Marquez Comelab's story in his own words...

Growing Up

I was born in the Philippines in 1977. At a young age, what I can remember quite significantly, was that my father was not with us in those early years. In a third-world country where work was scarce, my father, a Civil Engineer, had to find work in Saudi Arabia, which was, and remains to be, a common destination for Filipino professionals and workers. My mother stayed behind to take care of us kids at home while taking on odd jobs to supplement dad's income.

I might have been only 6 or 7 years old then, but I was the first child and I had to be the ‘responsible' one when mom had errands or work to do. I was the ‘man of the house' and often found myself looking after, and looking out for my younger brothers and sisters, who were a couple of years younger than I. You need to imagine what the early 80s was like for people in the Philippines. Frequently, power would cut out. Nobody in the street had telephones. The small mobile phones we have today were not invented then. We could not call mom and she had no way of telling us when she would be coming home. Tools to communicate were not as accessible as they are now.

My littler brother and sisters would ask me, ‘when is mom coming home?'. I would ask them to be patient and when they got anxious, I would pacify them by telling them that mom would come home with something worth the wait… like a brand new bike, for example. Sometimes they believed me and other times they didn't. They would cry like 2 to 5 year olds do when they are left without a parent. In frustration, in exasperation and by simply not knowing what else to do, I would join them too. Then, eventually, mom would home and we would all be happy again.

Once every year, we would be with dad, who came home with a luggage-full of delightful goodies from overseas, many of which were strange and wonderful. He brought Mars Bars and Snickers. He brought View-Masters: those little devices that allowed us kids to see colourful and picturesque tourist attractions around the world. He brought video and music tapes which allowed us to watch films and listen to music from wonderful lands from very far away. Within a few weeks, dad would be gone again. We would communicate with him by scribbling something on a piece of paper, or saingy hello on a recorded cassette tape that mom would to him to which he would reply one or two months later.

Although we were not rich, I consider my family to be one of the fortunate ones. We never went hungry, we had clothes on our backs, a roof over our heads and we lived relatively well. Many families were not so lucky. We had loving and committed parents who sacrificed so much, having to live apart for so long just so they could meet the demands of their young and growing family. I look back at those years with many happy memories of the times we shared together.

In 1990, my family migrated to Australia. I was thirteen at the time. My high school years started off very well, leading my peers in Maths and all other subjects. However, around year 9 and 10, I started getting involved with gangs: not criminal gangs but just a group of boys who ended up hanging around together. As migrants, we shared a common experience. Being migrants in a new country, it was not always easy trying to fit in. Hanging around our own groups of friends gave us a sense of belongingness.

At first we would engage in innocent activities and small fights between groups but soon enough things started getting serious when knives started coming out. The experience culminated for me when one afternoon, after school, my friend and I were attacked by a group of twenty, many of which were older, some already adults with cars. That afternoon, I nearly killed someone, and I nearly got killed.

I recuperated at home for a couple of months and I had a lot of time to think. I got expelled from school and no other school around my area would accept me. My parents eventually decided to move to a different part of the city where I got accepted into a new school. I got given a second chance.

From my experience, I learnt something about the susceptibility of human beings getting sucked into mass or group madness. I learnt psychology at the street level by understanding as much as I could about what had happened to me and how it happened so I could avoid it, and guide my younger brothers to avoid it too. It was from this experience that I learnt the importance of being independent and not seek a false sense of identity, strength, comfort and security derived from being part of a gang or a group, something to which, I'm sorry to see, many young boys and adults still fall prey.

I resolved to finish my high school and get into university. I did a course in Commerce – Banking, Accounting and Finance (BCom) because I reasoned it would give me what I needed to start and run my own business one day: economics, marketing, law, finance, accounting and leadership.

After university, I met a wonderful woman named Nancy and we got married two years later. She is just as entrepreneurial as I am. We have plenty of interests and we are willing to take risks and follow our passions and I would like to think that I support her just as much as she supports me. I can never be grateful enough for her in my life.

