Category Archives: Investment

Will the price of gold continue to rise?

Business, concepts, Investment, Money, , , , ,

Recently I have been posting answers to questions on yahoo.  It is fun.  Here is one I did today.

Question:

Will the price of gold continue to rise?

My Answer:

Well no one has a crystal ball.  It could go up or go down. But one can read the signs and make projections.

I assume when you say price, you mean dollars per ounce.  Much of the rise in the price of gold was really a reduction in the value of the dollar, some was the demand for gold.  It is all really supply and demand.  The price per dollar of gold will depend a lot on how much money is created in the world, how much credit is out there.  In 2007 the trend was to create a ton of money, and with the low interest rates now going into effect it will do the same thing.

So it all boils down to a bet, do you bet it will go up or down, I say it is a 65% chance it will go up in the next year and a 35% chance it will go down.  I do think you may have a higher percent return on silver than on gold, simply because silver is very useful in many things and is in growing demand, and the supply is not growing as fast.

Also no matter what metal you choose to buy, I would highly suggest you buy the actual metal, not a paper title saying you have ownership.  The best way to do this is simply walk into to any coin shop and buy it.

Gold is a great hedge to inflation, but I do think that many other things would be a better investment right now.

The future of Real Estate

Business, Government, Investment, Money, real estate, , , , ,

Many people are wondering if Real Estate will bounce back.   Well the answer must be “OF COURSE”.

It is all supply and demand.  The run up in 2002-2005 was simply due to huge demand.  This demand was caused mostly by very cheap lending rates and how easy it was to get loans.  During this time millions of people purchased their first house.  Another factor was the reduction of the value of the dollar.  Something can go up in price while keeping a steady value when the value of the currency it is measured in falls.  This is also what happened in the 2000-2006 years.

So what caused prices to go down in 2007?  Well supply and demand again.  In many places developers were very excited about the prices going up so they ramped up production to record levels. (Increase supply) Next came a credit crunch, and the cheap money and the easy money left the system.  This made most people not able to qualify to get the house they wanted.  (Lower Demand).   To make matters worse many people felt they were at the top and that it would be a good time to sell so they listed their house for sale.  (Increase Supply).  Then in many places like Phoenix, there was a huge crackdown on illegal aliens.  Tens of thousands left their houses, many did not sell they simply just left.  Most were renters and left their lease, making the landlord have issues. (Reduced demand, increased supply).   Some people were used to the easy credit and have been living well beyond their means for years now, and when that stopped they could not pay their bills, and that included their house and they could not sell or refinance so they were foreclosed on.  (Lower demand for ownership, higher demand for rentals.  Higher supply of homes)   So with all of these things working together there was no reason for prices to not go down.

So where do we go from here, Well prices must go back up.  Builders stopped most building in mid 2007, and most places have many more people moving there than houses being built.  (Decrease Supply)  Well the credit crunch seems to be letting up, more deals are getting approved, mostly with government support.  (Increase Demand)  The lower prices are making people think twice about selling now, and many houses are coming off the market and turned into rentals.  (Lower supply for ownership, higher supply for rentals)  The illegal alien mess will not be resolved any time soon but most the people who are going to move already have.  The number of loans that have payments that reset soon is going down, also the government is making new rules to help these people keep their houses, which will result in less foreclosures.

In 1974 the median home price was 32,000.
In 1984 the median home price was 72,400 (a 126% gain in 10 years)
In 1994) the median home price was 107,200 (a 48% gain in 10 years or 235% in 20 years)
In 2004) the median home price was 185,200 (a 72% gain in 10 years or 478% gain in 30 years)

During this same time the size of houses increased from less than 900 square feet to well over 1700 on average.

So it is now a great time to invest, everything is on sale due to these supply/demand factors.  But where do you invest?

There are a few underlying economic facts to consider when picking the location of your investment.  First you want to be in a place that is growing, meaning more people are moving there than moving out.  Then you want to see how many vacant houses are on the market.   If you look at a city with 50,000 vacant houses but 10,000 people move there each month (These are the numbers for Phoenix) you can see that soon the houses will be full.   A city like Detroit is not good because people are leaving, there is no growth.  You need growth for demand, and demand vs supply sets the price of real estate.

