How To Go From ZERO to £Multi-Million Property Empire

Learn how Progressive Property went from dining room to a £Multi-Million business through unplanned, organic JV's and none of Rob Moore's money.

LET YOUR MONEY GROW

There is one simple thing that separates the rich from the poor – this one principal is the reason the rich build more and more wealth, and the poor get even poorer, and traditional streams of education fail to teach our youngsters meaning most are faced with having to figure it out for themselves… and most never do.

But first, let’s look at defining the problem in simple terms so we’re all on the same page – what’s needed is some basic definitions of common terms that are often misunderstood.

One of those big problems we face as a society in this modern age is debt. More specifically – bad debt.

There are two types of debt you can have – good debt and bad debt. The difference? Well, the simple defining difference is that bad debt is credit you obtain and then use to purchase liabilities – or several liabilities. This could be taking out a loan for a new car, or purchasing this years holiday on your credit card. Good debt is credit that you leverage in order to purchase assets – this could be taking out a mortgage to purchase a rental property that’s going to return you a second, almost passive income.

The first thing we should probably clear up is the definition of an asset and a liability – they are not what most people think they are! For example, the house that you own and live in – is it a liability or an asset? Let’s make the assumption that you’ve been lucky to pay off your mortgage and you own it outright – how would you answer that question bearing that in mind?

Most people believe their home is an asset – especially if they have no mortgage on it. How can it be a liability when I haven’t got any credit to support it’s ownership and I have a store of value in the property’s equity? Well, according to Rich Dad Poor Dad, the simple definition of a liability is something that costs you money to own, and an asset is something that you own that provides an income over and above the expenses incurred to own it.

So, in the case of your house, unless you’re renting it out and making a profit, it’s a liability – it costs you money to own it and live there! You pay water and electricity bills to keep it operational, you pay council tax for the pleasure of it existing within a certain jurisdiction, and you probably pay insurance to protect the potential downside. If you’re not charging rent to someone to live there over and above YOUR costs then it’s costing you to own it. It’s worth mentioning also that if you rent it out but don’t make enough from the rent you’re charging to cover the expenses then it’s still a liability – the defining difference is whether it achieves positive cashflow or not.

Hold on, I hear you cry, but I don’t have a mortgage and I can sell my property for hundreds of thousands of pounds if I wanted to so it’s an asset because when I sell it I’ll make lots of money! Erm, not quite. You see, you only realise the paper value stored in a property like that once you sell it… and you can only sell it for what someone is prepared to pay. For example, you might have been unfortunate in a relationship and going through divorce where you need to sell quickly – you’re a highly motivated seller, and there are no buyers in the market for your type of property who are prepared to pay what you want to sell it for. All of a sudden, the value in your assets diminishes considerably simple because of someone else’s perception of value.. which could be drastically different to yours! You only realise the value in an asset like that at the point of sale, and there’s no guarantee you’ll find any buyers at the time you’re looking to sell, and there’s no guarantee that if you find a willing buyer that they’ll want to pay what you think it’s worth. This doesn’t sound like a very reliable asset to me – especially given the potential return can so easily change based on multiple variables that are completely out of your control. Yes – you might sell and make a profit, but you might equally have to sell at a loss, and you won’t know which it’s going to be until the point of sale.

Now that we’ve clearly defined good and bad credit, and the definition of an asset and a liability, let’s have a look at the key problem most people face when it comes to finances – financial education.

The one key difference between the rich and the poor is this; the rich know how to master their money and create assets that provide multiple streams of income – more simply, they understand the art and the science of putting their money to work in a way that means their money makes them more money without the controlling person having to exchange time for more money.

But this is exactly the opposite of what we’re taught in school, where the focus is on finding a skill, becoming qualified, and then finding a position where you can exchange your time for money for the rest of your life.

Okay, but what’s wrong with that?

Well, nothing if that approach aligns with your values and allows you to achieve your goals in life. However, the key limitation with this approach is this – you only have 24 hours in a day like everyone else, so what happens when you reach a point where you’re exchanging all those hours for an hourly wage? Well, when there’s no more hours in the day to exchange, you’re not only burnt out and unfulfilled because you have no time to direct towards the things you love in life (let’s face it, most people are far from doing a job they love), but you have now hit your earnings ceiling. How do you earn more when there’s no more time to exchange? This is the key limiting problem with this approach.

