WeSeed - The stock market for the rest of us
http://www.weseed.com/

Fake stockmarket to learn how it works

stockmarketfortherestofus weseed.com

virtual stocks

One is that the financial press isn’t in the business of supplying useful information; it’s in the business of feeding people’s lust for predictions. “You keep buying the magazine regardless of how the forecasts turn out,” Wellington says, “and they’ll keep supplying the forecasts.”

Blaine Lourd got rich picking stocks. But then he realized that everything he thought he knew about the markets was wrong. And he's not alone.

As a group, professional money managers control more than 90 percent of the U.S. stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole, minus whatever fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more

Like a lot of people who end up on Wall Street, Blaine Lourd just sort of stumbled in. He'd grown up happy in New Iberia, Louisiana. His father had made a pile of money in the oil patch, and Blaine assumed that he too would one day eat four-hour lunches at the Petroleum Club, hunt ducks on the weekends, and get rich. His older brother, Bryan, had left Louisiana to make what seemed like a quixotic bid to become a Hollywood agent, but Bryan was gay, even if he pretended not to be. (He's now a partner at Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency.) Blaine was distinctly not gay and felt right at home in Louisiana—right up to the moment when, during his third year at Louisiana State University, the price of oil collapsed and took the family business with it. That was when he realized he had no idea what he would do with his life.

The markets are roiling, money managers & banks are posting disappointing returns, and people are beginning to wonder if they chose the wrong guy in Greenwich to take 2% of their assets and 20% of profits. But what if the problem isn’t the guy but the idea that makes him possible: the belief that the best way to invest capital is to hand it to an expert? As a group, professional money managers control more than 90% of the US stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole less the fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more. "If you put a thousand people in barrels and push them over Niagara Falls, some of them will survive. If you take those guys and push them over again, some of them will survive. And they’ll write books about how to survive being pushed over Niagara Falls in a barrel."

FTA: 'Blaine Lourd got rich picking stocks. But then he realized that everything he thought he knew about the markets was wrong. And he's not alone.' (note: Dec. 2007 issue!)

Online Data

The data collection effort about investor attitudes that I have been conducting since 1989 has now resulted in a group of Stock Market Confidence Indexes produced by the Yale School of Management. These data are collected in collaboration with Fumiko Kon-Ya and Yoshiro Tsutsui of Japan. Some of our earlier results are also noteworthy.

Robert Shiller's database

terest rates have dropped by 1% from your current mortgage. As always, use t

handy

Get Rich Slowly — recently named most inspiring money blog by Money magazine — is devoted to sensible personal finance. You will not find any get-rich-quick schemes here. Nor will you find multi-level marketing fads or hot stock tips. I am not pitching any product or book. Instead, you’ll find daily information about personal finance and related topics. I share stories about debt elimination, saving money, and practical investing. I also post occasional reviews of books, magazines, and software. And, of course, I scour the web for the latest personal finance tools and articles. Please note that I am not a financial professional. I’m just an average guy who found himself deep in debt. When it finally became too overwhelming, I began reading personal finance books, hoping to find answers. I wanted swift solutions to my problems. My research revealed that few people get rich quickly, but almost anyone can get rich slowly by patiently following some simple rules.

When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. Seven years later I still hadn't started. I put it off because it seemed mysterious and complicated. It turns out to be easier than I expected, and also more interesting. The part I thought was hard, the mechanics of investing, really isn't. You give a startup money and they give you stock. You'll probably get either preferred stock, which means stock with extra rights like getting your money back first in a sale, or convertible debt, which means (on paper) you're lending the company money, and the debt converts to stock at the next sufficiently big funding round.

nor tactical advantages to using one or the other. The paperwork for convertible debt is simpler. But really it doesn't matter much which you use. Don't spend much time worrying about the details of deal terms, especially when you first start angel investing. That's not how you win at this game. When you hear people talking about a successful angel investor, they're not saying "He got a 4x liquidation preference." They're saying "He invested in Google."

How to Be an Angel Investor

Notes from Paul Graham on angel investing. Actually pretty interesting. The key, as he describes it, is to pick the right companies... the terms you get when investing don't matter much and can even hurt your chances of success if you're strict enough.

I just link this to make me feel better.

An overview of how to set up your accounts to allow automation to help you manage your money better. Also contains scripts for negotiating with companies about financial matters, e.g. waiving late fees.

Great foresight from the guy who tried to beat the poker pros

While the nation's lenders ran amok during the boom, Andy Beal hoarded his money. Now he's cleaning up - with scant help from Uncle Sam.

Andy Beal, a 56-year-old, poker-playing college dropout, is a one-man toxic-asset eater--without a shred of government assistance. Beal plays his cards patiently. For three long years, from 2004 to 2007, he virtually stopped making or buying loans. While the credit markets were roaring and lenders were raking in billions, Beal shrank his bank's assets because he thought the loans were going to blow up. He cut his staff in half and killed time playing backgammon or racing cars. He took long lunches with friends, carping to them about "stupid loans." His odd behavior puzzled regulators, credit agencies and even his own board. They wondered why he was seemingly shutting the bank down, resisting the huge profits the nation's big banks were making. One director asked him: "Are we a dinosaur?"

