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Previous Chapter - The Last 3 Days (02): ﻿Love Blooms in Shop Class All published chapters can be found here. 62:34:18 His engine assembled and his tools sorted into their respective slots in the cart, Nick watched Becky struggle to fit a part. He glanced towards the teacher, but his back was turned. Gathering his nerve, Nick drew a grounding breath and walked over to Becky, waiting for her to look up. He held out one hand to take the piece, indicating with his other hand where it should go when the teacher reached past him, plucked the piece from Nick’s hand and pointed him back to his own work. Friday’s end-of-day bell rang his freedom. 62:29:56 Nick turned on his hand-me-down flip phone as he made his way along the crowded school hallway. When the phone’s tiny, pixelated icons appeared on screen, he checked for messages. He was still tapping buttons as he joined a tight knot of students laughing at a video on a smartphone held by Nick’s best friend, Barry, decked out as only a single child with divorced parents can be. Embarrassed, Nick pocketed his phone, only for it to ring. The dated ringtone drew everyone’s attention. And more laughs. “Hey, Mr. Retro,” teased one of the group as Nick flipped the phone open. “Hey, Jay,” Nick said, “What? Now? I have to get Jack.” The others watch Nick’s face and listened to his answers. They had a stake in this. “No. I have to walk my brother home.” As he waits for Jay to finish, Nick looked up and saw their expectations. “Fine. Fine, I said. I’m on my way.” Nick held out his free hand. “Paper, boys. It’s now or never.” A few seconds later, he clutched a handful of bills. “How are you going to get two bottles of vodka into a chaperoned dance?” Another student asked. Already turning away, Nick looked back. “Trust me,” he said and headed for the exit. “Nick, wait up,” Barry begged. A well-indulged single child of divorced parents who hid their failures in gifts and treats, Barry struggled to keep his bag shouldered while he wrangled the drape of his oversized thug clothes and catch Nick. Nick turned back to his friend and found himself looking at Becky. He backed through the door and held it for her. “Thank you, Nick. And thanks for trying to help in class.” “No problem. Happy to do it.” As she moved past him, she met his eyes. “Bye. Maybe I’ll see you at the dance.” “Bye — “ Barry’s hand gripped his arm. “Hey, Nick. Listen to this — “ 62:26:56 Parked at the curb outside Richmond Park High School, Ryan Bellows watched the metal double doors release a rising flow of students while his seat reclined, advanced, straightened and retreated in random sequence to the tune of electric servos. He felt like the winner he was, excited to show his new ride to his girl. Then a student backed through and stopped, holding it for someone as he spoke. A girl walked past the student, smiling and waving her hand in farewell. He recognized the girl and his mood soured in the space of two heartbeats. That wasn’t any girl, that was his girlfriend, Becky. He watched her approach and then walk past, looking for someone. His temper rising, he punched the horn to get her attention. When she turned back, he lowered her window from his door. “Get in,” he ordered. Becky climbed in and looked about. “Very nice. You got the promotion, then?” She reached for her seatbelt and fastened it. “Who’s he?” “He who?” “The guy who held the door for you?” Becky kept her tone even, speaking slowly. “His name is Nick. He helped me with my engine in shop class. I was just thanking him.” Ryan started the car and revved the engine. “Next time ask the teacher for help. Don’t talk to him.” “Sure, babe,” Becky answered. “So you got the promotion?” Instead of answering, Ryan glanced in the mirror and accelerated away. “Any minute now.” 62:18:43 Barry had better control of his clothes, clutching folds of them in his left fist. He had pressed his smartphone into that tight bundle so he could use his right hand to operate it. He kept the backpack in place by adopting a hunch that turned his right shoulder into enough of a hook to prevent the bag from slipping. Still, the effort was enough that he couldn’t match Nick’s pace. And his attention was riveted to the screen. “All the feeds say the asteroid is real, Nick. Some are saying it’s gonna hit earth.” Nick glanced back at his friend, not slowing. “Must be a slow news day. They never hit.” At the corner where Barry’s route home left Nick’s path, Nick had an idea. “Hey, wanna do me a solid? Go get Jack and walk him home for me.” “I can’t,” Barry said. “I have to get to my mom’s and change. My dad is picking me up for dinner. He has a new girlfriend.” “What a great gig, being a single child of divorced parents. Later.” 62:17:32 Clusters of children migrated across the tarmac schoolyard of Burchard Elementary School, excited for the weekend. Jack Burns walked with a few classmates and looked about for his brother, Nick. Not seeing him, Jack veered towards a bench where he could see Nick coming. He pulled his handheld game unit from his bag and settled in to wait while the schoolyard emptied around him. 62:17:30 Ryan put the new car through its paces, thinking to impress Becky. Then he realized she hadn’t experienced the quality of the sound system. Steering one-handed as he dodged slower cars, he called up a list of radio stations on the dashboard screen. As he shifted his attention between the road and the radio, he was oblivious to Becky’s fear. “The sport package was worth the extra money.” “Is it worth a speeding ticket?” “Relax,” Ryan couldn’t keep the condescension from his voice. “I know what I’m doing.” “Of course you do, babe. It’s the other drivers that scare me.” He glanced at her. “I love that you get me, Becky, how you call me babe. Makes me feel real good. Which brings up something I want to talk to you about.” Sure, babe.” The onset of rush hour slowed traffic, which increased Ryan’s agitation. “Doesn’t anyone understand speed limits? I’m doing 30 in a 50 zone. How do these people function on a daily basis?” “What do you want to talk about, babe?” “Huh? Oh, yeah. So with this promotion comes a raise. I think … I think it’s time for you to move in with me.” Caught off guard, Becky said, “Move in with you? What about my mother?” “What about her? Olga’s a trooper. She’ll probably enjoy not having to pay your way anymore.” The light ahead turned red, but Ryan left his braking to the last possible instant. “Could she live with us?” “What? No. I’m not living with an old woman can barely put an English sentence together. You’re missing the point — “ The music muted, replaced by Ryan’s ringtone. A wave of relief washed over Ryan. “Finally.” He pressed a button on the steering wheel. “Hi, Mr. Thurro. Tell me the good news.” Peter Thurro’s voice answered in surround sound, coming from nowhere and everywhere like that of an angry god. “I’ll keep this short, Ryan. You’re fired.” “What?” “Furthermore,” the disembodied voice demanded, “I will be filing charges with the police for your extortion of my employees. Not only will you have to pay the money back, you will probably go to jail.” The line went dead and the music returned. Ryan stared through the windshield, and tried to process his defeat. The light turned green but he didn’t move. His frustration erupted with a roar, and he pounded his fists against the wheel, the dash, his thighs and the door. Becky held her hands out. “Babe, settle down. Please. You’re scaring me.” Ryan raised his arm as if to strike her. Becky squeezed against the door, one hand unlatching her seatbelt and the other tugging the door’s latch. A siren erupted behind them. Also published here.