Yes, most of us will have to start with this inefficient exchange in order to generate our first income, but it’s what we do with the fruits of our labour that really defines where we’re going to mature into wealthy people or poor people. For those of us who have been lucky enough to have some financial education, we start to do things with our money that let it grow all on it’s own. For those who don’t, they spend all their spare money on holidays, new gadgets, and toys – aka liabilities!

This behaviour sends us into a downwards spiral that can be extremely difficult to get out of. You earn money, and use that money to buy liabilities. Those liabilities increase your monthly outgoings, meaning you have to exchange more time for money to increase your income so you can continue to service the new liabilities you have purchased. You increase your income further so you again have some surplus (but you’re now working 12 hours days and barely seeing your family), and then you use that surplus to purchase more liabilities… and so the vicious cycle continues. Can you see now why this behaviour is so destructive to people’s finances? Can you see why we have such a problem with bad debt these days? All because financial education is considered unimportant by our educational institutions. This needs to change, and this change starts with you educating yourself, so you can go on to educate others and set the next generation up for greater levels of financial success.

So, how do the wealthy grow their money?

There are multiple strategies people use, but they can all be classed as one form of investment or another. You could invest in stocks and shares that not only appreciate in value but that pay you a dividend throughout the year whilst you own them. You could invest in the wild west market of crypto-currencies and benefit for the massive bullish gains we’ve seen in those markets in recent years (I was trading Bitcoin at $900 at the start of 2017, and it’s now broken right through $10,000 – all in under 12 months). You could put your money into cash-flowing investment properties, or you could either start your own business or invest in one.

There are so many strategies you can employ to make your money work for you, rather than you working for money. All it takes is the commitment to educate yourself in whatever vehicle you choose and get started.

I’ve written several blogs on trading and investing that you can find by searching those tags so please feel free to check those out to get some more information on these strategies – there’s also loads of great resources on-line, but there’s also a lot of shit. Be careful and do thorough research from reputable sources.

You can also join my trading education group on Facebook by clicking the following link: LG Trading

You can find some of my trading and investing blogs at the links below:

• Trading: The Basics

• Understanding The Stock Market & Trading

• Financial Wealth: What, How & Why

Enjoy! Please drop me a comment if there’s additional content you’d find value in me covering on this subject!

Source: https://littlegreysays.com/2017/11/29/let-your-money-grow/ 

Today is Your Most Important Trading Day

Had a bad run of trades? 

You sat down at the computer last week with your cup of coffee and your favourite pair of lucky slippers on, just another trading day. You were making good progress, and there was a little whisper from way back in your head saying, 'I think we can do this. We're getting there...'

And then you went into self-destruct mode. Trade after trade of emotional trading, the monster coming out of nowhere and taking control, firing off orders like a stereotypical office-manager flipping notes at the pole-dancer after one too many drinks.

It hurts. Hurts like hell.

But tomorrow will be different, right? You sit in the corner of the room after the trading destruction derby and feel awful about yourself. You go for a walk and try and figure this shit out. It needs to change and YOU need to change.

You get revved up and ready. Tomorrow will be different. You're going to change and become more disciplined.

Right?

Except, you've been saying that for six months, a year, longer even.

Until you come to realise that you only ever have TODAY to trade effectively, you are going to continue making excuses and mistakes.

Every day when you wake up and sit at that computer, that is your most important trading day. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Today.

You want to be a trader? You need to be willing to focus yourself TODAY. The discipline needs to be there TODAY. The ability to follow your rules ODAY and never mind how long your setup is taking, or the loss you made yesterday that you want to make back.

It sounds like it should be easy, but it isn't. We all have 'off' days. You know the ones where we wake up and it feels like a greyness has settled over the world. We don't want to work, we certainly don't want to do anything difficult.

But guess what? Today is the most important trading day. And when you are feeling like that, you should underline those words on a post-it and stick it to your computer monitor. Because those are the days when the damage tends to be done.

When you feel like that, try this... Just don't trade.

I'll give you a minute to get over that ground-breaking statement. It can be hard to grasp.

Today is your most important trading day. And every day, focus number one is protecting your account. If you feel like rubbish, the best defensive move can be to simply stay away.

