As someone who has been an enterprise customer this depends on a lot of factors. First being who your competitors are and how their pricing is structured. At work we are evaluating three products and the one that has a yearly fee will win because the other two charge based on usage. I would definitely tend to start with a yearly model until you have lots of customers.
One thing to consider is, can you put their logo on the front of your website? Some companies I've worked for do not allow this while others will endorse your product. Be sure to think about the overall value of the customer and how you can leverage having them, but don't make your business depend on their contract.
Agreed. I became a nihilist as a teenager and still believe life mostly has no meaning. Humans will all die and the earth will keep turning. I don't really believe in an afterlife.
At the same time a person gets miserable going against the grain of society and thus you learn how to be content and how to keep your emotions in check. I do not see any conflict in these two things. I see it as the survival skills of a nihilist.
Your natural instinct will be to prosper in this life, it doesn't mean there is a bigger meaning than farting and dying.
Git does not use TOML, even if it looks very similar. You can check the syntax in "man git-config", but is definitely has a few syntax differences to TOML (especially the "[section "subsection"]" part)
There is no formal git-config standard other than what's deployed in git.
Beanstalk is nice for rapid development. The problem I is that it doesn't scale for nontrivial architiched apps. I've converted failing beanstalk deployments to real orchestarators a few times.
People who fail to read and educate themselves will listen to snake oils salesman pitches and trade stocks like a junkie on heroin. I spent years learning industries, learning how to read quarterly report, to identify signs of fraud, and pay attention to the news every single day.
Like anything you do you have to be committed and determined to be successful. It's not a dark secret that there are no short cuts in life. This article assumes we are all much dumber than I prefer to believe we are. We being people who have money to trade stocks and suffer from big losses.
I learned how to trade stocks by reading books about value investing and accounting practices. Very simple stuff that like anything worth learning takes a bit of time and effort. I don't get the upvotes on this article.
> I spent years learning industries, learning how to read quarterly report, to identify signs of fraud, and pay attention to the news every single day.
How'd that work out for you? Do you beat the S&P 500 YOY with less volatility? If you account for your hours and trading fees? How many years in a row?
If your answer is yes, you should start a fund! Because statistically, whether a mutual fund or exclusive hedge fund, you're a miracle.
> Like anything you do you have to be committed and determined to be successful.
His argument, seemingly based off the Random Walk Down Wall Street data; which basically shows that no matter how committed and determined you are, the broad based index is going to beat you, if not 1 year, year over year.
Today I have 5 stocks i've bought over the past 60 days. I wont take the time to post my past 24 years of investing. I'm doing ok and so is my team of close friends I bounce ideas off of.
I bought XOM about 2-3 weeks ago at 71.75 You're also not calculating dividends. Xom is pay 4.4 and some of my other holding have already paid a few thousand in dividends.
You can be doing okay, you can even be beating the S&P 500 in the short term; but if you're beating the S&P 500 over the long term you are beating almost every professional team of fund managers.
I mean, look at what Fidelity is doing with FZROX and FZILX. Both Vanguard and Fidelity are locked in a crazy fee war [1] to be the GOAT of asset management companies [2]. How the hell do you compete with Fidelity as an individual stock picker when there are no fees to speak of to participate in this fund?
I've seen people mentioning that HFT can totally and consistently beat indexes [3], but then a) can I even get in on the action with less than $1000 and b) is the automated system in place any good?
I was actually up 13% on ENB a Canadian pipeline company. My gain is cut in half because I doubled up on shares. I'm long on everything but RHT which is a cash payout.
You’ll probably make 10% on this trade. But the is risk of losing more than that if the transaction doesn’t close for some reason is real. That’s not free money.
The risk is obviously lower now than it was the day after the acquisition was announced. And the upside is also lower now. Less than 4%, for a closing which is not expected until the second semester of 2019 as far as I understand.
Given all your preparation and work, do you think you're able to beat the market on a risk-adjusted basis? What marginal edge do you have over professional institutions + quant funds, who are also reading reports and paying attention to the news? (to say the least)
I average 12%-20+% yearly. I like to look at companies with a good PEG (price to earnings over growth) on a PEG of 1.00 or less unless their are good fundamentals. I like companies with a low P/E. I like dividends as I can reinvest cash.
My grandfather taught me about how industrials are cyclical and easy to make money on. Gas prices go up in the summer etc. etc.
Reading news means nothing. Understanding the overall picture of the economy, jobs, housing, commodities, macroeconomics (a fundamental understanding which few take time to learn) are key. Interpreting the "news" is important and learning to filter. Most news is (as the article kind of says) telling you what trends are happening. Never buy a trend. The news mostly tells the past. You have to focus on the present and future.
The news is actually talking about recession. The economy is strong at the moment. The news told us oil would never go below $150 a barrel. If you take time to learn the larger picture you would know these things are fear and not true. See the forest for the trees.