The Last 3 Days (03): Decisions, Decisions

Day trading is like a fascinating game that rolls chess, poker, and gaming into an exciting package, adds the adrenaline rush of a roller coaster, and flavors it with a few dashes of lemon and a pinch of salt. Trading is a great struggle between illusion and reality, and in many ways, a cruel maze of tricks within tricks. However, if you are one of those who can create a plan, follow a strategy with strong discipline, handle your gambling demons, and accept trading as a profession, you can possibly make it... after 3-5 years of hard study. Trading attracts people who love challenges. However, only a lucky few can stand out of the crowd and make a fortune out of thin air. These people need to have a vast amount of experience, know how to keep their cool in the face of natural greed/fear impulses, and be savvy about the psychology of the masses. They need to gather some initial trading capital, but also have some money in reserve for critical situations and slump periods, because these are statistically proven to happen to all traders - it is just a matter of time and cardinality of trades. Knowing when not to trade, when to take a break and step back is a critical part of risk management. Most of all, you need a working trading system that suits your needs and trading style. If you have all of these, the last piece of the puzzle is to embrace the following tenets: “The goal of a good trader is not to make money; the goal is to trade well.” “Making money is more important than proving to yourself you were right.” “Your effectiveness in trading is proportionate to the hard effort you put into trading.” “The greatest lesson in making money is the experience gained from losing money.” “Try to enter as close as possible to the point where you were wrong. Never fight or question the price action.” “If you have a will to win, you will win. This article is split into two sections. The first part is a window to the life and mind of a master trader with more than 15 years of experience in both crypto-related and regular stock markets. This is the part of the knowledge sharing. The second part introduces you to basic trading products such as spot, swap, or margin. Part 1: What the life of a day trader is like: an interview with a successful cryptocurrency trader, who wishes to remain anonymous. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation for an interview. To kick this off, tell us something about yourself and what led you to trading crypto and the stock markets? I actually didn't get straight into trading at first. I was participating in classical hardware and cloud mining for cryptocurrencies, and then doing some minor investments, which led me into stock market trading. After that, back in 2016, I learned about crypto trading, and I can say it was a blessing, since I could use existing methods used in the stock market that worked pretty effectively in crypto, too. How did your journey start? My first experiences with trading were unusual. I made quite a bit of profit during several week-long periods without any knowledge but inevitably broke the streak then and suffered brutal losses. Many people quit after losses, but in your trading failures, you can gain plenty of experience to become a success. That's why it is important to journal your losses and find what connects them, fix the issue, and move forward. Many people have a great start when they start trading, but they get drunk on early success and crushed a few months later. How were your first trading months? I agree some people do get drunk on trading in crypto because it is such a speculative market, but in the stock market, it's a lot tougher. How many years do you think it could take for somebody to become a successful trader? It depends on the person and their lifestyle. The traits you grew up with can naturally make you a successful trader. So I don't think it's measurable in time, and it's really about who you are that determines how quickly you can adapt to the market. Consider thinking about one's lifestyle habits overall and make game-changing life adjustments such as tuning sleeping habits and adding regular workouts. Sometimes, it is not about trading only but more about building a better life. What was your breaking point from an average trader to a successful trader who can do whatever he wants? Discipline was the only thing I needed to learn. As soon as I realized the importance of discipline and persistence, I started to grow and become what I am today as a trader and as a human being. That and a lot of backtesting. I recommend this to all who are at their trading beginning to add a daily 30 minutes backtesting timeslot to their daily schedule if they really want to improve and boost their confidence when entering trade setups in real-time. What are the key aspects one needs to embrace to become a decent trader? Tough question, but again it can be summed up as discipline, patience, and persistence. Many people fail a couple of times and fall for what's called “revenge trading”, which means irrational trading after you lose, hoping you get lucky and win back the losses quickly. But as you can guess, they will only go further down the spiral most of the time. It is also critical to absorb a lot of knowledge that will help you to create your own opinion. When you start to listen to your inner voice while following the plan, you are on a good path. Only following others simply gets you nowhere in the long run. Then, hide your Profit and Loss (PNL) indicator. (PNL is the difference between profit and loss in trading.) Don't observe the money you may be gaining or losing; trade the setup, not the PNL. What are the most frequent trading demons that could possess a trader and cause account bankruptcy? FOMO (fear of missing out), greed, and not following your backtested trading plan. But if I were more specific, it would go like this: Exited too soon Exited too late Entered too soon Entered too late Taking too much risk Didn't take a planned trade because of self-doubt To fight these demons and get rid of them for good, avoid these pitfalls and give yourself a point for each successful and flawlessly executed trade. You are cured when you have five positive points at each of these. However, If you collect ten bad points for a single item mentioned below and you cannot stop, you are probably doomed to be a non-trader. (Screenshot from 2011 - explaining the Demon Finder principles) Feel free to make a copy of the above-mentioned GoogleDoc and use it. What about the path to becoming a trader? What milestone do we need to pass first before entering the Valhalla of trading? Always try to protect your capital. Trading is one of those professions where you need to have both skills and capital. Without money there is no trading. Also, you need some money to back yourself up. At least a month of paper trading to start. Then, develop 2-3 strategies and backtest them hard on at least 100 samples. Then start with 1% of your capital per trade. You can move this up to 3% per trade but only if your hit rate is about 60%. When you hit a sequence of 4 losses in a row and you feel that you are completly out of the zone, decerease the trading size from 1% to 0.5% until you will get like 2-3 winners that will get you back to the game mode. Of course, there are traders that have 85-90% hit rate. These guys trade big numbers and the only thing they need other than meeting trade conditions is to have enough liquidity. Trades like this usually have from 0.8 to 1.3 R (Risk/Reward Ratio) while not using much leverage. Personally, I found that around 2.5R is my mostly reached﻿ target. What method do you use for trading? I use many things now since I like the effect of pulling a lot of Aces from up my sleeve. I'm always trying to add essential books to my library and use something new here and there. Currently, I trade crypto using Elliott Wave (EW), Price Action (Pat) combined with some basic Candlestick knowledge, and some Moving Average (MA) strategies. But one needs to understand the smart money concepts to create a successful trading method. Some great sources are free to watch on YouTube, such as: PhotonTrading MentFX PhantomTrading In the stock market, it's a bit harder, so I use Volume Price Analysis (VPA), EW, Candlesticks, trendlines, and some chart patterns even though some of them are getting obsolete. It is also good to have a basic overview of the news that moves the market. However, I am not a “news” trader. The capability of reading the market bias is more important than the strategy used, though. Markets tend to seek liquidity that lies in zones of inefficiency. Markets return to these zones to balance themselves. Try to use monthly, weekly, and daily charts to spot those inefficiencies, such as fair value gaps (FVG), equal highs or lows, and other liquidity stores, such as liquidity pockets that form around multiple touched trendlines. When you mark these zones, try to imagine a path the market needs to accomplish to reach these areas before it changes direction or continues further after a pullback. What is your top advice for somebody who wants to be a great trader one day? Do it for yourself, not for the money. Really, the best thing about trading is it can teach you a lot about the values of life that will guide you to a better lifestyle. A better lifestyle then morphs you into a better version of yourself, and as the better version of yourself, you can make the people around you happier. Personally, I get a lot of these values from a fellow named Jim Rohn, who left his teachings for the world to learn from. He was an avid businessman and motivational speaker who amassed a vast fortune from nothing. Then also, don't try to make each day a trading day. Sometimes you can observe the market and not make a single trade since the stars don't align in your favor. Never trade when you don't have an edge. Trading is like poker with one critical difference. In a game of poker, you need to play each hand with cards you got. In trading, you can wait for the proper hand and then trade it perfectly. If you have a will to win, of course. What was your greatest win and your most "redonkulous" fail in trading? Well, my greatest win would have to be everything compounded that I've acquired over time, but the most in one single trade, if I can remember, is 2500% on a leveraged BTC position. I've lost it all before, so nothing can be more of a failure than that. But I believe that failures will give you the experience to succeed. Do you have any more secrets for being a good trader and long-term success? There aren't any secrets. All the information is out there, and most of it is free… However, you need to be passionate about what you do no matter what it is. If you don't like what you're doing, you're not going to be successful in it. That's what I believe, but I do have a passion for the art of trading. And yes, I do like the money that comes with it, but I love the ability to predict. It might seem cheesy, but it's like being a wizard and seeing into the future a little bit. Sure, sometimes I'm wrong, but those times I'm right are just great. Then, of course, learn to anticipate, not participate. Stop chasing pumps or the moves that are already on the go - good traders don't trade because something is moving. Your time to enter this was 5 minutes ago. You can jump into a trade for a quick grab and go, but if you stay in it, you are just sacrificing your capital for somebody else's success. Do the opposite. Start laughing at the chart and be glad that it is going so well without you. Then, prepare to trade the retest, since almost every good entry is retested at some point. Then, you have to learn to have patience with great trades, but also imperial impatience with trades that don't look good or that are eating through your stop-loss (SL) zone. Observe, adapt, execute within a few seconds. It's all about doing non-stop quick adjustments as the situation develops. And lastly, be aware that as a retail trader, you are easy prey for Market Makers (MM), when trading on emotions. To be successful in the market, learn to move with MM, resist their calls to sell, when all they are doing is selling a ticket to “destination fucked” for as many traders as possible before they do the counter move. Defeat the market by defeating your emotions and your urge to trade first. Then, be patient and execute as your backtested setup showed you. That's right. I agree. As an intelligent trader with experience under your belt, you agree that no guru is going to make you rich in the long run, is that right? Exactly. You need to love what you do and be ok with doing it on your own. Only then can you do it for endless hours and still feel full of life and motivation. Tell us about your average trading day. Well, it's just like any other person's day except for the fact that I don't drive to work. I walk across the hall to my office. I wake up at 5 in the morning, take a shower and get to the charts, watch pre-market for stocks, and check my overnight holds for crypto. Then, I do a few hours of trading, and sometimes I don't trade if the opportunity isn't there. I'm only really working for 1–2 hours, and I usually just read until something pops up. Some days I don't even bother checking and go out for the day. I like to keep my life balanced between work and play. What are the most inspiring books you have read? Trading or otherwise! Lots of reading and knowledge from people who have been successful in the field. As a kid, I read The Richest Man in Babylon by George Samuel Clason, and this was my gateway to more comprehensive books like Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas. For self-improvement, I really enjoyed Master Your Hidden Self by Serge Kahili King and The Truth by Neil Straus. If you could time travel and give advice to yourself before you started trading, what would it be? Don't wish for things but make sure you are doing the maximum to make it happen. And of course, enjoy what you do. If you don't enjoy what you do, it will be hard to get through the part in which you are not profitable, and you will mostly give up. And maybe also that the pain is temporary, while the pride is forever. Well said. The end of the knowledge-gathering section. The next part will introduce you to the world of Bitcoin DeFi trading products that could be considered as an alternative to other DeFi platforms such as Uniswap (Ethereum-based) or Centralized exchanges (which mostly require KYC and deposition of your assets to their control). Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an emerging financial technology based on secure distributed ledgers similar to those used by cryptocurrencies. The system removes the control banks and institutions have on money, financial products, and financial services. Decentralized finance uses the blockchain technology that cryptocurrencies use. A blockchain is a distributed and secured database or ledger. Applications called dApps are used to handle transactions and run the blockchain. Part 2: Find the proper trading playground So, did you enjoy the interview? Are you motivated to go explore, learn and participate in this high-risk/reward environment now? If the answer is yes, then I say good! The following will introduce you to other trading prerequisites and to common trading products. While studying, reading, observing, or doing courses is a vital part of learning, the most crucial part of the learning path of becoming a day trader is getting down in the figurative trenches, and trading—making decisions in real-time, writing notes, and analyzing your trades. To start your trading journey, use a browser-based technical analysis (TA) tool, such as , for paper trading or just as your "trading sandbox" for all your charting observations, and journal entries. TradingView Then, you will need a trading platform with an easy-to-use interface. Start by experimenting with small amounts of real assets. This is the best way to start, as you will experience what it’s like to trade with "real money," even if just a few dollars are on the table. A brief introduction to the world of cryptocurrency trading products or is where you buy an asset you believe in or have researched, with the plan of selling the asset for a profit in the future. 1) Swapping Spot buying allow you to Long and Short, which means you don't buy the asset per se, but put up collateral to take a position on market direction. You make money by forecasting the market's future price. Using leverage (1x-5x) can enhance your profit if you have a technical analysis or fundamental edge. 2) Margin trades NOTE : Very often, you do buy the underlying asset using margin trading. If you use bitcoin as collateral and buy bitcoin on margin, you hold that bitcoin that you purchased. But when bitcoin’s price rises in the future, it is highly likely you will have to sell it to pay back the loan (that you leveraged) but still hold onto the bitcoin 'profit'. It depends if you are trading derivatives or not. Lastly, 3) Perpetual Futures A perpetual futures contract—or perpetual swap—is somewhat similar to an ordinary futures contract in that it allows traders to speculate on the future price movements of cryptocurrencies. The core difference is that perpetual swaps do not have expiration dates. Traditional futures have expiration dates, which forces the price to track the spot price due to arbitrage between the contract and spot price, with the settlement date in view. You can take on the risks and rewards of the spot price movement without actually buying or selling the asset. You cover the risk by supplying margin assets that cover any losses you experience if the price moves against your position. Outro Good luck on your trading journey! Learn from your mistakes. Journal your trades and mostly your aftermath-like observations! If you have a will to win and keep improving, you are on the pathway to success! Don't get discouraged in the first 2-3 years of learning and trading since most traders made it into positive months after five years of active trading. So, don't think about you as a trade you will be in next year, but think about yourself as a trader who needs to be here five years from now, working hard to improve and adapt Remember: -> Stay patient. Also, . Find a trading community, be proactive, work hard and talk about your journey with others. If you simply don't know where to start, I can give you two tips: -> don't be afraid to ask for help 1) of 2) Monthly subscription-based (150 USD) trading group called with many live streams you can watch, many chat possibilities to ask and grow, and a lot of materials delivered by skillful traders you can use to your advantage. However, the best thing is their kind and friendly attitude. Optionally, signup to the Whop platform, from the space of which you can and get a 5 USD bonus. Free discord community Mindo Chroma join Chroma using the following link -> Be rigid in your rules but flexible with your expectations﻿. And lastly, if your trading portfolio is below 1000 USD, . Buy a book, watch a course, practice what you have learned, and journal what you found out. -> invest in yourself and your future success first Don't trade to make money; learn first how to survive, protect your capital, and trade well overall. - Mickey Maler See you in the trenches!