Business

After finishing university, I worked as a Graduate Accountant for a few months. The role was to help the firm to do Accounts Payable and Receivable for a small firm for a year or two and maybe re-evaluate. The world was and still is to me, an exciting place with so many things that need doing.

At the turn of the decade, I was sure that the future belonged to the world of computers, internet and the web and I wanted to position myself in it. I learnt how to develop websites. It was not merely to start a business but it was because I had a natural liking for the activitiy and I got some enjoyment out of it. After only a few months of being an employee, I resigned and started my very first business venture, providing website design and development services to businesses.

At the time, I was going around to many businesses, nervous, scared and excited, knocking door-to-door along the streets of Melbourne telling all who wanted to hear to get a website and not get left behind. Many of them looked at me, not really knowing what a website was and why they should get one. Even though I managed to secure a few jobs for myself and my partners for a few months, it seemed to me that it was I who was way too early. It was 2002 and Australian businesses at the time had not yet caught up with the online trend.

In taking on this venture, door knocking and cold calling, I learnt a very important lesson in business: an entrepreneur must be able to sell and communicate and relate to people very well. If you have an idea, you cannot count on anybody else to push it forward other than yourself. Convinced I would one day make my idea reality, I took on a role as part-time sales consultant for a well-known company. This allowed me to gain working knowledge of the inevitable and all-important sales process and thus I enjoyed it.

During this period, I started a publishing business. The initial idea for the business was to become a publisher and distributor of art, prints and posters. My brothers and sisters, as well as my wife and I, were all very creative and we wanted to create a business to monetise all our skills, talents and passions. We purchased a large-format printer to print all our works and started selling in markets and knocking on doors to try and get our artworks distributed by art and souvenir outlets.

There were many challenges in getting the bigger outlets to distribute our products: some, for example, had an exclusive agreement to only distribute artworks from the big suppliers. The smaller ones who agreed , were too small to be able to purchase our artworks for resale and would only agree to sell them on a consignment basis. With limited budget, we could not supply many shops with our works. So we plodded along on our own. We had turnover but the profit margin was too small.

To reduce our overheads, we realised we needed to shift our focus. We decided to rely more on using our website and the Internet to sell our artworks. This would allow us to sell first before we actually invested in the printing of the artworks themselves. The website had an ecommerce facility and was selling artworks to countries outside of Australia. We made arrangements with international artists to sell their works on our website. We had artists from Poland and Israel for example. This helped our business evolve into an online service selling artworks from all over the world, which seemed like a much better business model: our overheads were low and our reach was becoming increasingly global.

Our idea was to provide a website where buyers and sellers of creative products and services could come together on one website. At the time, our website had all the basic elements of the big websites today. We had a section on the website for creative professionals like Elance.Com has today. We also had a section where fine art artists and photographers would license their images and artworks to organisations who needed them, much like iStockPhoto.Com is doing today.

Even so, we did not turn into the successful business model we were working hard towards. Our ideas were solid but we did not have the financial and technical resources to push them forward. I later found out that the investment injected into some of the early Internet ventures who have succeeded, exceeded millions of dollars to promote and keep their operations running for years until the big money came along.

At the end of 2007, a friend asked me to help him kick-start an Australian ITC company with offices in Fiji to service the outsourcing and off-shoring needs of Australians with a view to servicing the nearby Asian and American companies. In exchange for this, he offered ownership in the company. So I agreed to be, what he called, the General Manager for Finance and Operations, the longest title I have had to put on a business card. Once again things did not turn out as planned however this company remains to be a client of my next business venture I was about to embark upon.

In 2009, I decided it was time to come back to what I started almost a decade ago: helping businesses and organisations use modern technology to do business. Australian business owners were a little bit more tech savvy by then and I no longer had to convince them they needed a website. After acquiring and developing more IT skills and knowledge, as well as having gained enough contacts and associates, now was as good a time as any.