Totally agree. As this commenter [1] said it succinctly (although in a different context): "Such a family office also has to contend with other giants trying to claim the G.O.A.T. title for asset management companies with incredible scale efficiencies. The stakes are 'for all the marbles of the game' high, and they're using all the benefits of capital scale they can scrounge."
I find it extremely hard to believe that one dude can consistently beat Vanguard and Fidelity in the midst of their fee war when it comes to public equity (private equity, however, is a whole different ball game, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion).
> do you think you're able to beat the market on a risk-adjusted basis?
I don't think anyone is going to beat the market doing their due diligence. It's more about making sound investments instead of treating investing like gambling at a casino or rooting for a particular sports team.
If that is the case, why not just buy the entire US stock market through something like FZROX, SWTSX, or VTSAX? That feels like a sound investment to me.
But there is a shortcut in this particular instance: following Charlie Munger's advice and just buying index funds like VTSAX, SWTSX, or FZROX. A 10-year return of 13.25% for VTSAX is really sweet given the very low effort it takes to throw money into that fund.
It's not a matter of being dumb or not: it's a matter of whether the average investor is willing to carefully research companies or not. You seem to do it as a hobby, and it's great that you're getting 12% to 20% returns. But I'd wager that the average retail investor doesn't have the same drive as you do in figuring out which company's stock might rise.
After I told my coworker that I was beating the market in my stock picking account by quite a lot, he said “Man, I’m down 80%, like $10,000. What do you think I should buy to make it back?”
I said, “Just sell everything and put it in an index fund.”
I don’t think he did. He’s probably down more now.
Stock picking is fun, but for me it’s just gambling. If I lost that much, I’d quit.
I worked for Ibm Websphere 1998-2002 in those days. I supported Aix, HP/UX, Solaris 8, and 4 rpm based Linux versions. Our job was to do nightly builds and test on each OS with DB2, Oracle etc. HP/UX and Aix were menu driven and painful for automation. Solaris was much more fun to work with. Redhat, SuSE, Yellowdog and mandrake were the linux distros. No yum to handle dependencies. I remember working on bash a lot to handle package dependencies.
One day I got an Itanium from Microsoft. It was fun to play with. Sadly I was forbidden from opening the server. It was so alpha that adjusting the clock would kill the server. It never went very far due to being so alpha.
Ansible is an imperative language while Puppet is declarative.
Ansible is push mode (ssh connection) while Puppet and Chef have an agent that pulls and enforces configuration.
Ansible is great for quick hacky or one time solutions like building a server. It's very newb friendly and easy to use out of the box. Puppet is great for enforcing a configuration every 30 minutes and scales across Data Centers. In my opinion Chef is more robust and is easier to use and share cookbooks on Supermarket.
Ansible Galaxy isn't as great for sharing work, but I find Ansible is so easy to use I don't need anyone else's work.
Once this has a pull mode (agent) it seems it will be like a very lightweight Puppet like declarative tool. Both Puppet and Chef have very mature products for serving and managing infrastructure. They can scale.
This tool might be awesome years from now, but I have to use Ansible everyday at work. From 2.0 to 2.8 it has become a solid and fairly mature product. I also use Puppet and have for 10 years. It feels old and is a pain to use across 1000s of machines in an Enterprise. There is a learning curve and training to be done at all times. At my last job I used Chef and I really love it for being powerful, easy to use, and just having a great design.
We currently install Puppet with Ansible once initial config is done to enforce policies. I could see this potentially replacing the Puppet side of that equation some day.
I'll for sure watch this tool and experiment with it in my lab as it grows. I do love Python and Puppet is far to long an overhaul. It will be interesting to see what directions are taken as this new product matures.
I do not think this is about using python instead of yaml. It is super easy to write Python modules for Ansible and use them. We have to use them for the things that aren't included in the base such as managing Infoblox etc.
I’m not sure that’s true. In the days of film the average consumer shot <1 roll per year. Whereas a professional photographer would shoot a dozen or more rolls per day. Their biggest customers would have been newspapers and studios buying 10,000 rolls at a time on a regular basis
IBM's customers are the same as Microsoft's customers (at least the high profit ones). Very large enterprise companies locked into contracts worth millions and 100s of millions of dollars. They move slow like icebergs and carry as much weight.
They don't worry about new customers when the largest companies in the world have gone through months or years to get them as preferred tier one vendors.
Sears on the other hand did not serve large Enterprises and were generating revenue mostly from retail. Consumer vs. Enterprise is like Apples and Oranges guys.
Hum... I work in a large MS customer. We are a happy customer for some measure. We are also an Oracle customer, and happier than I would expected to be possible if I didn't know about there.
I just can't imagine anything we could hire from IBM.
One thing to consider is, can you put their logo on the front of your website? Some companies I've worked for do not allow this while others will endorse your product. Be sure to think about the overall value of the customer and how you can leverage having them, but don't make your business depend on their contract.