Thanks for reading, please subscribe and post a comment on this subject.

The value of financial education is huge.

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It is said you never really know what you don’t know. It is not until you learn something that you really understand the value of the thing you just learned. Some things are very valuable and other have little value. For example if you get a little education on real estate investing and how it REALLY works, (Not always what you see on the TV) it will rock your world.

On the other hand I went to a 4 year university and at the end of it all I felt that I could have learned much more on my own. I am still glad I went for the social side of it all. Too many people spend their whole life in the rat race, it is like a giant treadmill, you only earn enough to get current on your bills, and if you ever make more you tend to spend more.

There are many bloggers, most much more popular than I am, that tell the masses how to save their meager earnings, and how to find deals so that they can spend less. But you really can only save so much. Even if you could save 50% of your earnings you still would take years to really get ahead. What they miss usually is that it is MUCH easier to increase your earnings than reduce spending. It takes a different kind of education, a type that most people do now learn. One nugget of info can change your life. It is much easier to live below your means if you increase you means. You do need to control costs, but spend more time increasing income than controlling costs and you will be ahead in the long run.

There is another blog, by a successful guy who gets this, I highly suggest you read his blog. It is called 7Million7Years. He recently wrote a blog about home equity, and that you should not put all your net worth into it. Read it here

Are you ready to learn how to take your investing, and your thoughts to the next level, well the next step is get educated. Read books by Robert Kiyosaki, Donald Trump, Douglas Andrew and Ric Edelman. I have found them to have the best books on real financial advise. Most of the others really give the WRONG advise. I don’t know what they are thinking sometimes.

If you are interested in real estate investing (Which you should be) my company, Capital Active, sponsors events where we teach people, for FREE, how to get started and how to be successful right from the start. If you are interested in an upcoming event sign up here.

Thanks and have a great day, leave a comment please.

Choose Your 5 Faves Wisely, it will change your life.

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I have heard for years, before T|Mobile even existed, that the 5 (Adult) people that you spend the most time with will shape your life.  You will become like them in most every way.  The amount of money that you earn will be near the average of these people, your ethics will be similar to the ones they have, your hobbies will start to match them and in many ways you will reflect these people in your life.

For me I have two people who I spend a lot of time with at this time, my wife and my business partner.  But beyond that the people are always changing.  And this is the key, when I decide who to spend time with I am REALLY deciding who I want to be.  Do I want to be like my friend who is a great speaker, a multi-millionaire, great to his family and a great all around guy….well of course I do.  Do I really want to be like the people who don’t care, who just do the minimum in life, and have bad things in their life……well no I don’t.   My problem in my life, I hate to admit, is that many times I spend time with the second type of person.  I don’t really know why I do this, it is not in line with my goals but yet I find myself in this position.  Maybe it is because when I am with them I am the one who knows everything, I am the one who is in charge.  When I am with successful people it often points out my flaws and challenges me, logically this is what I want but often emotionally it is hard to handle after a while.  For a few years there I strayed off course.  I seem to have done this a few times in my life.  I imagine where I would be if I did better, if I was bold enough to do everything that I imagine.

So how does this relate to business, well your personal development is the KEY to your success in life and therefore your success in business.  You choose who are your 5 Faves, and that choice determines you whole life.  Choose wisely.

Emerald Computers, a short history from a business POV

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I started a computer company in 1998, and thought I knew it all but I quickly learned so much more. I moved that store a few doors down and this time designed in the way I wanted all future stores to be like. I created systems for doing everything. Then I set out on opening more stores. By then it was 2004 and the market for computers was crashing, the wars by the big companies erased all the profits in the industry. By 2005 we were back to one store. By the end of 2007 we decided that the retail storefront was not the way to go. We moved to a much lower rent area, and just serve corporate and online customers, the ones with the best profits. The wars are over and the profits are back in the computer industry, and with our reduced cost, decade of experience we are ready to explode. All we need now is a capital infusion to get us to the next level. Even if we only get .5% of the US market that is still huge.

