Prepaid Creditcard

Prepaid CreditcardWould you opt for a prepaid creditcard if it was cheaper? Prepaid Cards Grow Despite Stigma Over Fees It s nearly a full year since finance guru Suze Orman faced a backlash over her prepaid card fees and two years since the pricey Kardashian Kard went kaput — and yet the prepaid card market remains u… View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

Artist CrowdFunding – Making Inspiration Happen

Artist CrowdFunding – Making Inspiration HappenI’ve been working on WorkingTitle365, a new way for artists to crowd fund their work. The??goal is to unite Makers and their admirers, the Fans, in creating Beautiful Things. Makers share their work and request support from Fans. The platform is aimed at encountering Makers, beautiful things and creative processes that a Fan would want to support. Makers continue doing what Makers do best: Making Beautiful Things, performing or exhibiting, and inspiring… WorkingTitle365 – You Make Inspiration Happen You Make Inspiration Happen. Support a Maker, Be Rewarded. Roos Blufpand. Fan This Maker. Sumadi. Fan This Maker. Frank Ruiter. Fan This Maker. Harry de Leeuw. Fan This Maker. Petra Groen. Fan This Ma… View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

Habits of Wealthy Entrepreneurs

Habits of Wealthy Entrepreneurs Filled with confirmation bias, and still an interesting read.

Seb Paquet What are some of the habits wealthy entrepreneurs have that other people don’t? http://www.quora.com/Entrepreneurship/What-are-some-of-the-habits-wealthy-entrepreneurs-have-that-other-people-dont What are some of the habits wealthy entrepreneurs have that other people don’t? Answer (1 of 9): Most people spend their money to get the most utility – fun, food, whatever. Entrepreneurs spend their money to make the most money. This one habit pretty much accounts for everythin… View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

One Year of Real Money #cash #credit #debit

Last year in June I wanted to use an ATM in France, due to the illogical layout of the ATM keyboard I managed to get the message that my debit card was blocked. I was lucky that my girlfriend also had an ATM card, so the holiday wasn’t washed out.

I didn’t think it was important enough to get my plastic back – I procrastinated – as there was no problem paying in cash … most places. Notably in company canteens, it looks like for efficiency and security reasons many of the canteens in companies I visit require plastic, even for the vending machines. Naturally this was no trouble for me as I could always find a friendly person who would be willing to pay for me with their plastic and take cash in return.

Just because you’re paranoid
Doesn’t mean they’re not after you.
—Territorial Pissings, Nirvana

I had also neglected to request a new credit card after the last one expired – I am not automatically send one – so I suddenly started to lose subscription that I had had for a while. The only exception being December when my domain names were about to expire when I asked a friend of me to charge to his card in return for cash, he gave them to me for Christmas.

After 7 months without plastic I was starting to see living without plastic as a challenge. By only going places where they accept cash, which were less than I expected and even not so large denominations are often refused due to the lack of small change in the cash register. Some businesses are traditionally cash only or primarily cash, although I slowly saw a shift that these companies where taking to plastic with the push by banks and the government to accept plastic for smaller and smaller payments. And afaik even making it punishable by a fine to levy a tariff for plastic payments.

After 12 months when I really needed some money I decided to see whether the canceled card was truly canceled and discovered to my surprise that the card hadn’t been canceled at all. So I started using plastic again, although just to get cash. Cash rules!

Image source: Bill McKay

Just Finished Reading: The Quants #books #risk #economy

I had heard of The Quants and wanted to buy it, after my father and I discussed how it was that all this money disappeared during the credit crisis I thought it might be wise to get an in depth view of the “China syndrome hedge fund catastrophe.” This is more than just a review of the book.

The first thing that I noticed were the multiple references to Ed Thorpe’s “Beat the Dealer”, a book on card counting Black Jack using a Hi-Lo method, and “Liar’s Poker“. Both books are on my bookshelf. Liar’s Poker highlights the years 1985-1987 as a trader at Salomon Brothers. There is some overlap between the characters of the book, such as John Meriwether who famously was challenged to a game of liar’s poker for 1 million dollars and replied: “If we’re going to play for those kind of numbers, I’d rather play for real money. Ten million dollars. No tears.”

The book reminded me of playing the computer game “Capitalism” when I was 16 in which I would game the system by creating a company which produced a little profit and initially plowing that profit into buying companies by hostile takeovers on the mini stock market and then avoid the system creating more AI companies – it had a fixed number of AI companies and mergers would cause new AI companies to be created – by buying a controlling interest in the AI companies and forcing them to turn out high dividends until all the AI companies in the stock market were under my control. And leave the computer AIs to tend to the companies and all their business while the dividends pushed my company’s profit into 12 digits.

The Quants is less of a narrative than Liar’s Poker, much of it is carefully crafted from multiple interviews with most of the players, books, magazines and newspaper articles. The tale of hedge fund managers and traders taking ever increasing risk just to earn the same amount that they did the previous year is and as it notes “Hedge fund managers who’ve seen big losses can be especially dangerous. Investors […] may become demanding and impatient. … [T]here can be a significant incentive to push the limits of the fund’s capacity to generate large gains […] If a big loss is no worse than a small loss or meager gains […] the temptation to jack up the leverage and roll the dice can be powerful.”