Approach every day like it is your only trading day. Don't allow yourself to slip and then assure yourself that tomorrow will be better. In trading, you don't have a guarantee of tomorrow. That damaging behaviour you keep carrying out WILL one day pull your ability to trade from under you. The account will disappear and you will be left with nothing. It won't matter what you tell yourself on your walks or when you're rocking back and forth in the corner of the room. Because you will have allowed yourself to forget that TODAY is your most important trading day, and that will have finally caught up with you.

If you want to succeed, in trading or anything else, you need to come to terms with the fact that all you have is today to make it happen. Your focus and your drive and your determination needs to be there today. Not tomorrow. Not yesterday.

Think of the constant dieter. Always tomorrow. Always next week. And in the interim, they continue on with the destructive behaviour that continues adding to their problem and making it more difficult to overcome.

Now think of the person who loses all the weight. They decided that TODAY is their most important dieting day. All of their focus and determination went into it and they stuck with it on every today.

If you want it, whatever it is, go get it TODAY.

I hope you've all had a great trading week!

James Orr

Source: http://www.thinklikeatrader.co.uk/2018/05/today-is-your-most-important-trading-day.html

Finding “Unicorns:” Questions to Ask Before You Invest in a Startup

Many people ask me about startup investing and how to get started.  

This post — while for informational purposes only and not investment advice — is intended to show you how one successful investor approached the early-stage game.

Jason Calacanis (@jason) has made 125 early-stage startup investments and picked 6 “unicorns” (startups to exceed $1B in valuation) — one out of every 21. Based on his AngelList profile, Calacanis’ investments includes: Tumblr, Cozy, Thumbtack, Rapportive, Uber, Chartbeat, Groundcrew, Evernote, Pen.io, Nimble, Crossfader, Signpost, Calm, many many more. He’s accelerating his deployment of capital and plans to invest in an additional 150 startups over the next 30 months.

The following guest post is an exclusive excerpt from his new book, Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000. Using stories from his own angel investing career, Jason wrote this book as a playbook for aspiring angel investors.

In particular, this post focuses on questions to ask founders before you invest, but it also serves as a tutorial on how to ask better questions in life and in business.

Enter Jason

A THOUSAND FIRST DATES

The life of an angel is all about managing a deal funnel, which includes three distinct steps: sourcing deals, evaluating deals, and, finally, picking which founders you’re going to fund.

Meeting with founders for an hour is the most frequent technique for angels to decide who to invest in, but certainly not the only one. There are some angels whose primary technique for selecting investments is to follow other smart investors, drafting off of their meetings and deal flow.

Another technique is simply to review the core metrics and decide based on those. This can be done by reviewing a deck or by checking public information sources, like the App Store rankings, and traffic monitoring services, like Alexa and Quantcast.

Some investors have a huge Rolodex and simply invest in the founders they already know, a technique that worked extremely well for investors who knew Elon Musk (Zip2 and PayPal before Tesla and SpaceX), Evan Williams (Blogger before Twitter), and Mark Pincus (Freeloader and Tribe before Zynga).

Of course, the “invest in who you know” approach would mean you missed the biggest startups in history: Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Evan Spiegel, and Larry Page, who all hit the ball out of the park on their first try—at the ages of nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-five, respectively.

Meetings are important and free. You should take a lot of them. Ten one-hour meetings a week is a good target for a professional angel. Half that if you’re doing this part-time.

My best advice to you as you start dating is to be promiscuous with meetings—but a prude when it comes to writing checks. Don’t be a tramp like I was.

I’m going to take you through the four most important questions I ask all founders. The goal of asking these questions is not just for you to understand the business but also so you yourself can answer four critical investor questions:

1. Why has this founder chosen this business?
2. How committed is this founder?
3. What are this founder’s chances of succeeding in this business—and in life?
4. What does winning look like in terms of revenue and my return?

HOW TO ASK QUESTIONS

Your job in these meetings is to play Columbo, the unassuming and always underestimated detective from the classic TV show that started in the ’70s and ran for more than three decades. Your job is not to show off or demonstrate how smart you are by explaining to the founder what they’re doing wrong or by bragging about your heroics as an investor or, even worse, as a founder yourself.

You want to have big ears and a small mouth in these meetings. You want to ask concise questions that take no more than a couple of seconds and then listen deeply to the answers, considering them with every fiber of your consciousness as you write your notes on paper—just like Columbo.

Listening like this will serve two virtuous goals, the first being that the founder will feel heard and understood by you.