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The Establishment looks on cryptocurrency as a threat. Which it may be. To it. Not us. The status quo imbues the Establishment with power. Crypto really might be a threat to its dominance. I, an O.G. supply-side veteran of the Reagan Revolution, for one, hope so. You might too. Here’s why. Crypto isn’t a threat to the financial security and opportunity of us worker bees. To quote from a speech to the Government Blockchain Association last year by Dr. Scott Stornetta, the co-inventor of the blockchain, the blockchain provides for a: keynote "Government structure that does not rely on centralized authority and ‘might makes right.’ But, rather, a peer-to-peer system (talking about voting), set forth in a document to run algorithmically whose consensus outcome we would all accept." First, however, the future depends on whether the sector’s “bored apes”  activate IRL.  They could ape into the political process. And dominate. Our bored apes could just as easily miss the boat. The coal industry sat out the “war on carbon dioxide.” Irrespective of what those of us committed to smart energy and pristine ecology policy may think, Big Coal gave its political adversaries a free hand . to collapse their sector’s market cap by over 90%, from $62.5B to $4.59B Don’t think that such a collapse can’t happen to crypto. It easily could if those whose enthusiasm for crypto, and interests, do not engage meaningfully and savvily. The banking sector spends something like in lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions. $2B a year They don’t do this for the fun of it.  Cost of doing business. Crypto doesn’t need to be three-comma extravagant. That said, as of now crypto’s advocates barely register on Capitol Hill. The Hill is the fountainhead of all that comes out of DC, good, bad or ugly. The heck with ! Where’s Waldo Where’s crypto? Back to the bored apes. The governing trope of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a wildly successful (and valuable) NFT, as summarized by Rolling Stone: The project’s name, Bored Ape Yacht Club, represents a club for people who got rich quick by “aping in” — crypto slang for investing big in something unsure — and, thusly, are too bored to do anything but create memes and debate about analytics. The “yacht” part is coated in satire, given that the digital clubhouse the apes congregate in was designed to look like a dive bar in the swampy Everglades. Can we get the real life “bored apes” – fellows (rarely gals) who casually made a fortune in crypto – to meaningful engage in the real world of politics and policy? Or will they continue just hanging out in their virtual dive bar, creating memes and debating about analytics? If so, they may experience “easy come easy go” good and hard. Its purpose is to help Congress formulate legislation, and telegraph good regulatory policy, for crypto. This could allow the blockchain to help foster the kind of economic growth that America, and the world, enjoyed in the 1980s and 1990s. I recently joined the American Blockchain PAC as its senior counselor. We have not seen that kind of prosperity, sustained, since the turn of the millennium. The economy, for us worker bees, has been cruising at around half speed for a generation. Crypto, if Congress lets it, appears to have the potential to restore the sizzling economic growth rates of the Reagan and Clinton eras. Crypto, the infrastructure of Web3, could be "Supply Side 2.0!" Fast-growing equitable prosperity would not make the experts who’ve stewarded the sluggish 2000-2020 era look good. So, it’s not in their interest to do a . mea culpa We supply-siders (of which I am one of the last living O.G.s) were roundly ridiculed. But consider... Albert Einstein that compound interest was the strongest force in the universe. If he had, he would have deserved to be awarded a Nobel Prize in economics (had it existed in his lifetime) to accompany his Nobel Prize in physics. probably never said Why? Presidents Reagan and Clinton applied “supply-side economics.” That’s shorthand for policies of a stable dollar and lower marginal income tax rates. The Establishment fought it tooth and nail.  Nevertheless, we persisted. And prevailed. The American economy then grew at close to (and even above) 4%, real, a year, year after year.  Since Clinton left town economic growth has clocked in closer, on average, to an anemic . 2% a year The difference between 4% and 2% may seem a trifle. Yet as Napoleon once , “From triumph to downfall is but a step. I have seen a trifle decide the most important issues in the gravest affairs.” actually said A 2% shortfall compounded over 20 years leads to a stunning cumulative deficiency. US in Y2K was around $13T. real GDP It is now approaching $20T. Had real economic growth proceeded at the Reagan/Clinton 4% rate, America’s real . GDP would now be around $30T Assuming spending restraint, that could mean the federal budget, without raising taxes, would be at or close to surplus. Because of two decades of persistently anemic economic growth instead we have yawning federal deficits. The federal budget achieved a robust surplus under Clinton. Let’s make it happen again. At somewhere between 3% and 4% real annual GDP growth Social Security would be persistently solvent. Such is the power of general prosperity! Sustained optimal growth since Y2K would have meant that each of us, on average, would be making, and worth, close to 50% more than we currently are. I don’t know about you but a 50% pay hike would greatly enhance the quality of my life. Many Zoomers are or soon will be struggling with student debt. If they were destined to be making 50% more, they’d easily be able to pay that off. Not struggling. Prosperity is powerful! So, we’ve been through 20 years of the economic doldrums, reducing our cumulative incomes and net worths by as much as 50%. The good news is that we can make up for lost time pretty quickly with supercharged growth. The bad news is that our political and financial elites seem never to have heard the definition of insanity also frequently : “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” attributed to Einstein Call it insanity, but the governing elites seem determined to keep doing the same thing over and over no matter how mediocre the outcomes. Mediocre for us, not them. The compensation of the privileged elites is based in their social status. Not performance. They're crazy like a fox. Let me let you in on an open secret about America’s last bout of stagflation and the towering "Misery Index" with which we struggled in the 1970s.  The experts back then kept doing the same thing – raising taxes, sinking the dollar – over and over, making things worse. Along came maverick economists Robert Mundell (later awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics) and Arthur Laffer (later awarded the presidential medal of freedom), channeled by their acolyte Jude Wanniski. Together they inspired junior Congressman Jack Kemp who set the agenda for candidate, then president, Ronald Reagan. All went on to distinguished achievement. We supply-siders prescribed reversing the high-tax-rate-weak-dollar policy that all the experts kept prescribing, all the while jacking up the “Misery Index.” We were almost universally ridiculed. The Republican Establishment (in the person of one George H.W. Bush) called our prescription, as channeled by presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, “voodoo economics.”  The Democratic Establishment ridiculed supply-side as “trickle down.” On the day in November 1979 that Reagan declared for the presidency the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 814. As I write this it’s over 34,000. Per the , per capita real GDP then was $30,000/year.  Now it’s approaching $60,000. Real, inflation adjusted, per capita…. St. Louis Fed Some voodoo! Many have forgotten that the core of supply-side, as set forth in its 1975 charter document “ ,” was monetary, not tax, policy. The Mundell-Laffer Hypothesis—a new view of the world economy What became known as the “Laffer Curve” was a mere footnote. Monetary policy, while almost invisible, is powerful. Money is the invisible oxygen of the economy.  Bad money drives out good. The supply-side recipe for good money was put in place by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker with the backing of President Reagan. Good money proved a massive propellant for a generation of equitable prosperity. It worked! Until the policy wonks lost their way, again, consigning us to 20 years of economic mediocrity. Is crypto the most important monetary experiment in the world since Sir Isaac Newton, as Master of the Royal Mint, in 1717, ?  (Yes. The classical gold standard was a happy accident.  You could look it up.) accidentally created what would become the international classical gold standard Sir Isaac’s gold standard propelled the world to previously unknown heights of prosperity… for 200 years.  Then … we went off gold. Fast forward. In 1991, Dr. Scott Stornetta, now chairman of the American Blockchain PAC’s advisory board, in concert with Dr. Stuart Haber, invented the blockchain. Per , Coingeek Working at Bellcore Labs in the 1990s, scientists Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta were allowed to pick their own research projects. For Scott, a problem worth solving was the authentication of digital documents: how could you be sure the version you were looking at had not been altered from its original? The two worked as a team and were on the point of proving to themselves that the question of trust made the problem insoluble: there always needed to be some independent person or body to verify authenticity—but what if they were also part of a collusion? But then, Scott says, as he was waiting to go into a restaurant with his family, he had a brainwave. If you needed to keep adding extra trusted parties to vouch for the honesty of the existing players, then, logically, the list would expand infinitely until the whole world was required. And that still wouldn’t be enough. Scott’s insight was, as he explains it, ‘I realised that if you turn that upside down and created a system of interlinked documents with essentially everyone as a witness, then you had, in fact, solved the problem.’ Their seminal paper was cited three times (out of eight citations) in Satoshi’s famous white paper creating Bitcoin. Bitcoin now has a market cap, as of this writing, of $763B.  Not shabby. After bitcoin, in blockchain’s cryptocurrency sector, came Ethereum. Per its , Vitalik Buterin conceived Ethereum after having been “nerfed to tears” in World of Warcraft. Per Owen S. Good at : secret origin story Polygon “’I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell ,’ Vitalik Buterin, the programmer who developed Ethereum’s original concept in late 2013, says in a bio hosted at about.me . ‘I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit.’ Buterin’s about.me bio created a social media stir this weekend when Thomas Shadwell, a Google engineer tweeted: “Buterin expressed broad suspicion of corporations in that Wired profile … telling the publication, ‘I saw everything to do with either government regulation or corporate control as just being plain evil. And I assumed that people in those institutions were kind of like Mr. Burns, sitting behind their desks saying, ‘Excellent. How can I screw a thousand people over this time.’” … Buterin conceived of the platform that would become Ethereum in late 2013. Today ETH has a market cap of $362M. Add that to Bitcoin’s and, to paraphrase a phrase attributed to the late, great , “a trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Sen. Dirksen Many have gotten rich from “magical internet money.” Fluke? Cryptocurrency is still in its adolescence.  The eldest of the cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, just turned 13.  To again quote from Dr. Stornetta’s keynote: Don't confuse the early birth pangs of a technology for its eventual potential. There's a substantial amount of coverage negatively inclined about blockchain and related technologies, much of it based on actual fact. But don't miss the forest for the trees, to switch the metaphor. A lot of these things are being worked out. I talked about Bitcoin. I talked about Ethereum. And then I talked about a whole host of innovators to follow. Just because something was a flaw of a particular earlier stage version doesn't mean that it is an inherent flaw of the blockchain concept. Back in the early days of the internet notwithstanding stories about “the dark web” and other scary fairy tales,  the internet, and the Worldwide Web, benefitted greatly from intelligent Congressional legislation and attendant light touch regulation. Imagine if Congress instead had cracked down rather than legislating benignly?  Oppressive legislation would have driven trillions of dollars of wealth and hundreds of thousands of great jobs offshore to balmier legal climates. That would have impoverished America, denying us our current position on the commanding heights of digital technology and badly damaging American prosperity. Nevertheless ... crypto has enemies in the national capital. Will those who have made their fortunes in crypto now step up to defend their interests, becoming consequential IRL, championing the means to create widespread prosperity and the vast opportunity that crypto portends? Or will they ape out? Will at least one “whale” (urban dictionary slang for crypto billionaire) – or perhaps a small syndicate of “orcas” – decide that it would be more interesting to lead the world into a new golden age of unparalleled general prosperity than to hang out, bored, in a virtual dive bar? Stay tuned. +++ Thanks to HackerNoon's excellent Editor and Marketing Campaign Lead Ellen Stevens.