Now we are looking for investors.  People who can see the vision and are willing to go there with us.  They will, of course, share in our success.

Cheer up, the nation depends on it.

Business, Inspiration, Investment, Money, , , ,

We are not really in a recession or a depression…  What we are in is a crisis of consumer confidence.   Let me explain, when people think that things may be bad they stop spending and that thinking CAUSES things to be bad.  It is funny, over 70% of the people think the economy is in trouble but also over 70% of people said that they personally were doing as good or better than 2 years ago.

The reason they think this way is because they hear the stories from the media, the hear what is going on with their unlucky friends, and the belive the hype.  In reality most every measure of corporate profits is UP, and many other measures are also up.  The GDP will be up this year, exports are way up.  Things are looking up in many ways, so stop being so down, tune out the negative media and cheer up.  When you do this everything will get better, spending will go up, sales will go up and, yes, even housing prices will go up again.

Start today, go buy something.  If you are one of the 70% that are doing fine, then do your civic duty and shop, shop like you did two years ago.  If you want a computer go to Emerald Computers this month and get $50 off by using coupon code march50.

Anyway cheer up.  It will make you feel better, and help our economy grow.

The key to commercial success for Linux

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You use a computer, and read blogs so you probably know a bit about computer and you probably know about Linux. Linux is great, robust and free OS. It runs almost all web servers and websites. Including google, wordpress and billions of others. Linux is very secure, robust, fast and hack proof. It makes great servers because servers are ran by experts. Without Linux the web would not exist as we know it.

Well for over a decade now they have been trying to make it popular for your desktop computer that you use every day as well. One of the best parts about Linux is that anyone with knowledge is free to change and customize it exactly how they see fit, and they have. Almost everything in Linux has at least 3 different programs that do the same thing, but they do it in different ways. People then pick and choose the different parts of Linux and combine them into a complete Operating System. They call this a distribution or distro. There are now 100’s of up to date distros, all with different ways of doing things and different followings. This has helped Linux in the past but in the world of mass merchandising it also has hurt Linux.

The problem is that when a company writes software to work on Linux they must assume things about how the computer is set up. Because there are 100’s of different ways to do this, and only a few million Linux users, they simply don’t bother. Companies that make drivers and hardware also don’t bother. The Linux people thus have to do all of it themselves. And, if they do it for one distro of Linux it probably will not work on many others. So the game makers, and the people who make the huge programs we need to function usually don’t bother making a Linux version. There is no Photoshop, QuickBooks, MSN or Yahoo chat with webcam, or robust video editing software in Linux because these are very complex and would usually be distro specific, and the userbase does not justify the cost.

The strength of Microsoft Windows was the fact that it was closed and controlled. People could not change the OS, all the rules from computer to computer were exactly the same. Because of this people could code for just ONE OS, that they knew would be supported and work for at least a decade. This is exactly what they did, 1000’s of companies started writing. Hardware makers could design one driver to work with the OS and everything was easy, because it was a standard platform, that was predictable. Windows was not the coolest, and it sure was not the most secure or robust, and they charged a huge price for it, but all of this was worth it because it was STANDARD. Nothing is more important than something being standard when it comes to business, and all the geeks need to learn this. McDonalds does not made the best burgers, but I have ate them in 5 different nations and they are all the same. When it is the same it is predictable, and you need that to get investors and make money flow. This is the main reason the Linux world still has less than 1% of desktop computers.

So now what? Well in a dream world someone with great power and clout would take all the best parts of Linux, get a ton of people behind him and release the ultimate distro of Linux. He would promise to not change it for at least 6 months and also promise that anything written for it will work for years on the newer versions. By creating a standard and unifying the Linux world programmers would start making software work on Linux and soon it would gain marketshare. It will be better and be free than windows, and soon takeover the world from the grasp of Microsoft.

Someone else, a tech billionaire named Mark Shuttleworth thought EXACTLY the same way, and he used his power and clout to do it. He calls it Ubuntu. He only release every 6 months, and he has static versions that are supported for two years or more. He then went much farther, he made a community around it. They have great free tech support with forums and chat. As well has many other great features and designs.  My good friend Matthew Helmke is one of the leading Ubuntu experts and forum leaders and inspired me to try it out.