1. How will you reach a massive audience? - Every Net entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to one million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users. 2. What is your unique value proposition? 3. Will your business be capital efficient?

ages. How does a company rise above the noise to attract massive discovery and adoption? YouTube did it through existing channels like MySpace, which already reached millions. Yelp had strong SEO, which found them a mass audience searching for restaurants and nightlife. Facebook’s University-centric approach landed them 80% adoption across a campus within 60 days of launch. Every Net entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to one million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users.

A personal finance blog focusing on ordinary people dealing with unprecedented levels of debt.

doesn’t work) A long time ago, I wrote a very popular post entitled “Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on the Back of Five Business Cards“. After posting it, several people contacted me and suggested that I try to turn it into a book of some sort. Over the following year, I tossed the idea around and eventually developed it into a fifty page short book, intending to use it to shop around to various book publishers. I incorporated a lot of original writing, pieces of various Simple Dollar posts, and lots of other interesting elements.

While researching investment strategies for my retirement savings, I’ve been reading a lot of books. There are hundreds of authors offering thousands of tips for turning a small pile of gold into a big pile of gold. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whose advice to heed. To be honest, I find the simplest investment strategies most appealing. I just finished reading Paul Farrell’s The Lazy Person’s Guide to Investing, for example, and I found myself drawn to the “lazy portfolios” he describes. Lazy portfolios are collections of index funds. Because these portfolios are balanced — they contain stocks and bonds — they mitigate risk while providing excellent returns. Best of all, they take very little time to maintain. Reminder: An index fund is a low-cost mutual fund designed to mimic the movement of a specific market index. A Vanguard 500 index fund (like VFINX), for example, tracks the performance of the S&P 500. The chief virtue of index funds is that, over the long-term, they deliver

Larry Cheng: So, here’s a more difficult than expected attempt at pulling together a global directory of blogs written by current VCs. To help put the blogs in some context, they are ranked by their # of Google Reader subscribers. In addition, some blogs despite having subscribers have not posted in 3 months and they are denoted by an *. This directory will be updated quarterly highlighting any new blogs and the movers/shakers based on subscriber growth. If you don’t have the time to sort through all of the blogs, I will write a bi-weekly summary highlighting the “best VC blog posts” from the VCs in this directory.

List of top VC blogs. Look through and add to my reader.

illiquid asset

from twitter, chart sharing

Service to share charts on Twitter

Quants come in three basic varieties. 1. Structurers: people who price complex financial instruments. 2. Risk managers people who manage portfolio risk 3. Quant traders people who use statistics to make money by buying and selling most quants are structurers. Of course, there is often bleed over between these varieties -but it’s a useful taxonomy for looking for work. I’ve done a little of all three at this point (very little, honestly), and have always liked quant trading problems more than the other two varieties. It’s the most ambitious, and the most likely to net you a career outside of a large organization (go me: Army of one!). It’s also the most mysterious, since successful quant traders don’t like to talk about what they do. Structurers and risk managers have to talk about what they do, almost by definition. Quant traders gain little from talking about their special sauce.

***** very good and deep articles on finance topics by "Locklin on science"

vocab of "job specs" in trading

important feedback in the comments, good stuff

Lazy Portfolios are helping investors intelligently build simple, successful winning portfolios by themselves and you watch your nest egg grow

Cool tool to practice what day trading is like before you actually do it and bankrupt yourself!

The Worlds First Web Based Day Trading Simulator. Practice trading US equities with our stock trading simulator tool. Become a master day trader before you committ your capital

Try and make sense of this

Last night, I attended an inspiring talk by Nick Hanauer of Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners. The venue was Seattle University, and the topic was

—If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks. —If people understand it, you’re too late. —If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks.

How to spot breakthrough ideas

As for social disruption, Hanauer gave a quick summary of what he meant: —If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks. —If people understand it, you’re too late. —If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks. So entrepreneurship is a dangerous field, he said. “The difference between being an idiot and being a genius is very, very thin.” And keep in mind, he pointed out, “you can be very successful without being socially disruptive. Great fortunes have been made doing incremental things. Burger King, which came after McDonald’s, was not transformational, despite what they tell you…But they made a great fortune.”

Notes from a great presentation by Nick Hanauer, early investor in founder of aQuantitve, Amazon, Insitu (AUV) ... lots of insightful thoughts on quantifying disruptive technology, entrepreneurship, etc.