If people believe they are being deeply listened to, they will talk more.

This is why, when you talk to your therapist about your mom, they say “hmm…” while tilting their head and looking at you with sympathy. Then they add, “Tell me more about your mother,” or “Unpack that some more,” or simply “Your mother…”

There are six words, four words, and two words in those responses. The last one is the most powerful because it just hangs there, inviting you to build on the topic.

You want to be Dr. Melfi, Tony Soprano’s therapist, sitting patiently while the passion and pain pour out from the boss you’re meeting with. If you’re a great listener, you will be a great investor, as well as a great friend, a great parent, and a great human being.

Second, if you are hyper-present in the meeting, thinking deeply about the founder and why they are taking on the irrational pursuit of starting a company, which comes with a greater than 80 percent chance of failure and a 100 percent chance of suffering, then you will be able to make a better decision on whom to invest in.

Basically, if you shut your trap and listen like a detective or a therapist, you’ll be able to uncover the answers to those four questions better than other angel investors.

You’ll have more hits and fewer misses.

QUESTION ZERO

When you are starting a founder meeting, ask one icebreaker question to get your subject warmed up.

How do you know Jane?

If you were introduced to this founder by a mutual connection, you can quickly establish common ground by asking these five simple words. Listen to the answer you are given and construct a follow-up question based on their answer. So, if the founder said that they worked with Jane, your next move is to say, “You worked with Jane? What was that like?”

I have a game where I try to say things with as few words as possible because it reminds me that this meeting is not about me, it’s about them. It also makes me sound wise, like Obi-Wan or a Toshiro Mifune character.

These are the exact four questions I ask every founder. The answers to these questions will give you most of what you need to make your investment decision. We spend the first half of our hour-long meeting exclusively on them. Then we go deeper.

1. What are you working on?

The reason I phrase this question as “What are you working on?,” versus something more company-specific, like “What does Google do?” or “Why should I invest in Google?” or the supremely horrible “Why do you think Google is going to succeed after eleven search engines have already failed?,” is that it celebrates the founder (the “you”) and what founders do (the “work”). It shows that you have deep empathy and you recognize that this isn’t about what the thing does (Google helps you find stuff), but rather it’s about people (Larry and Sergey write software that helps people find information faster).

2. Why are you doing this?

Again, five simple words that are focused on the founder. When I ask these first two questions, I almost universally see founders melt into their chairs. They relax, let their guard down, and feel like I care about them, which I do. Just like Columbo cares deeply about the suspects he’s interviewing when he asks, “So, what do you do here?” when he walks into their office, as opposed to leading with “Where were you on the night of the murder?”

Just like Columbo, I’m looking for killers and I’m trying to eliminate suspects.

There are some really, really bad answers to the question “Why are you doing this?” The worst two answers, which you’ll hear often, are “To make money” and “Because INSERT-SUCCESSFUL-COMPANY-NAME-HERE doesn’t do it.” If folks are building a startup for money, they will eventually quit when they realize there are many better ways to make money faster and with more certainty. If you want to make a lot of money, you’re better off being a world-class programmer on a very esoteric and in-demand vertical and getting Google or Facebook to give you $1 million-plus a year in stock and cash for ten years in a row. You have no downside, you can work a couple of hours a day, and you get unlimited free food.

If you’re building something because another hugely successful company doesn’t already have that feature, well, you’re wildly naive or, more often than not, plain old stupid. For years people pitched me on startups that were supposedly going to be Google search for news, Google search for video, and Google search for books and magazines. We all know how that turned out.

More recently I’ve been pitched hard on “Uber for food,” “Uber for helicopters,” and “Uber for shopping.”

While there have been some successful startups built by running ahead of market leaders, in general, those kinds of startups get crushed or bought for small dollar amounts. Summize was a search engine for Twitter, back when Twitter was so technologically incompetent that they could barely keep the service online. They bought Summize to catch up, as well as TweetDeck, a more advanced client for reading multiple feeds at once, but the return to the investors in Summize and TweetDeck for these acquisitions were minor when compared to the returns of the company that bought them.

The big problem with “founders” who build a feature that a market leader will inevitably get to—and I use quotes here for a reason—is that they lack vision. The act of selecting a feature as their life’s work, as opposed to a full-blown product or a mission, disqualifies them from being a true founder.