Even the glaring warning of Meriwether’s LTCM failure in 1998, like Daedalus’ warning to Icarus, it was ignored by most of the hedge funds. “By 1998, nearly every bond arbitrage desk and fixed-income hedge fund on Wall Street had copied LTCM’s trades.” They were leveraged up to their eyeballs, and while making huge debts of their own they traded with the debts of others, bonds, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. Some hedge fund had leverages of 30 to 1, which means they borrowed $30 for each dollar they had as an asset. “Coming into 2008, hedge funds were in control of $2 trillion.” And the banks they were borrowing from had leverages of at least 9 to 1, because of fractional-reserve banking, these same banks “… Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Deutsche Bank, […] were rapidly transforming from staid white-shoe bank companies into hot-rod hedge fund vehicles fixated on the fast buck…” These banks had “… trillions more in leverage that juiced their returns like anabolic steroids.”

And it wasn’t just the banks, insurance companies go into the action too. These insurance companies insured the credit default swaps, “[i]f the value of the underlying asset insured by the swaps declined for whatever reason, the protection provider […] would have to put up more collateral, since the risk of default was higher.”

The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
—Wall Street proverb

“… [T]here were legitimate concerns that as computer-driven trading reached unfathomable speeds, danger lurked. Many of these computer-driven funds were gravitating to a new breed of stock exchange called ‘dark pools’—secretive, computerized trading networks that match buy and sell orders for blocks of stocks in the frictionless ether of cyberspace. … In these invisible electronic pools, vast sums change hands beyond the eyes of regulators. While efforts were afoot to push the murky world of derivatives trading into the light of day, stock trading was sliding rapidly into the shadows.”

Conclusion

“The findings of behavioral finance .. had shown time and again that people don’t always make optimal choices when it comes to money […] [N]euroeconomics, was delving into the hardwiring of the brain to investigate why people often make decisions that aren’t rational […] Evidence was emerging that certain parts of the brain are subject to a ‘money illusion’ that blinds people to the impact of future events, such as the effect of inflation on the present value of cash—or the possibility of a speculative bubble bursting.”

To me it also looks like they were and still are blinded to money. Two great reads for the weekend.

Image source: Amazon

Due Diligence: Dutch Financial Handlers

As part of the due diligence of a project I was investigating at the end of 2011 I created a list of the Dutch Financial Handlers which were able to do electronic invoicing and paper invoicing. Although the list was incomplete I was able to give advise to the company I was working for, afterwards I closed the file and forgot about it.

Yesterday and this morning I discussed the value which could be created by sharing this information, and making it possible to modify this data by third parties. After considering the value of the data, which is freely available from difference sources – also included in the file – and the advantage to all I decided to release this under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands License.

Image source: Bill McKay

Proof of Concept: Rebranding GPL #opensource #foss

Recently I read an article on /. about the rebranding of Blender, this was a reaction to the press release from Blender, the comments mainly focussed on theft of the IP by rebranding. This was because the article was slanted towards the IP theft of GPL software.

I am an advocate of both GPL software and earning money, although I see the later as a necessary evil. And as I have mentioned before Free and Open Source Software is certainly NOT free as in beer and will never be. Taking the example of Blender, there have been people who have used Blender to create projects which were for profit and similar to the trickle down effect which the GOP advocates there should be a trickle down effect in FOSS, even if it is only morally.

I think its sad that there has not been anybody who has an app store for GPL’d software, where I could sell scripts or small programs and make the source available only once they have paid. There are lots of places that I can have my items downloaded for free, and nowhere for somebody to pay for them with Paypal or Bitcoin.

Image source: Bill McKay

Trumpet Winsock Author Compensation #risk #business

You wouldn’t be reading this if it wasn’t for Trumpet Winsock, after my initial use of Bulletin Boards in the early days of the internet it was thanks to the ISP Netland and Trumpet Winsock that I first arrived on the net. Being a snotty nosed kid I quite happily used shareware programs without a thought to the writers, let alone paying for it. I well remember the joy that this tool brought to me, although the rest of the internet may not be too happy about it.

I was sad to hear that Peter Tattam, the writer of Trumpet Winsock, got very little for the most widely used piece of shareware software^[1]. So now is the time to set it right by paying the fee you should have originally paid using PayPal: payments@petertattam.com

Thanks all… I had honestly thought the Internet had forgotten about me.
—Peter Tattam

Image source: Imperial College London

Yuan Better Than Lottery? #money #finance

I think the RenMiBi ¥, Yuan, is probably a better investment than the US Dollar $ and Euro €. Had I invested the €10 a month that I didn’t spend on the Lottery in the Yuan I could have earned 20% in the first 6 months or 10% had I held on to it until 2011. With $10 I would have earned nothing for the first 6 months, and I could have ended the year up 5%. As a Dollar investment it looks like you can’t lose investing in Yuan, and with the adjustment of the currency basket in 2008 and the fickle nature of the US Dollar the CNY to EUR is more profitable and slightly more risky in the short term.

Image source: Han Xu. Graphs by Yahoo! Finance.

Flogs VC funding delayed #ical #calendar

Flogs, which offers a shared calendar and digital organizer system, went through another round of funding recently. They had already received €2M^[1] VC funding from Lost Boys, Media Republic and Guerilla Games. The VC, who I have not been able to identify, has delayed the capital injection which Flogs currently needs. The VC cited the “current economic climate” as reason for the delay.

For Flogs, who are in their second year and have yet to turn a profit, this has meant that the purse strings are being pulled tight, which means they are losing some of their current staff.

Flogs are still looking for developers: Jobs @ Flogs

1. Flogs on CrunchBase