Nine rules for investors to keep in mind

DUE to an obsession with Taylor Swift and then The Carpenters, I decided I needed to have a Carpenters' CD with the full Burt Bacharach medley they performed in the early 1970s. So I went to Amazon and found that it was only on a Japanese Carpenters' Anthology CD which would set me back US$150 from the US or US$65 for a "very good" secondhand edition from Japan.

The last time I got a "very good" secondhand Elvis book from Amazon, it had some pages missing but I decided to give the Japanese CD a go. When I put the order in, I was told it would arrive some time between Oct 2 and Nov 4. Immediately, I received an email from Japan saying it had shipped the CD. Two weeks later, it arrived in a huge box.

After cutting through all the cardboard and bubble wrap, I found a pristine version of The Carpenters Anthology still in its factory wrapping with a handwritten note from a Mr Kinoshita from Kyoto in Japan saying, among other things, that a new version had been substituted.