Elon Musk didn’t build a battery pack: he built a car and eventually an energy solution that included solar, home batteries, and, perhaps when you read this, a ride-sharing service like Uber.

It’s okay to start small, but it’s not okay to be a small thinker.

The right answers to “Why are you building this?” tend to be personal. Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp built Uber because they couldn’t get a cab in Paris at a technology conference. Elon Musk built SpaceX because he wanted a backup plan for humanity. Elon’s earlier idea, that no one knows about, was to put a series of greenhouses in space to back up the biosphere— just like the Bruce Dern movie Silent Running—which, as an interesting aside, came out five years before Star Wars and featured drones that were an inspiration for R2-D2.

Zuckerberg was awkward with the ladies, so he built a social network that would show him their relationship statuses.

Think about that for a second: Is there anything more important than procreation? Not according to Darwin or Freud, so Zuck’s lack of game led to the fastest-growing consumer product in the history of humanity, largely based on people needing to find a mate or to connect with previous lovers (as demonstrated by the number of divorces that mention Facebook in their filings).

3. Why now?

This question has been floating around the Valley for a while, and the first time I heard it was from my friend, Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha—the venture capitalist who convinced me to become a “Scout” for their firm, which led to my two greatest investments to date: Uber and Thumbtack.

If you unpack this question, you’re really asking, “Why will this idea succeed now?”

For Uber it was simple: mobile phones were becoming ubiquitous and they had GPS. In fact, another company had already tried to help you order a cab via SMS messages a year before Uber came on the scene. Their “why now” was simply “text messaging,” but that, frankly, wasn’t enough. Without advanced mobile CPUs (central processing units) to power big beautiful touch screens with military precision GPS (global positioning system), there would be no Uber.

For YouTube, which had Roelof Botha as its first investor, the “Why now?” was a confluence of factors and breakout successes that tend to be born during these perfect storms. First, bandwidth costs plummeted after the dot-com crash. Second, storage costs were dropping due to this new thing called cloud computing. Third, blogging was taking off. Millions of folks were writing tens of millions of posts every week and YouTube offered a clever way to embed their videos on other people’s sites—reaching a massive audience for free.

There were dozens of video companies before YouTube, but they all charged people for bandwidth and storage, which meant that if you wanted to post a video on the internet, your reward for going viral was a ten-thousand-dollar server bill. Instead, YouTube sends you a thousand-dollar check from the ads they run on your hit video.

Dropbox, which launched onstage at the first year of my LAUNCH Festival and was also funded by Sequoia Capital, had the same “Why now?” as YouTube: plummeting bandwidth and storage costs.

Founders tend to have these “Why now?” insights without recognizing how profound they are. When I started my blogging company, Weblogs, Inc., in 2004, I had a very simple thesis: I believed that great new writers publishing five short, unfiltered posts a day would get more readers than established journalists writing one story, edited by a half dozen people, once a week.

When I had this realization, it was perfectly clear to me, but even the New York Times journalists didn’t see it. I remember running into legendary tech journalist John Markoff at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas when our blog Engadget was covering it for the first time. He asked me how many people we had at the show and I said fifteen. His jaw dropped and he asked me how often they were filing, and I said four times.

He replied, “You’re going to do sixty stories at CES?”

I said, “Actually they’re posting four times a day. So sixty stories . . . per day. How often is your team filing?”

He said they had three journalists at the show and they would do two or three pieces each over the next month. So, they were doing six stories and we were doing sixty a day for five days— three hundred total.

In some ways, “Why now?” is the most important question about the business you can ask because there are so many folks constantly trying the same ideas over and over again in our business.

Google was the twelfth search engine. Facebook was the tenth social network. iPad was the twentieth tablet. It’s not who gets there first. It’s who gets there first when the market’s ready.

4. What’s your unfair advantage?

Founders with breakout startups often have an unfair advantage. Google had their Stanford connections, filled with talented algorithm-writing engineering geniuses. Facebook launched while Zuckerberg was still a student at Harvard, and they used their understanding of campus culture and directories to figure out the dynamics of building online social networks that scale. Mark Pincus launched Zynga with a multi-year cross-promotion deal with Facebook, which allowed Zynga to tag along with Facebook as it grew at an astounding rate. Mary Gates was on the board of United Way with the CEO of IBM, which led directly to IBM hiring her son Bill’s new company, Microsoft, to build the operating system for their first personal computer.

