KeAnZu

On my recent trip to Niseko’s Hirafu resort I posed this question to a wide variety of people and of those who had tried both the results were unanimous:

Skiing is easier at the start and the fastest way to get enough skill to go on the lift.
Progression in skiing is very slow and it will be a long time before you ever get to any tricky slopes.

Snowboarding is harder at the start and you will take more time to get the basic skills which allow you to go on the lift.
Progression in snowboarding is fast and you can be on the tricky slopes much earlier than with skis.

People polled included beginners, experienced people and instructors. Surprisingly, everyone said a version of the same thing. Only those who had tried only one differed in opinion but experience is more relevant so I ignored their speculations.

My body survived the snowboarding (barely) but my pride and dignity died on the mountain as I spent an untoward amount of time gracefully sliding on my butt. Apparently to actually qualify as legitimate snowboarding the board itself has to contact the snow rather than your knees, hands and butt. Not sure what I ended up doing is really called, there was snow and a board involved … also pain, perhaps - “Uncoordinated goofy white guy sliding down a (rather flat) hill with board attached”. You think they’d name the hill something macho like “White Hill of Snowy Death” so you could at least salvage some pride by saying the name of the place that almost killed you, but no, they named it “Family” and it is serviced by the “Ace Family Pair Lift”. The tougher run up the mountain a little is accessed via the “Ace Pair Lift #1″ and is deceptively named “Slope for Family”, personally I think “Vertigo” would have been a more apt name. Anyway, the people were friendly, the instructors great and the lift tickets brutally expensive. Paying for those almost hurt as much as bouncing down the mountain.

If you are going to try snowboarding I would recommend knee pads, a butt pad and maybe even full body armour.

First we have to make some assumptions:

The average Taiwanese worker makes about NT$30,000 a month and gets two months bonus. Let’s say 1 in 30 people invests half their bonus in stocks. This means an average of NT$500 per person. Taiwan’s working population is roughly 10M so the total money invested is NT$5,000,000,000 or NT$5bn.

The stock market turns over about 120bn per day.

Even if everyone invested their entire bonus that would only be 300bn so it unlikely there is a “bonus effect” in the stock market.