This OS has the chance to become huge. For over a year now Linux has been the top distro, and it growing faster than the rest of the Linux world put together. The standard it presents has already encouraged many companies to start writing software for Linux. Many large games are not tested on Ubuntu. If you use Linux, switch to Ubuntu, for the sake of the Linux world. Raising a unified standard is the only hope that Linux has at commercial success.

I hope this explanation of a very tech thing from a business perspective educated both the techs and the business people who usually don’t understand each other.

I will offer much more of this sort of knowledge in the future so be sure to subscribe to this blog!.

Jason Dragon.

Launching the Bear Market by killing a Bear

Investment, Money, The World, , ,

Chase (JPM) is getting the deal of the century.  Buying bears stern for just 1% of the value it had just three weeks ago.  It is totally CRAZY.

The Fed is just printing money like crazy (Well creating it on a computer).  It does this first by lowering the interest rate which will make banks borrow more money.  Second they changed the rules and they are now allowing investment banks to borrow from the fed.

The dollar is just crashing.  I have talked about this over and over, be long in the dollar (See the other blogs for what I mean on this).  Silver and gold are spiking, and the dollar fell a few % vs almost every other currency.

This is going to cost the stock market today.  I would say that if the market only falls by 1% then they are lucky.  Check back in a 10 hours and we will see what happens.   Too bad I did not get to buy those options in BSC…would have made a ton.

The dollar is so weak, and we are paying for it, GREAT!

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For years now we have been borrowers.  We spend way more than we make.  I am not just talking about the government but also the people.  You can see this in our balance of trade.  Because of this the dollar is falling like a rock.  People don’t want to lend money because it will probably devalue more than the interest gained.

Imagine that I would lend you $1 million dollars and you need to pay me $1.1 million a year from now, well if the dollar goes down 20% I am only getting paid back (In present dollars) $880,000.  So why on earth would I lend you the money.  This is the problem that we are having now.  Up until recently most of the money being lent to Americans was coming for foreign investment.  These foreign investors as a whole are hesitant to lend us money.

So what is the solution that the government thought up.  Well they offered to lend money, billions of it, to the banks so that they can lend it back out.  But where did the fed get this money to do this, they simply typed it into a computer and created it.  This makes more dollars in existence, and will further sink the dollar down.  This cycle will keep repeating and soon our dollar will be worth very little.

What will this do for us.  Well it will make the dollar cost of most things go up.  Even real estate will soon start to go up with all of this.  Gold is now over 1000, silver is over $20 and oil is at record highs over $110.  This has been coming for YEARS now, I have been talking about it for about 3 years.  This just that start, until we start exporting much more than we import, and we stop spending so much this will keep happening.

So what is the best position to be in?  Well you want to have as little dollars as you can, you even would want to be short on dollars.  This means to borrow them.  I have debt for my house, and for other things, and when I saw this coming I took out as much as I could and invested it in things overseas, and in physical things such as real estate, and I think that in a few months, the value of these assets will be much larger than the debt.  The banks have figured this out and stopped lending to most people.

So what will happen to people who were not ready?  Well it will not be good.  If you have a job, and save money and have no debt you are in the worst position. The money you have saved will be worth less than it should be.  The

What can you do not?  Well as I said before the people who see it first are the ones that are in the best shape, they can prepare for the change.  Now it is too late, there is very little that can be done.  Right now I think it would be good to move money overseas, invest in companies with a large amount of foreign exposure.  Pay off only the minimum on debt.  Don’t keep cash, go turn it into silver.  But MOST important, if you can afford it GO BUY REAL ESTATE.  The prices will never be this low again, you can still usually borrow money to buy real estate and pay back later with money that is worth less.  Prices will go UP much faster than your pay will go up, so be ready for that.  Food cost will go up, and fuel costs will go way up.  Your pay will probably stay flat.  Consider a side business if you need more money.