"The Establishment looks [at] cryptocurrency as a threat"

"El Establecimiento ve [en] la criptomoneda como una amenaza"

"L'Establishment considère [at] la crypto-monnaie comme une menace"

"इस्टैब्लिशमेंट [at] क्रिप्टोकरेंसी को खतरे के रूप में देखता है"

「エスタブリッシュメントは仮想通貨を脅威と見なしている」

"O establishment vê a criptomoeda como uma ameaça"

"Tổ chức coi [xem] tiền điện tử như một mối đe dọa"

“机构将 [at] 加密货币视为威胁”

Getting featured in trusted outlets helps to build a personal brand, sell more, or find investors. Almost everyone wants to see their name or company in the media. But what is the best way to communicate with the editorial team? It is often a mystery. Just offer an exclusive story, come up with the requested commentary speedy, and stop calling after every release. Helping the journalist is easy. These guys get thousands of emails, ignore weird messages, and aren't surprised by almost whatever comes their way. But if the PR people overdose, journalists might be hurt deeply. Pissing off a journalist is harder. Luckily for us, Twitter was created for sharing upsetting cases among other things. Let's use it to take look at the workday troubles of editorial team members. Here is the selection of infuriating PR people phrases: 1. Please, do reply, I'm not asking for too much! Chris Stokel-Walker, who writes for BBC News, New York Times, and Wired, revealed a message from a PR person that angered him: https://twitter.com/stokel/status/1365196899570098178?s=20 A pitch in PR is a short letter in which the author tries to engage the journalist with news or an idea for a story. Chris adds up sharing that he receives 15 new emails per hour and literally cannot reply to each of them: https://twitter.com/stokel/status/1365236941764112385?s=20 If Chris spends only 3 minutes replying on each pitch, he will get back to everyone after only 2 years of 12-hour uninterrupted effort. And that's not counting the new emails that will come in during that time. Journalists' answers are rare, but not because they are greedy. They are actually human beings with a limited amount of time per day. Imagine you have written to a journalist. You check your mail several times waiting for a reply. If in a few days (3-7) there is no word, you can send a follow-up. This is another letter in addition to the previous one. It must contain new information: numerical data, a reference, or a new asset. If the journalist does not show any sign of interest after this, just back off. What is the best thing to do? 2. So... When the story will come out? Wudan Yan, a journalist who writes for the New York Times, asks not to be questioned about publication deadlines: https://twitter.com/wudanyan/status/1364273508839161857 The editorial boards of major media outlets may employ full-time journalists, contributors, columnists, and freelance journalists. They all write articles. Also, there are editors. These people check the content and decide if and when stories should be published. This process is not up to others who write. Another journalist, Meehika Barua, who writes for Vogue Magazine, Guardian, and Washington Post, commented on the previous tweet. She implores PR people to stop doing that: https://twitter.com/meehikabarua/status/1364561027799543808 Imagine you want to know when the article comes out. Keep in mind how newsrooms are set up and wait. Don't make the person get distracted by constant publication date queries. If you ask that often, the story will probably come out anyway. But the journalist will not consider you as a brilliant and nerve-saving source for the next article. What's the best thing to do? 3. I'll be sitting with you on the call with the CEO Whoever you are at the company, you don't need to be on the call with the reporter and the CEO if you're not the CEO. Journalist Sharon Green, who writes for The Age, Herald Sun, and Bride magazine in Australia, doesn't understand why third parties want to be present for interviews: https://twitter.com/SharonJGreen/status/1364467135502688259?s=20 In the comments to the tweet, colleagues agree that this feels like unnecessary micromanagement and there is no chance for a good story to come out after such communication. Imagine you want a journalist to invite your company's CEO for an interview. Compose a pitch, introduce the CEO and give the journalist a personal email for the direct approach. Say that you are always available and willing to help if needed. And don't get involved. What's the best thing to do? 4. Oh, personal encrypted mail. I'll write to make sure a journalist notices! Better not to. Unfortunately, the proof tweet of CBS News journalist was deleted shortly after publication, but the respectfully blurred screenshot is enough to get the idea: Journalists have multiple mailboxes. PR people can accidentally or purposefully find not the one intended for the job. There are even special tools to hunt those personal addresses. Using them is taboo. No one will be happy to see a work-related query in a place where it is less expected. Imagine you need to find a journalist's email. Research the author's profile on the media outlet. Google first and last name and look for a personal blog or website. Visit the Twitter profile and check the header. More often than not, one of these places will tell you which email or social network works best for a journalist to receive pitches. Only use it. What's the best thing to do? 5. I'm so sorry about the accident with the horrific injuries. By the way, I could write a column about it! In late February, famous American golfer Tiger Woods rolled over in his SUV and was seriously traumatized. He had several open fractures and serious foot injuries. All the world's media, including CNN, BBC News, and the New York Times, reported on the accident. Later that evening, Ross Andersen, Deputy Editor of major media outlet The Atlantic, shared a controversial pitch: https://twitter.com/andersen/status/1364310198135971849 Ross refrained from commenting except for a brief sigh of shock and disappointment. In the comments to the tweet, his colleagues wrote that it was immoral and disgusting. Imagine you want to get published when you have something to say about breaking and loud news. Keep humanity and ethics first in mind. Be especially careful with sensitive topics such as in the example above. In the U.S., there is a term an ambulance chaser for lawyers who chase ambulances and want to quickly turn an injured person into a client. Don't become a PR ambulance chaser. What's the best thing to do? How to find such Twitter treasures yourself: I found all the examples for this article through typing searches for bad PR pitch, the worst pitch of the day, PRs please stop, and PRs don't. Thousands of similar posts can be found by two hashtags: #PRfail and #PRfails. If you subscribe to the tags, new tweets from journalists will appear in your feed even if you're not following them. That's handy. When working with journalists, awareness of mistakes and embarrassing situations is just as important as monitoring successful PR cases. When you reach out to a journalist, remember: you will get either luck or experience. Even if one day you find your pitch with your name blurred in one of the #PRfails tweets, it's an experience. You need to take a lesson from this, shift your focus from self-promotion to genuinely helping the journalist, and move on. And, please, always prioritize empathy, sincerity, and caring.