Said another way, this question is asking, in just four words, “What makes you uniquely qualified to pursue this business? What secrets do you know that will help you beat both the incumbents and your fast followers?”

Sometimes, founders will not have an answer for this question. And that’s okay. This is one you often end up answering while looking in the rearview mirror.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

After asking these four founder questions, which in total are sixteen words, you should have an excellent idea of what this person is building and why.

These four founder questions give you a great starting point for answering the four investor questions every angel needs to ask themselves before investing. Remember, we want to figure out:

1. Why has this founder chosen this business?
2. How committed is this founder?
3. What are this founder’s chances of succeeding in this business—and in life?
4. What does winning look like in terms of revenue and my return?

After thirty minutes and four questions, you’re going to have a strong sense of why the founder picked this business, why it might work right now, and, of course, what they are building.

What you probably won’t know are the tactical details of how they plan on executing on their vision, including their go-to-market strategy, what kind of team they have, the competitive landscape, and the nuances of their business model.

You are going to find out the answers to those questions in the second half of your meeting. But this is the foundation.

Source: https://tim.blog/2017/08/04/questions-to-ask-before-you-invest/

What Is Happening To Crypto? Here’s The Truth… (And Some Things To Consider)

In this video Crypto Zombie discusses what is happening with the markets and cryptocurrency as a whole.

GDPR and Blockchain: How the US’ Lack of Preparation Could Swing the Balance of Power to Europe

This op-ed on GDPR and blockchain was written by Robert Chu — CEO of Embleema, the patient-driven healthcare blockchain, and Former SVP at IMS Health (Now IQVIA) — and Alexis Normand, former Head of B2B of Nokia Digital Health

Internet privacy advocates are surely disappointed by Mark Zuckerberg’s mid-April performance in front of the US Senate. After Cambridge Analytica misused 87 Million Facebook users’ accounts for political purposes, the young billionaire demonstrated that Internet platforms do not know how to regulate themselves. Asked by a senator about the nature of his business, Zuckerberg responded simply, “We run ads”.

It seems of little concern to Facebook whether our data defines us as consumers, patients or citizens. Asked about which rules would seem more desirable, Zuck barely conceded that the General Regulation on Data Protection (GDPR) which comes into force in Europe at the end of May, offered “many good things”. However, It’s not clear what there is to “like” for Facebook.

2018, thus far, really has been the year where data privacy and how our data is being utilized by technology companies has come to the forefront of media and the public’s consciousness. As European companies ready themselves for GDPR May 25th kickoff, the world has been made well aware of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal and the Russian meddling in the US Presidential election, with data-driven advertising being their weapon of choice. But this is not just an issue for 2018 — 15.5 million Electronic Medical Records were breached in the US in 2016 according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

GDPR imposes costly and significant obligations on platforms to avoid abusive data harvesting: there is “clear and explicit” consent to Terms & Conditions. These will limit the collection of information to only that which is necessary for the service to run. This feels like the sword of Damocles is hanging over the heads of Facebook and Google because nobody uses their services to be profiled, but the old adage “you are not the customer, you are the product” has never rang truer.“We run ads”: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

GDPR also establishes a “right to be forgotten”, to have embarrassing or damaging material taken down and erased from the public domain. Companies will need to provide a record of data processing, which generates significant overhead. The ability to hold on to one’s data history will become a right in Europe, the same way one can keep hold of the same mobile phone number when changing service providers. In health, the portability of patient records will facilitate the coordination of care, including treatment for complex diseases. 

Facebook has since admitted that it would not implement these rules for its US users and has gone to great lengths to reduce its exposure to GDPR. It is also possible regulators are increasingly reluctant to weaken US tech giants as the pressure from China increases. The Red State is now on par with the United States in terms of number of patents in artificial intelligence (AI). Its president Xi Jingping made AI a centerpiece of his Made in China Plan for 2025, aiming to take world leadership. AI has become a security issue whose importance goes beyond our private lives.

Europe has lost the AI battle, but is serious about Blockchain & Privacy.

Like Don Quixote, Europe wants to be the moral flag bearer for consumer rights, holding firm the belief that the GDPR and defense of privacy will in time garner a competitive edge. If the argument was only audible in Mountain View or Shenzen, perhaps the Masters of AI & the Universe would shine a smile. But for how long?