The key elements of a breakthrough idea, Hanauer said, are value creation and social disruption. “Value is difficult but possible to quantify—it’s the ratio of benefits to cost, divided by those of the alternatives,” he said. Benefits are things like a product’s durability, speed, and appeal

"In the first year of the current bear market, the market has fallen more steeply than it did during the first years of Great Depression's bear markets. After adjusting for inflation, stocks are more than 40 percent lower than they were at their 2007 high (and more than 50 percent lower than their 2000 high)."

always one step ahead ; http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/49b1654a-ed60-11dd-bd60-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

"By contrast, Soros sees the current crisis as a real-life illustration of reflexivity. Markets did not reflect an objective “truth”. Rather, the beliefs of market participants – that house prices would always rise, that an arcane financial instrument based on a subprime mortgage really could merit a triple-A rating – created a new reality. Ultimately, that “super-bubble” was unsustainable, hence the credit crunch of 2007 and the recession and financial crisis of 2008 and beyond."

Buy American. I Am.

I don't love her, but she sure says it like it is. Nice Q & A on investing, student loans, debts, etc..

When someone tells you to invest in a stock because it was up 40 percent in two months, ask yourself: “is that normal?” When someone tells you to put all your money in technology stocks because they have doubled in value in one year, ask yourself: “is that return normal?” When you buy a home on the expectation that values will rise 20 percent per year, ask yourself: “is that normal?”

Great financial advice to refer back to from time to time

Earlier this week, we solicited your questions for Suze Orman. You asked about paying college debt, choosing a good retirement plan, and — especially with a week like this — how safe your money is. In her answers below, Orman also offers a question to ask whenever deciding what to do with your money:

People are starting to think more about saving–and investing–than spending, which is perhaps the sole upside to the market turmoil. Being an investing geek has become much more socially acceptable, and companies are taking notice. In the last few weeks, several start-ups and familiar names have added, changed or completely revamped their online investing offerings. There are so many nest-egg incubators out there that we haven’t even had a chance to dive fully into them all. Here’s what’s new: - Investment research firm Morningstar has relaunched its home page with more analytic content upfront. Fund fanatics will relish the new reports (still in beta) that allow you to research past fund performance and what their stakes are. It’s charts all over the place, but much more engaging than a prospectus. Besides monitoring your own investments, you can also share your portfolio with other users and get a star rating.

social-networking sites for investing

Just in time for the recession, some new tools for monitoring your portfolio online. Here's a quick guide.

People are starting to think more about savingand investingthan spending, which is perhaps the sole upside to the market turmoil. Being an investing geek has become much more socially acceptable, and companies are taking notice.

RT @draenews: Del A Simple Way to Become Wealthy - Yahoo! Finance: http://yhoo.it/c1FEH8

"I gave excuses why I couldn't invest and then he said something that changed my thinking: saving and investing isn't hard. You just have to treat it like a bill. 'To max out your Roth IRA, divide by 12 and send that amount each month. Even easier, go to the finance office and set up an automatic allotment from your paycheck, and YOU'LL NEVER THINK ABOUT IT AGAIN.' [Perfect!] It's not that I didn't have enough money to invest. I just wasn't prioritizing how I used it. This forced me to make it part of my budget. That 15 minute conversation changed my life and might just make me a millionaire. Three reasons you should consider automatic investing. 1. It's easy. No remembering. Set it up once, and it gets done. 2. There's no emotional barrier. It's difficult to write a check each month when you have current wants. This helps you stick to long term plans. 3. You don't try to time the market. For the average investor, dollar cost averaging is best.

My first real job was as a junior enlisted member of the United States Air Force. I had great benefits, but as a low ranking

A Simple Way to Become Wealthy

From MIT. Information on Emerging Technologies & impact on business & society

academic study claims to use text in news to automate trading and beat Wall Street. Tested on 5 weeks + bizarre informative features --> sounds fishy

The ability to predict the stock market is, as any Wall Street quantitative trader (or quant) will tell you, a license to print money. So it should be of no small interest to anyone who likes money that a new system that works in a radically different way than previous automated trading schemes appears to be able to beat Wall Street's best quantitative mutual funds at their own game.

It's called the Arizona Financial Text system, or AZFinText, and it works by ingesting large quantities of financial news stories (in initial tests, from Yahoo Finance) along with minute-by-minute stock price data, and then using the former to figure out how to predict the latter. Then it buys, or shorts, every stock it believes will move more than 1% of its current price in the next 20 minutes - and it never holds a stock for longer.

Millionaires

時間とお金を失う方法。投資といってお金を使う。仕事に見えることをして時間を使う。これではまずい、と思う本能をごまかしてしまう。

I've written up the following directions to help you get there efficiently. Don't do it all in one sitting because you want your mind to digest the concepts over time. I suggest doing it over the course one week, setting aside a half an hour each day to go through this stuff.

Great walk-through of term sheets for startups

Great resource page for all founders interested in dealterms

I've written up the following directions to help you get there efficiently. Don't do it all in one sitting because you want your mind to digest the concepts over time. I suggest doing it over the course one week, setting aside a half an hour each day to go through this stuff.

Great walk-through of term sheets for startups

Great resource page for all founders interested in dealterms