My latest business plan

Occasionally when the throught of earning $8 an hour in bonuses from Ultimate for the rest of my life strikes me as not a little tedious, I get business ideas. Here's my latest.

Greatest Hits Non-Correlated Risk Inc has filed a shelf registration to raise $100m in capital for general corporate purposes. GHNCR is an investment fund where it is guaranteed your current investments will be 100% non-correlated with your investment with GHNCR. Suppose you invest $1m with us and $1m in the commodities market:

Your return from us if the commodities market goes up 50% in the next year ..... Nil
Your return from us if the commodities market falls 50% in the next year ....... Nil

If you run this through your Excel spreadsheet, I think you will see that there is clearly no correlation between the performance of the commodities market and the performance of your investment with us.

And there's more. This non-correlation spreads throughout the investment sector. Pineapple derivatives, Mezzanine debt, junk bonds, T-Bills. No matter what the beta, complete non-correlation is guaranteed, or your money back!.

Sign up now.

I don't want to be a Party pooper ... but

How about this mind-bending offer from Party Poker? Since I hadn't been playing there for a week, I thought that the e-mail from them offering $160 in my account on November 4 if I accumulated just 3,850 "Party Points" might be a reasonable deal. After all, they said that to gain this bonus I would not have to play any more often than I had played in the past. Oh foolish me for such naivety.

It took some research, but I finally found out that to obtain 3,850 points I would have to (a) deposit $500 and leave it there for more than a week (generates 1,000 points), (b) play 20+ "raked days" in a calendar month (generates 500 points) and (c), play about 4,000 hands during the "happy hours" (9am to 7pm BST).

I could reduce this to maybe 3,000 hands if I exclusively played $5-$10 or higher. But the rake would still be about the same -- in the region of $400.

Personally, I don't see much point in paying $400 rake for a $160 bonus. I can do that on Full Tilt. Looked at another way, the "normal" deposit bonus for Party is 7x your bonus, or 1050 raked hands for $150. This slendiforous offer from Party Poker is three times as bad. Thanks, but no thanks.

There you are Pokerstars, you can use THAT in your marketing bumph (I know that there's only five of you....)