What if Europe, like the “knight with the sad face”, was actually visionary? Blockchain, as a breakthrough technology is already reshuffling cards. “History has more imagination than men”, said Lenin who knew a thing or two about revolutions. The hype should not make us blind to the profound transformation operated by Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin.

The First Age of the Internet was that of information. The constitution of databases, search engines, and the combined knowledge of users, together brought down transaction costs and freed many segments of the economy from imperfect information and geographic distance. By monopolizing these technologies, US tech giants captured the benefits of all these efficiency gains.

We are entering a Second Age, that of the “Internet of Currency” or its equivalent, the exchange of certified information. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer IT infrastructure that records a transaction between two parties in real time for all participants in a network so that it becomes tamper-proof and immutable. It offers the means to certify, without any third party, an exchange of information, which can also be an economic transaction. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, a development platform for Blockchain apps summarizes: “While most technologies aim to automate workers on the periphery performing repetitive tasks, Blockchain automates the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of work, it puts Uber out of work and lets the driver work directly for the client. “Europe is far more serious about data privacy than the US, the authors argue.

The disruption goes further, because the very business model of the company which operates the network switches from maximizing profit to maximizing exchanges between nodes in the network. Indeed, blockchain companies act like Central Banks within the economy they generate, paying themselves by issuing tokens, like Disneyland gives you vouchers to use on different rides.

Taking a familiar example in healthcare, Blockchain offers the patient a rare opportunity to share their data seamlessly with a doctor or laboratory, being compensated automatically for each exchange. This is a paradigm change for the data exchange industry, which currently lets large data brokers take the bigger slice of a $15billion cake, leaving the patient with zero compensation. In short, Blockchain would give patients back ownership over their health data.

In all sectors where traceability is critical, blockchain essentially removes the need for a trusted or not so trusted third party, and any “rent” that he might perceive from his privileged position as owner of the marketplace. Blockchain reduces the cost of coordination between stakeholders of a network. This could be the demise of Silicon Valley’s centralization of data and power, and perhaps even of modern capitalism as we know it. Had Karl Marx lived in the time of blockchain, he would finally have found a way to free workers from companies becoming monopolies and capturing all the “added-value”.

A new divide is emerging between AI-powered platforms, which are hostile by design to privacy protection, and blockchain-powered decentralized network: a conflict between monopolies and libertarians, Big Brother and Crypto, the United States and Europe. This is good news for individuals and end users who can no longer simply trust institutions to protect property over data. This is good news for Europe, which can reset the meter by combining GDPR and Blockchain. This is very bad news for Silicon Valley. It invented the sharing economy of your physical assets that AirBnB and Amazon have captured the better share of. Now, old Europa is writing the rules for the sharing economy of your digital assets. Tomorrow, we will all be the CEOs of our data.

Rob Moore | Build your confidence as a property investor

Rob Moore from Progressive Property sharing his insight and knowledge on building confidence, so you can become and achieve the goals and ambitions you set for your life and business.

Dealing With Quiet Periods by Decisive Trading

There are always quiet periods when trading - times when the market just isn't lining up with what it is your trading plan identifies as your trading edge. The problem is that this is the time when most people undo all of the hard work they have done during the 'good' period. In this trading Vlog Decisive Trading explain the importance of remaining patient, and also ways to reframe those quiet periods into a positive!

10 Ways To Invest Money While You Have A Full-Time Job

10 Ways To Invest Money While You Have A Full-Time Job

Most of us don’t necessarily love the jobs we have. We all had wonderful plans for ourselves growing up. But our jobs pay, so here we are. But wouldn’t you just want to break away from all this charade? Do the things you’ve always wanted to do? Sure, who wouldn’t? But that requires money, the only source of which right now is your job.

But we do truly live in a golden era where anyone anywhere could make small investments and possibly make money off of it. Even though investing on oneself, one’s education, skills, health etc., would still be the best investment for the long run, most of us are looking to make investments that could actually make us money right now.

So, here are ten ways you could invest money while also maintaining a full-time job.

1. Peer-to-peer lending

This is possibly the easiest investment you could make. Peer-to-peer lending involves you lending some money to a peer in hopes of making a profit out of the interest in the returns. Now of course this peer has to be someone you know or trust, so that alone reduces the pool of potentials. In a way, this method could be deemed as risky as it is simple. However, if you abide to the golden rule of lending anything including money, “Don’t lend something you can’t afford to lose”, the risk is definitely worth the simplicity and potential profit.