What should the government do?  Well they were the ones that created this, they were lending money out so cheaply, and printing money like crazy to keep us afloat.  You got to remember that the government is over 9 trillion in DEBT.  They also have over 30 TRILLION in obligations to people in the form of social security and government retirements.  This is a huge debt.  So what they did is they tied this to CPI, the fake, government created index of inflation.  Today it was released and it was 0%.  The people on CNBC just laughed at how fake it is.  But because it is 0% that means that the social security debt does not go up this month.  Now, by any measure dollar is worth MUCH less now than 5 years ago, I would say it is worth half as much or so.  So basically the government just CUT their debt in half because of the weak dollar, and this is very smart.  But they can’t let people know this is going on, they have to spin this so that foreign investors and the general population don’t know what is going on.  For all the people who are not watching are going to be hurt, but for the government, the big investors and all the people who see the signs and act on it, this will be a great time of huge wealth creation.

Jason Dragon
http://www.jasondragon.com/
http://www.capitalactive.com/

The flow of investment capital and how to keep it active

concepts, Investment, , , , , , ,

Well here is a quick mental exercise. I am going to think about, and share with you, my thoughts about investment money.

Well the main areas of investment I see are:

  • Real Estate (Commercial and Residential Property)(I am not counting owner occupied housing because that is not primarily an investment.)
  • Securities (Stocks, Bonds, Mutual Funds, Futures)
  • Private Equity (Direct investment in private companies)
  • Metals and Jewels (Large amounts of money are kept in Gold, Silver and other precious metals)
  • Cash (Yes many people keep money in cash, CD’s and deposit accounts.)
  • International Investing (All of these areas but outside of the US)

Now, because the total amount of money is VERY QUICKLY increasing, the actual value of a dollar must be going down. This is evident by looking at the price of the dollar verses most any investment. You could have invested in most any are for the last 5 years and had a positive outcome vs. the dollar. Over 90% of this money is owned by less than 3% of the population. The total size of all of this investment money is well in excess of 70 TRILLION dollars. That is more money than most people can even imagine.

One important concept that I have noticed is the fact that money shushes around, from one investment type to another. In the late 1990’s the stock market was all the rage, and most other areas of investment were growing slower than normal, most investment money went there so the values went sky high. Then the hype popped in 2000-2001, and people started taking their money out of stocks, the people who left early took most of the profits.

From 2002 until 2006 the hype was all about Real Estate, as a whole the US made over 6 TRILLION dollars investing in real estate. That is about $40,000 for EVERY adult in the United States, and this number does NOT count the house you live in, only investment properties. By the start of 2007 people made a ton of money and started to see an end to the run-up in prices of Real Estate, so they started cashing out. Again the people who did it first made the most money.

Now this money STILL is out there. Where is it going? The easiest way to find this out is to look at what is going up in value. Metals is one huge area that has seem price spikes from 2007 until now. Another area is Private Equity. Most people who made this huge money qualify to invest in Private Equity and they have done so. They have brought companies private, they have started new companies.

Another area that has seen a huge increase in investment is the INTERNATIONAL segment. New cities are being built all over the world. The rate of investment in much of the world is on record pace.

Because of the vast size of stocks, and the fond memories many investors have, much of the money has returned to stock market. But many people who made a ton of money in Real Estate are looking to return to that market also.

So where should you invest??? The key is to move into the segment first and leave first, but it is hard to predict what will happen. For example I think metals were HOT but they are now near the top, and as we have seen when this happens there often is a fall. A lot of money has gone back to the stock market and more will follow, so there will still be a few years to make money in that area. Real Estate has taken a huge hit but should come up later, the returns will not be huge but at least there will be returns. So the two areas I see, where I would invest my money is in Private Equity and in International. In much of the world the Real Estate boom is just starting.

The best thing would be to start a company in a fast growing nation, and take advantage of the growth. This is hard so the next best thing would be to invest, using Private Equity, in a US company that does a good deal of business internationally.

When we stated Capital Active, this is exactly what we thought about, the fact that there is a huge amount of Capital out there, and that it needs to be kept moving around, kept active doing different things at different times.

Tell me what you think, please leave a comment to this blog, tell me if you agree or disagree.