5 Warranted Ways to Annoy a Journalist with Your Email

Seven steps for planning, approaching and delivering bad news in the workplace We’ve all been there: You are about to say something that is going to make the other person feel . You see your conversation partners expression turn to shock, and then sadness. You try to make them feel better, but it just feels like you are making things . Most of us have had an experience like that in our lives, especially when . terrible worse breaking bad news In work and life, you may be required to give some information which will on somebodies life. In the workplace, examples can include things like giving negative feedback, telling somebody you can’t pay them as much, or that you need to lay off staff. negatively impact We are by how we handle these conversations, and when performed poorly, they risk doing more harm than good. Even the most professional of bad-news givers like physicians struggle with this. defined It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way to break bad news without creating emotional scar tissue. Most people are never enough to receive training on how to perform this tricky skill. lucky In this post, you will : learn how to How to plan and structure a bad news conversation flow How to communicates effectively without being overwhelming Why your approach should be professional but empathetic How to work through emotions and plan for resolution As a general disclaimer, techniques that leverage can be easily and need to be applied sincerely. Help make the world a better place — . emotional intelligence abused practice beneficence, not maleficence I really need to know now — just tell me For those of you breaking bad news in a few minutes with no time to prepare, the following flowchart is for you. Above all else, just remember to know what topics you need to cover and be empathetic to the level of information required and any questions asked. The Seven Steps I use for breaking bad news For those of you willing to go a little deeper and build this conversation muscle, the following steps are for you. Step 1: Be prepared or prepare to fail Unlike most discussions, a bad new conversation has . Any mistakes carry higher risks for emotionally and psychologically harming someone. high stakes Here are the things you need to think about before having the discussion: Identify what information needs to be covered Set enough time aside for the conversation so that you won’t be disturbedPick a location that ensures privacy Decide if anyone else needs to be in attendance How well do you know this person? Think about the best way to introduce yourself and make opening statements Step 2: How ready are they for bad news? After making your introductions, you want to aim to understand how much the recipient knows already. Start by the topic of the bad news and follow with an . Examples include: introducing open-ended question “How do you feel your performance has been in the last few months?” “Are you aware of the organisational changes in the company?” “We want to talk about topic X. What do you know about it?” “How does topic X make you feel?” Take note of they respond and try to between the lines: how read What was their tone of voice? What language was used or avoided? What was their general attitude like? You can use this to help you for bad news and tailor your response later. gauge preparedness Be respectful if you find the recipient is not interested in exploring their views on the topic. This usually happens if they know bad news is coming. In this situation, aim to find out what they would like to get out of the conversation. Step 3: Give A Warning Shot One of the worst things you could do is surprise a person with bad news especially if they think everything is fine. Its cruel, erodes trust and is entirely preventable. The gives the recipient time to and prepare for taking in information. You can deliver this by simply stating bad news is coming: warning shot mentally adjust “I’m afraid that I have some bad news” “Well, the situation does appear to be more serious than that. I have some bad news to discuss with you.” And now pause. . Like before, take note of body language and any verbal responses. If there is silence, be comfortable with it for a few seconds, and prepare for the next step. Let that information sink in Step 4: How much would they like to know? Before providing further information, it’s worth asking the recipient actually wants to know. Unless you are a mind reader, chances are you don’t know, and it’s not smart to assume. After all, it’s their bad news day, not yours. how much information Think about it as if you were in their shoes. Would you want to know all the details of how this happened? Do you need some time to process this information? Perhaps you just want to get to the practical next steps and not bogged down in the ‘why this happened’. Aim to ask open questions like: “Would you like me to tell you the details of the news?” “Are you the kind of person who likes to know exactly what’s going on?” Try to which can shut down conversations like: avoid leading (closed) questions “You don’t want to be bothered with the details, do you?” to their response will help guide you when giving more information next. Listening Step 5: Giving Knowledge and Information Having now got a feel of what is essential to discuss, refer back to your original list of topics. Think about which points are most relevant and how much detail you actually need to disclose. Approach this from their starting point. What state of mind are they in right now? Progress in providing information using the following strategies: Use non-technical and straightforward words Reinforce any correctly stated information If appropriate, use similar language as they have Give information in small chunks Check in to make sure you are explaining things clearly — “Could you just tell me the general drift of what I have been saying? I want to make sure I have explained things clearly.” Most people receiving bad news are understandably upset. It’s important to remember that in this state it’s unlikely they are taking in any information you are saying. Strategies that can help here are: Offering to clarify any informationInviting questions * Repeating important pointsListening to concerns * Looking for buried questions in responses Step 6: How Are They Feeling? A person's response can vary from silence to distress, denial, crying and even anger. It’s tempting to provide calming words or try to comfort, but . Sometimes we inadvertently do this help make ourselves feel less uncomfortable, but it risks doing long-term harm. don’t fall into the trap of giving false hope You can be most helpful by just being very human about the situation: * Acknowledge the feelings the person is going through, that you understand this is very upsettingRespond empathetically * Ask them what they are thinking or feeling * Don’t be afraid to ask if you are unclear what the person is expressing If there is a natural pause, and the response is silence, don’t worry. We humans are very uncomfortable with silence and feel tempted to rush in with words, . Allow up to seven seconds to allow the recipient time to express any feelings and worries — watch and listen. but silence is essential Step 7: Strategy & Summary Before ending the conversation, By providing a plan of action, recipients are less likely to get anxious and panic. it’s essential to acknowledge their biggest anxieties and explain what the next steps look like. Try to do the following: * Highlight any significant issues from the recipient’s problem list * Identify that you understand their specific concerns * Invite questions and reassure them that they can come back later with questions later — maybe even set up another meeting End the conversation by summarising the discussion and if available, providing resources of support. Secret Bonus Step 8: Check in with yourself Having these conversations can be and produce a lot of personal . It’s crucial to regularly check-in with yourself afterwards and take the time to replenish your emotional empathy. emotionally draining guilt * How are you feeling right now? * Do you regret anything you said or how you said it? * Is there anything you missed? * Is there anything you need to follow up? Techniques like mindfulness and journaling can help, but I find it with friends and colleagues is most therapeutic. just talking about Conclusion Breaking bad news is really hard, but now you have the tools to become so much better. Smarter, empathetic discussions have the power to improve the lives of those around you. Many of the techniques are transferable, and I have found practising them has not only enhanced my experiences at work but also helped my personal life. So go out there and practice what resonated with you here. Help build a while also helping . better world yourself “No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.” Sophocles, Antigone

How to Break Bad News in the Workplace

Get your skin in the game The Stock market can seem like an intimidating place: expert investors bidding up prices in anticipation of new trends, market analysts flaunting around their indecipherable jargon, important people making even more important calls. It all seems very complex and reserved to insiders. But it doesn’t have to be. Potential investors are all shackled by anxiety: in the stock market, according to Bankrate, a financial advice website. Only one in three millennials is currently investing Fear takes many shapes and forms. For many it’s the “possibility of a collapse”; for some, it’s the lack of professionals they could entrust their savings with; for many others, it’s the simple question: “How do I begin?” And that’s the pivotal point: many want to get their skin in the game, but just don’t know how. That’s why in this article we’ll cover the basic two ways of and, later on, strategies to help the newcomers out. investing trading Passive vs Active trading strategies Before you spend all of your savings on a Warren Buffet outfit and go storm the NASDAQ stock exchange, you have to sit down and choose the appropriate strategy. Everyone knows to buy low, sell high — but there’s more to it. Broadly speaking, there are two types: and . Passive Active investing Passive investing Passive investors hold on to their assets despite the up-and-down price rollercoaster — it’s all about the long-term outcome for them. They usually invest in or and are not full-time occupied with trading throughout the day. mutual funds index funds Also known as a strategy, passive investing means that investors seek to time the market perfectly or profit from short-term price fluctuations — the assumption is that the market will generally deliver positive returns over a long time horizon. buy-and-hold do not Let’s look at an example. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index — one of the most widely known of its kind — has been jumping up and down throughout the year (see graph above). But its overall value has nevertheless grown by 8.65% since the beginning of the year. Passive investors have a relatively low risk-tolerance, and think they are unlikely to out-smart the market. Their profits are thus moderate, but so are their potential losses. They seek to avoid the broker fees associated with constant buying and selling. Some collect from firms. Most spread their risk across multiple industries. dividends Active investing Active investors are more risk tolerant. They buy and sell in a time frame of a few hours for quick profits by exploiting short-term price fluctuations. In other words, they’re the ones that jump on the ship when the prices go up, and they jump out once they begin to plummet. securities The potential returns are high — some investors bring home six-digit earnings. But equally large is the possibility of burning all of your savings because of a few mistakes. Because the fees for buying/selling are relatively high and the stock prices usually don’t swing much — active traders rely on a large volume of trades to make a buck. That also means the assets they invest into must be (quickly exchangeable back to hard currency). That’s why you won’t see day-traders buying up works of 19th century French photographers — they simply couldn’t sell them on the market quickly enough. liquid In the past, active trading strategies were reserved to professional traders, who had and in-house (to lower commission fee) and could cope with high-frequency trading. brokerage But with real-time market data available to everyone — there is a whole plethora of online tools that offer opportunities for any individual to become an active trader. Active trading strategies Active trading is speculative in nature. Investors thus depend on some sort of market strategy — a type of active trading they believe will help them beat the market. Some are indeed superstitious: In one of the episodes of a famous American sitcom “Friends”, Monica, one of the main characters, notices a stock with her initials (MEG) and decides to try her luck as an active trader. Her strategy, obviously, doesn’t hold. Other methods are built on rigorous technical analysis and predictive methods. The following are only the most common ones. Trading on the News Markets rally up and down constantly for a number of reasons. It might be a corporate scandal, an announcement that central bank is raising interest rates or a speech delivered by a country’s leader. As the name implies, traders seek to exploit these news. Day trading Now synonymous with the definition of “Active trading”, Day trading is essentially a strategy to only trade securities on the same day. The stocks you bought are sold within the same day, and no position is held overnight. Positions trading Positions trading is the method of “riding the trend”. By using longer term charts in combination with other predictive methods, position traders seek to jump on the “wave” and benefit from both the up and down of market movements. Swing Trading Swing traders are the “scramblers” that get in once some trend breaks. At that point, there is some volatility in the market — the ups and downs become far more likely. Swing trading is a form of art that seeks to capture profits from those small short-term swings. Scalping Scalping is a method of profiting from thousands of tiny movements in price based on charts and one-minute charts. The strategy involves exploitation of various price gaps usually caused by tick bid-ask spreads . Short selling (Shorting) Excluding the of how it is actually done, shorting is essentially an investment on the premise that a stock or a whole market will go down. Numerous have been made about it — it is perhaps the most sinister way to invest, but, in a crisis period, potentially the most profitable. technical element movies . Other notable mentions that didn’t make it into the list are range trading , pairs trading and momentum trading A few final words Time is your friend in the stock market. The earlier you get started, the earlier you figure things out — the better your returns will be. The amount of money in the market can seem way above your pay grade — New York Stock Exchange alone had a market capitalization of US$21.3 trillion in June 2017 — but, in reality, you can begin passive investing into index funds with as little as $5. You don’t have to take your whole savings on a roller coaster ride, but it is important to put a portion of your income into stock market. You’re better off guarding against money-eroding inflation and to saving up for your retirement. Arm yourself with knowledge and storm the market. Find more useful tips and comments on new and improved . We always ready to answer your questions! ORCA Telegram group