I keep in touch with the latest news, stories and developments that can help our clients utilise the latest technologies to grow and run their businesses. Here, I will try and share as much as I can with you by posting anything I think might be helpful for you, especially if you have an interest in modern business topics like technology, websites, e-commerce, search engine optimisation and social media as well as the staple business topics including economics, law, finance, leadership and management.

Trading

I began trading the share market before the tech stock market collapse in 2002. Unlike the many people who lost vast amounts of money in this event, I was fortunate. I learnt enough about trading and the use of technical analysis to close all my trades two working days before the panic selling began. I witnessed what some thinkers have referred to as the ‘madness of crowds' and I have since been fascinated with the markets.

I moved on to trading the foreign-exchange (forex) market. Learning how to trade was perhaps one of the most challenging things I have done in my life and it remains to be today. As difficult as it is, there are certain things about the activity of trading that can be distilled to a method and I have identified vital concepts and distinctions that would be helpful to people who are learning to trade. I decided to document all my knowledge and experience into a book. Before writing it, in 2005, there was no other Forex Trading book around. I may have written the first, or at least one of the first, Forex trading books in the world: The Part-Time Currency Trader: Trading Guide for Working Men and Women. It was published in 2006.

Although my trading method does not heavily require me to keep a close eye on news and current affairs, I still keep up to date with large macro-economic, political events and other related items. I have a website dedicated to this topic: http://www.theparttimeinvestor.com . I used to share my trade strategies on a weekly basis but I stopped doing that when my weekends started becoming too busy. As much as I can, however, I do post about topics closely related to trading, investing, business, trading psychology, money management and trading strategies.

Reasonism

In 2007-2008, in between work, trading and kick-starting a call centre and data centre in Fiji, I became very curious about the bigger questions in life: questions that were philosophical, scientific and religious. Who are we? How did we get here? Is there a God? What are religions? Are they truly divine?

Answers to such questions were never a big part of my life. But when we see religious extremists crashing planes into buildings, blowing up trains, buses as well as clubs and bars to kill ‘infidels', it seemed to me no longer true that religion was a private matter.

For about a year or so, I researched to find the answers to those questions. I wrote what I found and concluded in my second book, The Tyranny of God: Liberating Ourselves From Our Own Beliefs. I also found something I did not expect when I was researching and writing the book: a fuller appreciation of what it means to be alive, here on Earth, in this very moment.

Life and the world seem so much more glorious and fascinating. That sounds dramatic, I know… but it is true! Learning about our natural history, spanning millions and millions of years, to discover how we got here and to contemplate the millions of years ahead, is so wonderful and exciting. It is a gift with which I wish to endow everyone I meet.

[Reasonism.Org is a website dedicated to the subject matters covered by the book. Please visit it sometime: http://www.reasonism.org.]

Writing

When I wrote my first book, The Part-Time Currency Trader, I wrote it as a way to store what I learnt and discovered about trading so I could look back years later and remember. It is a book I wish I had when I was learning how to trade and I am certain that this book will save someone a lot of money trading because trading is fraught with danger.

When I wrote my second book, The Tyranny Of God, it was more about what I had learnt and discovered about us human beings, religions, morality, God, science, the universe, faith and reason. I wrote the book because I wish for people to revisit their beliefs. The world would be a far better place if less people operated like zombies enslaved by ideas harmful and dangerous not only to themselves, but to their children and everyone else.

My reasons for writing my books were to share and communicate as honestly as I could with readers. It is always great when I meet people in person and they tell me they have read one of my books. Even though it is impossible for everyone to agree with everything I say, they all express a genuine happiness to meet the person whose thoughts they have just read. When this happens, I know I have touched someone and a deep human connection has been made.

I wish you the best and please keep in touch by subscribing to my mailing list or to this website's feeds and follow me on Twitter so I can update you with the latest!

Cheers,

Marquez