week, or $42,000 per year earned with 37 easy hours per week, I’d choose the latter. I’m not there yet.

A Garden of Tips
I don’t buy into everything that Ferriss writes, but I love how he shatters conventional wisdom. I love that he makes me think. Even if you reject his central thesis, there are dozens of tips and tricks here that can be extracted and used to optimize your life. Here are a few:

• Ask yourself, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?”

• How to double your reading speed in ten minutes.

• Why it’s more productive to carry around a written to-do list than to keep one on your computer.

• Learn the art of non-finishing. This is all about the sunk cost fallacy: just because you paid $10 to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to watch the entire thing.

• How to be more efficient with e-mail.

• How to reduce clutter from your life.

• If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.

• Life exists to be enjoyed — the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.

• Why geographic arbitrage is a great way to enhance your relative income.

• The value of a virtual assistant.

My Recommendation
Despite its flaws, The 4-Hour Workweek is a great book. I think that most people can draw something useful from it. Borrow it from your public library. If you like it and think you’ll re-read it, then wait for it to come out in paperback. I’ve already read my copy three times, but that’s because it’s perfect for when I am in life; I’m not convinced that others will extract the same value.

 Welcome to indexpoint ,

In the wake of the third week of the second quarter of this year ,the stock market suddenly started going down .There was a kind of panic .The panic was understandable  considering the fact that our market before then  had  been characterised by huge returns .And the beginning of this year was no exception .So obviously one has to panic when the bearish trend developed .

But if you had enough information ,you  would know and understand  that there was no way  our market will remain in a bearish position .Ours is a developing market and it is an understatement to say that  the potential for growth and returns in the market is huge.

Let me give you a clear example .America has a population of  over 300 million, a GDP in excess of $13 trillion and a market capitalisation of $15.35 trillion.South Africa  has a GDP of $282bn and a market capitalisation of $759bn .In Nigeria we have a  population of about 120 million ,a GDP of $160bn and a market capitalisation of $90 bn .Only about 2 million Nigerians are investors in the stock market .That is  less than 3% .In the U .S 49 .7 % of the people  invest in their markets ! The bulls will return.

This clearly shows that our market in still emerging .More people will definitely enter the market ,capitalisation will  move up  ,and more companies will get listed on the exchange  .So the potential for more activities is quite huge .

The Nigerian stock market is the best in the emerging market category of stock exchanges and among the best on return on investment .So ,the bulls will return.

By the beginning of 2007 ,market capitalisation stood at N5.12 trillion  and by December of that same year it has appreciated to about  100 % to N10.2 trillion .By the time we entered  the third month of this year  ,the market has appreciated by more than  20% to N12.6 trillion .

Afri Invest west Africa  recently in it’s half year result  collaborated the  belief that our market will  witness a steady bullish trend in the nearest future .

So what is my point ?

Even though the market is experiencing a bearish trend/volatility ,major indicators are strong and with the recent intervention of market  regulators  the correction of the market could have started in earnest .

What are you buying !!

Our experts are suggesting that Transcorp should be included in your buying potfolio but definitely not in your selling .

Starcomms joined the market on Monday at 13.56 .and gained close to 1.00 that same day .Wether it is a good buy ?

Telecommunications is presently a lucrative sector  and starrcomms has been involved in expansion projects ,so it is a good buy and  it should be one of those equities you might want for keeps.

Enjoy the rest of your week .

Uche

Note –indexpoint is a  weekly newsletter .Our focus is Stocks ,Bonds ,Unit trusts , REIT and Mutual funds

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cheers!

on friday , the market recorded the highest activity for last week .Market capitalisation of listed equities was 10,715,615,199.71 while index was54,905.36.The banking sub sector was the most active during the week with 2.5 billion shares worth N54b beign traded by investors Intercontinental bank plc,.PlatinumHabib bank plc and United Bank for Africe drove volume in this sector.Price gainers include Chevron -31.47,Total-11.62,Unilever-3.40.

Come tuesday july the first,E-Allotment will be launched in Abuja .E-Allotment will totally eliminate the use of certificates in transacting stock busioness as share allotment will be credited into investors account .e -allotment according to Director research and planning of SEC Mr Sylvester Akele ,will also  reducederastically the cost of printig certificates ,postageand other related costs .He also said the vstress of certificate verification will be reduced abd market efficiency enhanced .

hello,

Monday at the Nigerian Stock Exchange,Tantalizers was listed .A quick service  restaurant chain that began operations since 1997 ,the company holds a lot of promises .speaking at listing the managing director of the company Mrs Bose Ayeni said the company ‘s first franchise shop was opened in Abuja,Nigeria in 2004 .Tantalizers which pioneered African Meal in  the quick service restaurarnt  business presently has 39 noutlets with 10 more to be  opened before the end of this year .The management of the company were advised to stay closer to their financial advisers and to regularly  make available their financial figures  in other  to make the best use of the their quotation by increasing investors’ confidence in their company

Menwhile market capitalisation monday stood at 10.5 trillion while index was 53,985.Gainers include chevron Nig.plc-15.35,Total Nig.plc 11.62,Nestle 5.00.

Did I tell you that I d love to hear from you .Ask me any question on the Nigerian Stock Market or simply air your view on articles on this page .e mail me via litedupnow @yahoo.com .

+

the E -dividend mode of dividend payment was launched monday in lagos and has already taken effect with the payment last week of Oando and Nigerian Breweries shareholders through the system .Major stakeholders were present .I bring you a report on that

E DIVEND PAYMENT BEGINS

FINALLY ,e –dividend was lauched-in Lagos State . ‘Hence forth ,the crediting of dividends into share holdres acc ount will be done 24 hours after the company had paid the money ‘this statement by Mrs Oguntuwase who represented the Lagos Staste Governor Babatunde Fashola at the launch marked a change in the payment of dividend in the the Nigerian Stock Market .In fact the representative of Nigerian Inter Bank Clearing System –NIBSS,Mr Paul Lawal said that e dividend payment had already commenced with the payment of Oando and Nigerian Breweries shareholders as at last week .