Roller Coaster Ride: Stock market Trading Strategies for Newcomers

Nicolas Cole Instagram I have written over 400 columns for . Inc Magazine Before I landed my own column, with several million views on my work (this was back in 2015). My “claim to fame” was the fact that I had reached Top Writer status in less than 9 months of writing on the platform, had over a dozen of my articles go viral (100,000 to 1,000,000+ views each), and had been republished by just about every major publication on the Internet: , and —to name a few. I was a Top Writer on Quora TIME, Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, Slate, Observer, Thought Catalog, Hacker Noon, Medical Daily, The Chicago Tribune Inc Magazine During the second half of 2015, there was a 6-month period during wherein was republishing one of my Quora answers . Inc Magazine every single week I had found my stride as a writer focused on personal development—and took notice. Inc When I was offered my own column with , I turned the afterburners on and doubled my output. Inc Magazine I was already writing an Answer per day on Quora (which I deliberately structured as a full article). But instead of replacing Quora with , I worked the night shift writing a column per day there as well. Inc 1 month later, I was one of ’s most popular writers (and one of their only paid writers). And in 2017, I was named one of their Top 30 columnists for the entire publication. Inc Magazine There are very few columnists that write as much as I do. Most people don’t believe me when I say I ( ). write close to 10,000 words per day while running a company To me, writing is a sport as much as it is a form of art. I view the craft the same way I viewed hockey as a teenager, eagerly chasing the dream of one day making it to the NHL. I do not subscribe to the mantra that . I think that’s a cop out. If one is truly a writer, they write regardless of whether they feel like writing or not—because writing, just like everything else in life, requires practice in order to master. one writes when one is inspired When I became a columnist for Inc Magazine, I saw it as a venue for me to express my thoughts and opinions with the world. What I found instead was a world of press pitches and marketers that wanted what I had—a column. Within days of my being listed on the site, my inbox started to flood with pitches from PR companies. And aside from the fact that half of them couldn’t even spell my name correctly (there is no “h” in Nicolas), I had no interest in writing about the “revolutionary ” some up-and-coming company claimed they had. technology What separates me from a lot of other people in the business world is that I am not a marketer. I am a writer. I know what people want to read because I . I know what works because I publish and iterate, publish and iterate. I know what resonates because I work hard to share who I am as a person, human to human, through my writing. And I know how to get exposure because I take the time to learn what it is people want to read—and why. write So, as someone who has written thousands of articles on the Internet, I want to pull back the curtain and debunk some myths about getting exposure onto your written content. 1. Writing for (or being featured in) a major publication does not mean “millions of views.” Not a single day goes by where I don’t hear someone make the Hail Mary statement that if only their company could be mentioned by a major publication—then they’d get the exposure they’re looking for. People love data, so let me give you some data. Of the 409 columns I’ve written for , only 44 of them exceeded 10,000 views in 2017. Inc Magazine 28 of them were 10,000 to 19,000 views. 5 were 20,000 to 29,000 views. 4 were 30,000 to 39,000 views. 2 were 40,000 to 49,000 views. 2 were 50,000 to 59,000 views. 1 was 90,017 views. 1 was 128,041 views. And 1 was 133,000 views. Out of my top 10 performing columns, 9 had to do with personal development. The 1 that had to do with a company was about Facebook. You’re not Facebook. 2. Social content is still king. Side by side, my column has out performed my viewership on Quora or Medium. Inc Magazine never once Big publications are idolized because people assume that “70 million unique monthly readers” means that every single piece of content receives 70 million views. That’s like saying in a city of 70 million people, everybody knows everybody. What most people don’t know is that while the entire site might yield tens of millions of views, the site is also publishing thousands of articles per month (hundreds every day). On my best month writing for Inc Magazine, I cracked 300,000 views. I wrote 30 columns that month. In comparison, 300,000 views is considered a weak month for me on Quora and Medium—where I consistently average closer to ~400,000+ views month over month. And when I was writing original content every single day on Quora, I averaged over a million views per month for a year straight. If you’re publishing content on your company blog (or worse, a single byline in a major publication) and expecting millions of views to appear overnight, you’re in for a rude awakening. The single best place to write on the Internet right now is Quora and Medium. 3. People do not read articles that pamper a company. They just don’t. Unless I was talking about Facebook or Amazon or Tesla in the news, all of my most popular articles have been devoid of a company mention. All. Reason being, nobody reads an entire piece talking about how great someone is, how “game-changing” their unique ( ) approach to their industry is and thinks, “Wow, I have to share this with all of my friends!” it’s not unique I know what people want to read, and I know because I have written and tested and iterated and learned and refined and delivered. I know what it takes to write a viral article because . 99.99999% of marketers and PR companies cannot say the same—and yet, every single day, another business gets sold on the pipe dream that from a columnist on a popular site will drive significant ROI for their business. I frequently write viral articles a single mention The average column on a major publication barely receives 1,000 views. Let me say that again: The average column on a major publication barely receives 1,000 views. The ones that “go viral” only fall into three categories: They mention an insanely successful company (Apple). They talk about a controversial and trending topic. They are focused around personal development/life advice. And in the off-chance your company gets a soft mention in a viral articles ( that’s the one part of the article nobody is paying any attention to. “According to company, 49% of Millennials actually hate their jobs…”), 4. Building consistent exposure online requires 2 things nobody wants to do. Be patient. Be consistent. There is no other way around it. You can’t buy a real audience. You can’t cheat a real audience. And you certainly shouldn’t expect a real audience after your company writes 3 blog posts. It astounds me how many PR companies and agencies promise eons of exposure, when they can’t even get exposure for themselves. I don’t know about you, but I would have a hard time getting my hair cut by a bald barber. marketing As someone who has racked up 50,000,000+ views on my written content, who has gone viral dozens of times, and who has had work published in just about every major publication on the Internet, . I am telling you from first-hand experience that nobody wakes up to that overnight The rewards I have seen for myself as a writer and for my business were not paid for (I’ve never spent a dollar on PR or advertising). They were . earned And that’s not to say you can’t earn it too. Because you can. Just don’t expect it to happen overnight. 5. If you truly want to be a thought leader, you have to be willing to say what nobody else wants to say. Read enough leadership articles, and there is only 1 thing that separates the stuff worth reading from all the rest. Vulnerability. There are thousands upon thousands of companies in the world. Thousands upon thousands of founders and CEOs. Thousands of writers, thousands of “industry experts,” thousands of everybody, everywhere. So, what does the Internet sound like when they all say, at the exact same time, “Being an effective leader is all about open communication.” Noisy. The Internet sounds very, very noisy. A thought leader isn’t the person on the front of the magazine, or the lucky name drawn out of a hat and quoted in a column. A thought leader isn’t the person with the biggest ad spend, or necessarily even the one with the keynote speech. Those are all just stages to stand upon. What makes someone a thought leader is what they say—not where they say it. Again, speaking from my own experiences here, I would like to share a few of my most popular articles on the Internet: 2M+ views: 7 crucial lessons people often learn too late in life. (This piece has been reposted on Business Insider 3 times now. The first time it racked up 1.5M views. The second, 200,000+ views. And now ~100,000 for the 3rd time.) 1M+ views: Is it possible to change yourself so much that you no longer recognize yourself? . 800,000+ views: How to become more confident 783,000+ views: How to stop being average. 507,000+ views: What it feels like to go from unattractive to attractive . 425,000+ views: A stranger I met once that changed my life forever. 412,000+ views: Why having everything you want won’t make you happy. There are lots more, but they all follow a similar theme. Every single one of my most popular articles plays at what I like to call “The Golden Intersection.” I am answering the reader’s question—providing them value. I am telling them a story, my unique and personal story, which helps them relate to me as the author. That’s it. What makes a great piece of written content online requires a conflict. The reader wants to know the journey you’re about to take them on. What was the challenge? What were you afraid of? What was holding you back? And how did you overcome that challenge and make your way safely to the other side? Again, most people (in any industry) don’t want to do this. And the reason is because they think they can achieve the same result (“Look how impressive I am”) without having to reveal the vulnerable part. But the irony is the more open and honest you are, the more people will relate to you, hear you, and ultimately share your message with others. But trying to prop yourself up behind this facade that you have it all together, you’ve had it all together, and you’ve never once sat in front of an obstacle and thought, “Shit, I have no idea how I’m going to overcome this,” is a lie—to yourself, and to your readers. always Anyone can write something thoughtful, meaningful, and exposure-worthy on the Internet. Literally anyone. In order to do that, however, you have to be willing to put your audience before yourself. Some people call that “effective marketing.” I call it Writing. Thanks for reading! :) Want to learn how I built my Personal Brand online, attracting over 50 million readers? Click here to take the free Personal Branding email course! Want to work with Digital Press? Check us out !