2. Investment in precious metals

Precious metals are a very controversial investment. Some deem them the best investment one could make, others deem them the worst. Truth is, they could be a little bit of both.

The fluctuation in their prices aren’t as predictable as other things since they’re mostly dependent on the rise and fall of the dollar. However on the plus side, if a small investment is what you wish to make, the potential profit usually balances out the potential risk. Besides, precious metals like gold and silver are among the last remaining material investments one can physically hold on to.

3. Trading forex

Forex or the foreign exchange market is the world’s largest financial market. Everyday trillions of dollars are exchanged through forex and that is vital to the economy. Businesses, governments and investors use forex. Businesses use them to facilitate foreign trade, governments to implement policies and investors study the market and predict the rise and fall of the exchange rates and capitalize on this.

For as little as 25$ you could get started on foreign currency trading. The basic idea is that you buy a certain amount of a foreign currency and sell it at a higher price when its valuation is higher than what you originally paid.

4. Trading options

Options trading is a process that lets you control a stock or an asset without actually owning it, letting you capitalize on its price chances. An options contract allows you the right to buy the shares owned by another person for a certain price known as the strike price before a certain date in exchange for a certain premium.

If the value of the share rises, then you can buy the shares for a price cheaper than the market price and then sell it at the market price to make an overall profit. If instead the value of the share falls, then you may decline from buying the stocks but you lose the premium you initially paid.

Options trading can make a great investment if you understand the market.

5. Trading futures

Futures trading involves investing in a volatile market and capitalizing on the fluctuations while providing stability to the businesses you have contracted with. With the pay of a full a time job, you can possibly afford to contract with small local businesses.

If the market prices drop and the businesses can manufacture cheaper, then you get the profits. However, if the market prices rise and the manufacturing becomes more expensive, then you lose money. Once again, like options trading, if you are well educated about the market then futures trading make great investments.

6. Investment on real estate

Real estate prices continually rise and fall. And like precious metals, they are assets you can physically hold on to. If your pay can’t afford to invest in real estate around you, there are options around the world.

Many countries allow foreigners to invest in their real estate and if you’ve assessed the risks well enough, they may potentially prove to be a great investment. This is specially true for developing countries where a cheap real estate can be worth a lot more within just a few years. Once again, this requires great research.

7. Crowdfund investments

This could possibly be the best option for someone with a full time job. In crowdfund investment you are only require to invest a small portion of the required amount, and your future returns depend on the amount you have initially invested. This gives you the option to invest on big businesses that could potentially make a lot of profit. Furthermore, since you’re only investing a relatively small amount you could invest in a number of businesses and expect at least some of those to make you a profit.

8. Buying stocks from established corporations

Stocks of established corporations are usually a safe bet. Let’s say you are willing to invest a thousand dollars a month from your salary. You could buy 20 stocks worth 50 dollars each. Since big corporations are constantly at work to try and increase their profits, stock prices are sooner than later bound to increase too. You could then sale some or all of the stocks you own to make a profit.

For an established corporation, worst case scenario may be the drop in stock prices by 5 or 10 dollars, because they don’t usually go below that. You’ll only be losing a $100 or $200 of your initial investment.

9. Being a silent partner in small businesses

Small businesses don’t usually require a lot of money to operate. The $1000 you agreed to invest in stocks in the previous point could very well help run a small business somewhere else.

Furthermore like real estate, you are not restricted to invest in businesses near you. In a developing nation, the $1000 could mean a lot and could help establish a number of businesses that could in time grow to be profitable. Becoming a silent partner means you don’t have to worry about the operations of the business. But once again, you need to be sharp on your assessment of the business and the person running it before you invest.

10. Buying penny stocks

Penny stocks are common stocks that are valued at less than a dollar. Investing in penny stocks is therefore considered highly speculative. They seldom make a good investment so unless you’ve run out of options, you should stay away from them. However since they are already so cheap, there is no other place for their prices to go but up. If you buy a lot of them (since they are all so cheap), at least some of them are bound to make you some profit. At least, these are the general assumptions surrounding investment in penny stocks.

Source: https://www.lifehack.org/359768/10-ways-invest-money-while-you-have-full-time-job