Audit: Fla. lottery sales going flat in recession

Auditors recommend more control of office space, commissions to offset flat Fla. lottery sales

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Florida Lottery sales are going flat, a legislative audit reported Thursday.

Growth in the lottery's annual contributions to education began to slow down in fiscal year 2007-08. Now, officials are reducing their goals for future years.
The audit by the Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability said the lottery is wasting money on excess office space and should review commissions paid to retailers who offer various games. Retailers earn a nickel for every dollar ticket sold and receive an additional 1 percent bonus for redeeming winning tickets.

Auditors said the lottery's operating expenses continue to increase mostly because of growth in its commission payments. The lottery paid $121 million to vendors for advertising and providing the online and scratch-off games in this fiscal year alone.
Auditors recommended the department expand its retailer network to increase sales, propose using vending machines for online ticket sales, secure competitive advertising and reduce commissions paid for higher-value scratch off tickets.
Lottery Secretary Leo DiBenigno said that the economy was not the only reason for the slowdown, and that he plans to ask the Legislature to approve some of the recommendations in the audit to help enhance sales, including instant ticket vending machines.
"There would be additional revenue available if we were able to use those tools," he said.

Lawmakers were concerned as well.

"People that were hoping gambling would pay for education, it's just not working out that way," said Sen. Nancy Detert, R-Venice, after hearing about the lottery's woes at a morning education appropriations committee meeting.
The audit noted that the lottery has introduced new scratch off games, midday drawings and the multistate game, Powerball, in January in hopes of boosting sales in a sluggish economy. Powerball sales totaled $50 million in its first month, but sales decreased in several other existing games.
Florida was previously the only state that did not participate in any multistate games.
Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment in 1986 authorizing the state to operate a lottery with profits aimed at enhancing education.


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SigmaForex Introduces World Events And Wise Forex Trading

Forex trading has the great potential of becoming a profitable and fulfilling career that will let you have a lifestyle that few other lucrative activities in the world can offer to people from many roads in life and without asking any of those men and women for a diploma or some special certification.
But Forex trading is not easy; it may be simple to enter and place your first trade but becoming a profitable trader is a different thing. You will need to acquire the right knowledge and techniques in order to understand and know when to enter or leave a trade always fulfilling the main objective every trader must have; making money.
There are two kinds of analysis you can perform on the Forex markets. They are known as technical analysis and fundamental analysis. It is common that traders tend to divide themselves into "technical" and "fundamentalists". Each group devoting themselves to the main tools each kind of analysis gives them.
Technical Forex traders base their trading on the analysis of the charts and the number of indicators derived from the plots of price oscillations and patterns. Meanwhile Fundamentalists traders base their trading mostly on the fundamental numbers and economical indicators of countries economies. Though, even if divided, both tendencies tend to complement each other to some degree.
In this article I will place myself on the "fundamentalists" side and focus on one of the situations every Forex trader must be aware of and don't let the events involved affect his trading efforts.
This risky situation is that when unprecedented chaotic world events start to develop as the trading day goes on. The power of the media (TV, internet, printed) can magnify and sometimes it may even distort the events taking place and impacting the trading journey in a significant manner. The result of this magnification and rapid diffusion of the news about the series of unfavorable events taking place is an increased atmosphere of fear, confusion and uncertainty in the trading world. And fearful traders are not prone to make the best trading choices because they have given themselves to panic and emotional reactions instead of reasoned and intelligent decisions.
If you need to have more specific examples of these kind of events you can search a bit inside your memories and consider the impact of just a few types of unfavorable chaotic world events as the political upheavals or corporate scandals of companies as; Enron, WorldCom, or of people as the case of Martha Stewart trial, etc. There is also the example of the terrorist attacks on Sep 11 in New York, March 11 in Spain, etc. Also natural disasters: tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, freezes, droughts, hurricanes along with wars can cause great disruption in a trading journey.
In short, every Forex trader should be totally sure that his method of trading has built-in safe guards (stops, limit orders) to prevent a major financial loss from his trading account in case any of the unfavorable events I mentioned above ever takes place. And being realistic, many of those events will surely happen in the future.