5 Myths About Exposure I Learned By Writing 400+ Columns For Inc Magazine

Lambda functions are a truly awesome bit of , if you haven’t read up about my theory that and more specifically AWS Lambdas are going to take over the world in 2018 then check it out here: technology serverless _Serverless computing is a fairly new concept that has somewhat exploded in terms of popularity. This is in-part due to…_hackernoon.com How Serverless Computing will Change the World in 2018 It got a couple of readers and somehow got tagged as one of the most read medium articles on the 1st of January… must have been a slow news day I guess. What Can Serverless Really Do Though? It’s all very well me evangelising these Serverless technologies, but it doesn’t show you the true potential of the technology. So, in a bid to show you what is truly possible with Lambda’s I thought I would put together this how to guide and show you what could really be done with the tech! Introducing UpTimeGirl — My Latest Million Dollar Startup In this article I am going to be building a Website uptime monitor that will allow people to fill in a form and it will create a new lambda function auto-magically for you that will check the health of your site every 15 minutes and send you an email should one of these sites die. I’m going to be focusing more on the Lambda-oriented concepts and brushing over things such as IAM and setting up of roles. Every good startup needs a catchy name so we are going to be calling this the website monitoring service as a bit of a hommage to Billy Joel? UpTimeGirl Disclaimer: If you do make a million dollars from this idea I expect at least a beer!! Requirements As this is a software project, it needs a set of requirements, otherwise how will we be able to define any form of success from our project? As I want to build a world-class multi-million dollar monitoring solution for all of my sites I want it to have the following requirements: It MUST never go down itself. It MUST be cheap to run. We need to maximise profits of course. It MUST notify me whenever a site goes down, either through text or email It MUST scale to hundreds, if not thousands of site. A fairly decent set of requirements for a project that we’ll be putting together in less than half an hour I think you’ll agree. The Frontend The Frontend will be a simple VueJS application that will feature both an input box which will take new sites to monitor and a list of tiles showing the websites registered already. — I’m currently trying to learn it and thought why not? Why VueJS? This will just be a very simple frontend that will look like this: If you want the source code for this you’ll be able to find it in my github repo here: https://github.com/elliotforbes/uptimegirl I’m currently just using a very simple request in order to trigger the Python API which constructs the lambda functions. HTTP GET The API The API will be written in Python and will use the Boto3 AWS SDK to enable me to interact with the AWS’ various APIs. This API will essentially take in a and the and it will dynamically generate and create a new Lambda function based off these parameters. URL time_period Disclaimer: I can guarantee this isn’t production ready. In this chunk of code we have created a simple in Python 3.6. This will feature 2 main endpoints, a get_functions endpoint and a create_lambda_function endpoint that can be accessed through and respectively. aiohttp REST API /funcs /create In the function we simply return a json response containing all of the functions currently registered in our Lambda Service. get_functions() The function is where it gets interesting. In this we create a dictionary object of all the environment variables we wish to pass in. In this case we are just passing in the that we wish to monitor. In order to somewhat ensure unique function names we then create an alphanumeric function name from the URL with a little bit of regex magic. create_lambda_function() URL After we do this we then create our dictionary object which will simply pass in our file as bytes. We then pass both the dict and the dict into the AWS’ function and this should hopefully create our lambda function for us. Code lambda.zip env code create_function After this we then try and attach a CloudWatch Event trigger to our newly created lambda function by using the function and passing in the name of the 15-minute rule that we’ve already defined in the AWS console and the list of targets, in this case a single target. put_targets() Once this has all happily ran we then return a simple non-json(I know… sorry) response. In the github repo I’ve included a dockerfile that can be run and deployed on AWS’ ECS should you wish to go down that route, for now I’m keeping it all on localhost because there is still clearly a lot more development work to be done. The Lambdas The Lambda functions that we will be dynamically creating will essentially try to grab any URL that we pass into it using a simple request. We’ll then run this every 15 minutes based of the CloudWatch Event rule that we are using to trigger every function. GET Should any of these scheduled requests happen to fail then it will automatically publish an event to SNS which will then drop an email and send a text message to whoever is subscribed to that SNS. The Code The code for our lambda function is incredibly simple. All it does is try to send a request to a URL which it picks up from an environment variable that is set when we dynamically create the function. If this request fails then it throws an exception. GET If we wanted our system to notify us for any error then we could do this one of two different ways. We could either extend our Lambda function and add the code necessary for it to publish to an SNS topic or we could set up an alert on CloudWatch whenever an error is reported by one of our Lambda functions throws an error. For simplicity’s sake we’ll go for the latter: And boom! We have an alerting system that will email us whenever our system is down. The list of people subscribed to this SNS topic could be modified dynamically by the frontend but we need to leave some work for us to do once we get past the first funding round for our startup. We Are In Production! In less than half an hour we’ve been able to successfully construct an entire monitoring solution using a series of lambda functions that is now live and in production. It is not only incredibly resilient, it also scales to potentially thousands of sites and the cost for doing this is minimal due to the very small nature of the lambdas we are creating. The frontend and API orchestrating the addition of new sites through the creation of new lambdas hasn’t been deployed to ECS in this article as I felt that’s slightly out of scope, but there is a Dockerfile there should you want to make a start on this. If you were feeling really meta you could totally serve the frontend application from a Lambda function and front it using the API gateway and then dice up the Python API into a series of Lambda endpoints, but I’ll leave that as a follow up task for the reader! There is still a hell of a lot that could be done to improve this but I’m hoping this simple example helps to highlight the incredible power of Lambda functions and how they can be used. In a traditional application you would have had to not only write a hell of a lot more code, you would have had to deploy it across multiple availability zones. These all represent extra complexity that would have taken far more time to build and to release. Conclusion Hopefully you found this article insightful and enjoyable! If you need any further assistance setting up these lambda functions then please feel free to leave a comment in the comments section below or tweet me: Elliot Forbes I’m also on should you wish to connect! LinkedIn For those that are following me regularly and enjoying my style of writing I’m publishing my second book through LeanPub titled: An Introduction to Cloud Development Through Story! If you fancy supporting both myself and the EFF check it out! _This book provides a gentle introduction to the world of cloud development. We will be taking an in-depth look at…_leanpub.com An Introduction to Cloud Development

Creating A Highly Scalable Website Monitoring Service in half an hour using AWS Lambda

This is a story about the crazy shit you do when you want to fulfill your dreams as a startup 🙏🏼🌠 If you’ve watched the TV show Silicon Valley, you know that the startup scene is incredibly competitive. Sometimes, it feels like a constant race to “beat your competitors” and find “product market fit” and there’s a general feeling that the only way you can win is by getting accepted into a top-accelerator in the Bay Area. Y Combinator (YC) is the behemoth of accelerators in the real Silicon Valley. Twice a year, they invest in a large number of early stage startups. Being home to the likes of Dropbox and Instacart, YC has been dubbed “the world’s most powerful start-up incubator.” It’s sort of like winning the jackpot…If you get in, you’re SET 🚀. Everybody wants in! Last winter alone, 7,200 startups wanted in… and 100 got in. I want to tell you the 6 minute story of what happens when a startup thinks they’ve got a real once in a life time chance… Chapter 1: A sliver of hope Tuesday October 10, 2017. Our CEO James sent a really impressive application to YC. He has done a fair share of research on the process and let our team know that the YC partners who review applications give each company’s application about 😲**.** 15 seconds of their precious time But… a week after submitting our application, on Tuesday afternoon, James randomly got a message from “Michael” of YC: On your application, in the question asking if your coding is done externally, and who does your coding, you wrote “ ”. Please clarify. No Holy… F*^k. Someone from YC RESPONDED ! ! 🙀🙀🙀 Unable to contain ourselves💃🏼🕺🏻 James hastily google’d the name Michael. He is the CEO of YC. Through bouts of laughter and high fives all afternoon, we revelled in the fact that they know we exist… and they are interested enough to ensure they thoroughly understand our application! Keep in mind, these shrewd AF people pay attention to only the clearest and strongest applications (Note: The fortuitous mistake in our application occurred because of #NoSleep). In our world, we had a huge shot! James went an bought bottles of champagne, and our team celebrated🥂. This was the energy all of Tuesday afternoon after the initial email. I felt compelled to capture the genuine passion, excitement, fatigue, leadership and hope that James embodied! Chapter 2: Becoming attention grabbing A-holes. Following Tuesday’s excitement, the rest of the week entailed plenty of low key brainstorming of creative ideas that may get the attention of relevant people at YC, and/or the media. Should we plan a pickup soccer game in SF for all the companies at YC? Should we get quotes from YC alumni for a blog post about how sports/physical activity motivated them to stay active and prevent burnout during their term there? Maybe we can blockade the YC entrance with OpenSports users, Clif bars, and a ping pong table, and challenge everyone to a game against an OpenSports pro? Or we can start a cross country van tour visiting OpenSports communities. Maybe cycle there? …and dozens of more hilarious ideas! Finally, on Thursday night, between chatter about OpenSports icons or something, there was an idea that stuck… Let’s anonymously create a “startup roulette” website… My response: Followed by a quick midnight name brainstorm: …and then… the magic 🎩: The domain was purchased. This was happening. Chapter 3: Getting the team up to speed Friday at 2:30pm when we were all in, we called a team meeting and packed ourselves into a closed off whiteboard room. We had to plan this thing, design it, and build it in… an 18 hour sprint. Given the compressed time line, we had to work quick and flesh out . only the best of ideas The overall vision was to . The inspiration came because 99% of applicants don’t get in, and don’t receive any feedback about why, so we wanted to create a space where founders could receive feedback (and beer), and viewers could know whats going on in tech. create a webpage that would have a constant feed of the one minute application videos that founders sent to YC Ideas that made the cut: “Send a beer to your favourite startup” button 🍺 (not real beer, silly! Although, that was the original idea) Leave anonymous feedback in a comments text box (that get sent only to us, and we would subsequently send the feedback to the company) A nav bar with a drop down list of video categories An “About me” section (which would just be about the project, and not about OpenSports) Chapter 4: The Design and Development Sprint It took Orest less than an hour and a half to design the entire site — In our meeting, he already knew which “sexy” shade of red and what font he wanted to use. Kaylin, Ryan and I started watching hours of YC application videos (this was much more tedious and much less fun than one would think😪!) and categorizing them into categories like “E-commerce, Fintech, Sustainability, Basically Air b n b”, etc. By 5:32pm on Friday, the site was up. Damn, we’re fast: Chapter 5: The marketing strategy The marketing strategy was simple and hilarious: Spam the press and all the big tech news sites about WatchMeYC, pretending to be . Erlich Bachman from Silicon Valley We laughed our heads off as our designer and creative director Orest embodied Erlich. He needed to do his research via YouTube videos to make sure the banter was perfect👇 Watching videos of Erlich Bachman to fully get into character. James found a list of hundreds of tech reporters and on Monday, we sent them all an e-mail from the account of Erlich (erlich@watchmeyc.com), about our new website. The e-mails we sent to journalists and tech news sites like TechCrunch were hilarious! They went something like this: Hello, I know you look at me and see me as a guy who has it all figured out, and for the most part I do. When I sold Aviato, it gave me a home, cars, food; but there has always been a hole in my heart. I guess that hole is the “what if?” What If I don’t get into YC? I guess we’ll never know because I always do. But what about the 99% that don’t get in? Well that’s why I made watchmeyc.com. Why, you ask? Well, why not. Yours, The Silicon Valley King. Erlich. Chapter 6: The fall from grace Out of 220 emails sent on Monday October 23— Google blocking many of them — we got a response from one… ONE….REPORTER 🤢! FML. Needing a break from it all! Our posts on Reddit got taken down. Twitter did not allow us to have an Erlich Bachman account… nothing was going right 😩 But I still had hope! So much hope that I took a “pre-becoming-famous” video! Chapter 7: Decision day — Did we get an interview? Tuesday October 24th, One whole week after that initial message from “Michael”, was decision day with no indication of what time we would receive the much anticipated e-mail from YC. James predicted it would come between 9pm and 1am, given the 3 hour time difference between Toronto and San Francisco. Our team was fairly certain we would get the interview. I could see it in James’ eyes and his behaviour that he felt so strongly about it. The interview would mean we would fly to San Francisco the next week to meet the YC partners. Half of the teams who go for an interview actually get in to YC, so your chances are high when you’ve made it to the interview round. Then we would move to San Francisco from January to March, for three of the most intense months of our lives, a period when stress would eat us from the insides out, but we would learn and grow as a company a LOT. I couldn’t hang around all night to wait for the decision, so I just waited to hear from our team, who were having some pre-celebration drinks. And then at 1:34am came the message from James: …bla bla bla… Chapter 8: Coming together to ease the pain like a real #fam: On Wednesday morning, Orest and I went to a grocery store in our building to buy a cake, so that our team could celebrate “not getting into YC”! We decorated our own cake: Turning the lemons of tragic loss into some lovely profane lemonade 🍋 And shared a slice with everyone in our Toronto-based startup incubator 🍰. Chapter 9: Live and Learn After all of that, what happened? Nothing. But our team got to temporarily pull our minds away from the amazing project we work on 24/7, , and completely let our creative minds go wild. The amount of laughs we shared through the constant exchange of fun ideas was invaluable! OpenSports More than that, we can apply learnings from this project to future tasks. Here’s an example: During this whole period, we were certain that some of our new OpenSports users from the States were YC people spying on us and testing us out. Based on how thoughtful I was whenever I reached out to the people I was suspicious about, I created the motto “treat every new sports organizer like they’re a YC CEO.” It helped me think of new systems to ensure high quality engagement and retention on the app🤓. Chapter 10: The last shot Oh, and here’s the product demo we made in 🙏🏼, because we’ve got an amazing product. And an active, engaged community. And we build and iterate like crazy. And best of all, we ❤ and respect each other. I know our team is destined for greatness. 5 hours Will we apply again? F🐧🐦k ya. This hasn’t disarmed us, after all, as Mattan Griffel, a successful YC- accepted founder wrote in his blog about : How to get into Y Combinator …Y Combinator shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all. It’s still only a step on the way to success or failure for your company. If not getting into Y Combinator means your startup is going to give up, or won’t succeed, that’s already a very bad sign. That being said, Y Combinator is that benefits just about every startup. a very cool and valuable experience Chapter 11: Update: The Story Continues… So…. we ambushed Kat and Yuri (Partners at YC) in January at Pearson Airport in Toronto and it led to something pretty epic! Read about that :) here Thank you for reading :) We have many funny adventures and stories. If you want to hear more, e-mail me! alicia@opensports.ca ❤ Your sports fam, Alicia and the OpenSports team P.S. Want to watch our one minute founders’ application video that was also posted on ? I think James applied some kind of algorithm so that our video plays once every 10 videos, so you should find it there easily 🙊. You’ve gotta be creative 😈😇. watchmeyc.com

