January & February 2008
Hello! Welcome to 2008 with Intervest Global Live. We are proud to bring you the first of our bi-monthy newsletters for the year. With the year well on the way we have been busy employing the "CAN I" approach of Continuing and Never Ending Improvement to ensure that TriLogics will always be the worlds best cashflow software. We have also been celebrating because......
 We turned 9 this month!! Thank you to all of our loyal clients for your support over the last 9 years. We look forward to many bigger and better developments that will see us powering on for another 9 years and longer. Leaving a Legacy
By Matthew Whyatt, Intervest Global Live Founder and Chairman
All of us are going to leave a Legacy. Your Legacy is either deliberate or accidental.
Part of what makes IGL different is we have decided to be deliberate about the legacy that we leave behind.
Our Vision is “Life Fulfilment Through Financial Freedom”.
Intervest Global each year donates money to charities that are going to change the world.
Last year we donated money to the Hunger Project which educates women in villages in India who will in turn bring their communities out of poverty. The money that has been raised is the start of a 5 year commitment by the XL group that will educate 3000 women leaders, which will directly affect 3 million people and bring them out of poverty. I travelled to India in January to see how our donations are being spent and what differences have been made.
The Hunger Project is a global, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger.
The Hunger Project empowers millions of women and men to end their own hunger. The Hunger Project has pioneered low-cost, bottom-up, gender-focused strategies in each region where hunger persists. These strategies mobilize clusters of rural villages to create and run their own programs that achieve lasting progress in health, education, nutrition and family income.
Extract from: The Hunger project website www.thp.org
To view a video on the work in India that is being done that I saw first hand please go to The Hunger Project Women's Leadership Workshop.
Description: Thanks to a revolutionary constitutional amendment, more than 1 million impoverished rural women in India have now been elected to local village councils. The Hunger Project trains and empowers these women to be effective change agents for the end of hunger and poverty in their village.
In January XL led its first Pioneer Club trip through India in conjunction with the Hunger Project; there were 63 of us in the first group. We spent 3 days with the Hunger Project and their on the ground partners.
The first day we saw the women’s leadership workshop where the elected women are told for the first time that their ideas and actions can make a difference and they are asked what areas they would like to focus on in their communities. For some this is the first time they have been asked their opinion on anything.
The second day we visited the villages where we were greeted like celebrities. I found out through interpreters that the reason this is such a big deal that we were there is that we were the first white people they have ever see in this village. What we saw was that these women leaders have developed and are implementing strategic plans to achieve 100% education for children, clean drinking water and sustainable food production.
The third day we were guests at the 3rd annual leadership conference where initiatives have been put into place such as a greater involvement by women being elected to the local village councils from the government mandated 33% to 50% and also having the government recognise the lack of effective law enforcement regarding the abuse that is perpetrated against women and young girls. The lines of communication were forever changed when 1000 women and men marched on the Minister’s office and had the police chief removed and new systems put in place.
I went to India expecting to see differences. What I walked away with is the realisation that most of the important stuff like health, family and safety are the same issues that we all deal with and that joy can be found if you take the time to see it.
There is a planned trip back to India by the XL Results Foundation towards the end of the year if you are interested or you can donate money and decide that your legacy will also be a deliberate one.
If you would like to know more about how to get involved with the Hunger Project please contact Matthew at the office.
This year we have started spreading our vision of Life Fulfilment Through Financial Freedom by supporting entrepreneurs in third world countries by donating a portion of the proceeds from every sale of the TriLogics program towards helping them grow their businesses.
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| A PRE-SCHOOL TEST FOR YOU Which way is the bus below travelling? To the left or to the right?
Look carefully at the picture again. I know, me too... |
Gambler more than broke even
(Weekend Australian 2-3 February 08)
The world of horse racing lost one of its biggest punters with the death of Australian-born Allan Woods in Hong Kong last Saturday.
Woods, 62 was universally recognised as among the top three punters in the world.
His colleagues in the penthouse of betting turnover are his former business partner, American Bill Benter, and Ziljko Ranogajec an Australian-based recluse whose turnover on sports gambling is said to outweigh the massive investments of the Woods-Benter organisations combined.
But it was Woods, born and raised at Murwillumbah in northern NSW, who was the co-pioneer of computer betting syndicates in Hong Kong and a key man in the development of computer analysis for betting.
His fortune at the time of his death was estimated at $670 million.
The Woods betting syndicate became legend in the cauldron of Hong Kong racing, where huge amounts of money are invested into the totaliser pools.
For the 2006-07 racing season which ended last June, the Hong Kong Jockey Club recorded a betting turnover of $US64 Billion ($71.46 Billion compard to only $13 Billion in Australia). It has been estimated the input to annual turnover by Woods and his syndicate was about 2 per cent ($A1.42 Billion).
"I would not think that estimate is an exaggeration" said John Schreck, former chief steward for the Australian Jockey Club in Sydney and later for the HKJC in the late 1990s and into the early years of the new millenium when Woods' syndicate was operating at full steam.
"To my knowledge, he never ever came racing while I was there (Hong Kong). But he had in his employ dozens of Filipinos running around carrying mobiles and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash waiting for instructions on how and what to bet.
"There was a time the Jockey Club closed his account but this was through a silly policy adopted from a misjudgement in management.
"In the main, the Jockey Club was and is sensitive about these people (betting syndicates) being the big customers that they are. I saw these people as professional gamblers and not a problem at all (to the integrity of racing)."
Indeed, the syndicates relied on Schreck, and his fellow stewards to police clean racing. Their profits, after all, were based on statistics for corrupt-free racing.
Woods cut his punting teeth on horse racing when he went to New Zealand in the early 1980s but turned his attention from there to the greater betting pools of punting-mad Hong Kong.
Woods teamed up with Benter in Hong Kong in the 1980s and together they formed the first betting syndicate whose success depended not on insider tips but on what the computer would spit out after being fed a range of information on the horse, current form, race times, selectional splits, weather, state of the track and Jockey form.
Don't forget to let us know if you move home, change phone numbers or email addresses. If you keep us updated, we can always keep you updated.