Read about this company’s hilarious hacks to get into Y Combinator

Welcome to " ". This week we have an Entrepreneur and tech expert who thinks Monday is the most exciting day of the week. His previous experience includes working for Tech giants like Twitter, Teradata, IBM--before he found fulfillment in graphs at his venture TigerGraph! Mondays with Entrepreneurs 's the Guest? Who : Name Dr. Yu Xu Dr. Yu Xu is CEO of 💪What they do: TigerGraph So before starting your week, pause for a coffee break ;) and enjoy this chit-chat with Dr. Yu Xu. 1. What topic areas are you most passionate about? I’m most passionate about bringing the power of graphs to advanced analytics, Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the native and parallel technology breakthroughs in the industry by TigerGraph, utilizing graph analytics on large data sets to provide unique features that improve traditional ML/AI models is critical to many use cases. Such use cases include anti-money laundering, supply-chain optimization, real-time fraud prevention, customer journey analytics, personalized recommendation systems, and more. 2. Through your experience, how do you visualize the evolution of data mining and data science? Could you brief them? Data mining and data science have a long history. Due to the data explosion over the past 10 years and the dramatic cost reduction in data storage and performance improvements in CPU/GPU, deep learning (auto-ML) is fundamentally changing how data mining and sciences are applied across industries today. In addition to all the exciting things happening in data mining and data science right now, an up and coming trend to shed light on is how to leverage graph technology to augment ML/AI, whether it’s new features only available through graphs, or explainability for ML models. Graph neural networks are gaining tons of attention in both academia and industries. TigerGraph has organized an open conference called Graph + AI Summit, which occurs twice a year to facilitate this. The last two virtual conferences have been hugely successful, bringing together over 10,000 data scientists and researchers, Fortune 100 companies, innovative startups, and industry analysts to share best practices for combining graph and AI. 3. How did you get to become an expert in Data Analytics? I gained experience in data analytics through my years of experience training in the field. I’ve always been a database guy, as I see it as an integral part of the data analytics infrastructure. To further my knowledge in this discipline, I got my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego. Beyond this, working with customers every day helps me learn what matters to real-world use cases. 4. 2 Sentences that best summarize how you learned ML and data analytics? I learned the basics and theories from my M.S. and Ph.D. studies in Computer Science. I also learned a great deal while at Teradata, working with leading customers and their use cases. And while I was at , I got to work alongside some of the best data scientists and ML engineers in the world. These experiences taught me a lot more than what I learned from my schooling. Twitter Now, I am learning from leading companies such as UnitedHealth Group, JP Morgan Chase, Visa, Jaguar Land Rover, Duke Energy, Nike, Walmart, and many other innovative companies, specifically using graphs to improve their ML and data analytics. I find this, even more, educational and inspiring. 5. What’s the main value proposition of Graph Analytics Technology? The main value propositions for graph analytics technology are highlighted with the phrase, “Connect, Analyze and Learn from Data.” Graph analytics provides these three core capabilities to drive business outcomes: Connect all data sets and pipelines: Organizations of all sizes are connecting all of their data, including Spark pipelines, for machine learning and Kafka pipelines for streaming data with a distributed graph database. Analyze connected data for never-before insights with advanced analytics: After connecting all of the data, the next step is to analyze the data 10-100 times faster with graph-based analytics. Learn from the connected data with in-database ML: After connecting and analyzing data, organizations are learning from the data with graph-based ML. 6. Can you please brief us on How are graphs used for e-commerce/customer intelligence, anti-fraud detection, supply chain intelligence, and other areas? For this question, I think it will be most powerful to explain using customer examples aligning with the core capabilities listed in question 5. These include: You can connect data sets and pipelines: One customer example would be . They are connecting 200+ sources to deliver a real-time customer 360 to improve the quality of care for 50 million members. UnitedHealth Group The graph is also used to analyze connected data, providing never-before insights through advanced analytics: For example, has accelerated supply chain planning from 3 weeks to 45 minutes, reduced supplier risk by 35%, and added 100 million pounds annually in profits. NewDay, a leading specialist financial services provider and one of the largest issuers of credit cards in the UK, uses advanced graph analytics to prevent and preempt financial fraud. Jaguar Land Rover There are many opportunities to learn from the connected data with in-database ML: has built an AI-based customer 360 with in-database ML for entity resolution, personalized recommendations, and fraud detection. Graph-based ML at Intuit has reduced at-risk events by 50% while improving accuracy by 50%, overall reducing false positives. Seven out of the top 10 banks are driving real-time fraud detection and credit risk assessment with in-database ML. Intuit 7. Regarding Tiger Graph’s growth, What is the biggest improvement that you introduced in the last 12 months that has considerably improved your workflow? The #1 challenge for TigerGraph right now is our goal of hiring 300+ talented team members quickly to scale our business. Before the pandemic hit, TigerGraph was mostly hiring in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially within our engineering teams. In the middle of last year, we decided to drop the location requirement, which is the single biggest improvement that has materially changed our business. 8. What are the top challenges you currently face as a professional data scientist and CEO? And how do you go about tackling them? Hiring the right talent is critical to the success of our business. As mentioned earlier, TigerGraph is hiring in many locations now. For example, we’re building an R&D Innovation lab in San Diego and a sales center in Dallas. Another challenge we’ve faced is how to take our successes in the U.S. and UK, and expand our business to more regions. We’re hiring experienced leaders in various regions who can help the company build local teams quickly. 9. Which non-paid activities would you be keen to take part in if the opportunity raised your profile or delivered value to your audience? I would love to volunteer and educational opportunities with student organizations to help students learn how to navigate new tools like graph analytics and UI/BI in data analytics. 10. What are your passions outside of work? I enjoy reading books and listening to music. 11. And the last question, since the series is named “Monday with Entrepreneurs”, What are your Monday Morning rituals? I start my Monday mornings with a cup of coffee! Following that, I get ready for our TigerGraph executive meeting and look forward to sharing what’s been on my mind over the past couple of days with the team and hearing their updates in return. Monday is one of the most exciting days of the week, in my opinion, so I’m pretty psyched in the morning . I'm so glad we had this time together. Thank you for taking a break from your life to share your knowledge with us. I'm sure readers will enjoy and learn. Shahmeer: Thanks, Hackers, for reading :) If you have any suggestions regarding questions to ask in this series or if you want to get featured, I am available on , and you can also reach out to me on ;) slack Linkedin

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