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Understanding Risk (with stocks & shares)
A major risk you face, as an investor, is that what you buy will perform worse than you expect. Every investment in the known universe carries such risk (rising inflation can eat even the gold bars in the bank vault). You can't make a judgment about how bad the risk is, in a particular case, without considering both probability and scale. Consider a $1,000 investment that you believe will grow steadily over the coming decade. A 10% risk that its value will instead decline by 50% will be, for many people, far more serious than a 50% risk that its value will decline by 10%.
This is because risk isn't a statistical abstraction — what should be counted as a bad risk depends on your circumstances. Let's put it more graphically. Suppose I'm a bored billionaire, and I offer you a bet. I'll toss a fair coin once, and I'll pay you ten million dollars if it comes up "heads" and you only have to pay me one million if it comes up "tails." Mathematically, it's a no-brainer — I'm virtually giving money away. But in reality you'd have to be very wealthy too before this bet made sense. Why? Because, for us non-billionaires, an even chance of getting rich isn't worth an even chance of being financially ruined.
Some investments have a value that fluctuates a lot, these are said to be more volatile and (at least in the short run) more risky. Investments with more stable returns, or some insurance or guarantee behind them, are considered less risky. Investors commonly use asset allocation and diversification to reduce volatility, and thus the overall risk of their investment portfolio. To learn more about this, read Setting Goals and Staying on Course.
But notice that "riskiness" and "volatility" aren't necessarily the same thing. Sure, highly volatile investments are risky, but that's because they may fail, and their failure may prevent you from meeting your financial goals. Notice this: very low volatility investments, which fail to make significant returns relative to inflation, are also "risky" if they too prevent you from reaching key goals. In investing, being too conservative is also a strategy with risk attached.
So you need to risk some to make some. But you also have to consider your "volatility tolerance" — your financial (and psychological) ability to ride out market swings without sudden "panic" selling. People who are naturally conservative or risk-averse don't sleep well at night when the principal value of their investment, and possibly any growth they have obtained, seems to be evaporating. On the other hand, people with an aggressive investment attitude, who can ride out market downturns without panic, often put at least some of their money in more volatile investments. These can fluctuate wildly in the short-term, but they may offer superior inflation protection and long-term wealth-building prospects.
Which attitude you can afford to take depends crucially on your reserves. On "Black Monday" (October 9, 1987), the Dow lost over 500 points, almost a quarter of its value, in a single day. In conditions like that, with fully-grown brokers weeping and ruining their hand-tailored shirts, it was a lot easier to have steel nerves if you had a sensible reserve of cash, Certificates of Deposit, and other non-volatile savings to tide you over. Indeed, facing such a situation with all your assets in stock, and no cash in hand to buy next week's groceries, isn't investing — it's desperado gambling.
The best risk-reduction tool is knowledge. Never invest in something you don't understand. Always consider how an investment fits into your long-term goals. Always try to calculate, at least roughly, both the best that is likely to happen with a given investment and the worst — and take an honest look at how you feel about those prospects. Even a very good investment performance takes few people into the Rolls Royce showroom. On the other hand, even relatively bad performance should not force you into auctioning your furniture on E-Bay. Risk can't be eliminated, but it can be understood, respected, and managed.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
My FreeIQ
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This is a market for ideas website which allows you to become Affiliates, paid per links, and direct publishing. You have your own account with Free IQ and you can change the link which ever way you like.
Free IQ also has videos on how to market, advertise and information "Earn as a affiliate".
They allow you to sell your products on your blogs through them with account and you earn more money.
You can also purchase products, make a profit off people who join Free IQ and sell their products (educational videos on marketing) and many more, just click on one of the links and join, its free to join Free IQ. Give it try !!!
Earn as an Affiliate
There are several options for you to create affiliate links to refer Customers and Content Providers to Free IQ.
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Any Content Page
You can create your own affiliate link to most any page on Free IQ, including any Free or Paid Content page. To do so, just login to your account and then navigate to the content page you want to create an affiliate link to and then click the Get Affiliate Link button under the video or audio player. Then, enter the words you want for your link and click Save. The link displayed will be your affiliate link to this page. You can use any combination of letters and numbers that is not already in use.
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Sunday, December 14, 2008
Creating the Mock Site
Creating the Mock Site
After all design photo-types have been finalized, it is time to create what might be called the mock or alpha site. Implementation of the mock site starts by cutting a digital comp into its pieces and assembling the pages using HTML and, potentially, cascading style sheets ( CSS ). Try building the site using templates so that the entire site can be quickly assembled. However, do not put the content in place during this phase. Many of today’s modern publishing tools aid in the assembly of sample pages from screen composites. For example, consider the digital home page composites of the Demo Company site shown below.
We then can use a tool such as Macromedia Fireworks (www.macromedia.com/software/fireworks) to “slice” the sample layout into its appropriate pieces.
Designers should be cautious when using the HTML produced by slice and save features of applications such as Fireworks or Adobe ImageReady. These applications often produce non-standard, very complex, or difficult-to-maintain markup.
With the various pieces that make up the Home Page and the various sub-pages of a site, a Web designer can use a Web editor to assemble the components into fully working pages lacking real content; greeking text of the form “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” should be used to give pages form. The fully constructed mock site may lack real content, but can give developers and testers a true flavor of how the site will eventually work.
Producing the HTML
While visuals and technical elements are very important to Web designers, the heart of nearly every modern Web page is still markup. Creation of HTML/XHTML should be taken very seriously as it must be a stable foundation upon which we will build presentation and interactivity.
Interactivity of page
Build with server and client side programming
Presentation of page
Build with HTML, CSS, flash and media elements
structure of page;
Build in HTML / XHTML
Yet despite its important as the page’s foundation, Web designers often are more concerned with how they creation is. In truth, there are pros, and cons to every method of HTML page and some of their pros and cons are presented in one of the images in the last post.
The reality of creating HTML documents is that there are occasions to use nearly every approach. For example, making a quick change of a single tag often is fastest in a pure text editor, saving out large existing print documents might make sense using a translator.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
The Site Plan
The site plan
Once a goal, audience, and site requirements have been discussed and documented, a formal site plan should be drawn up. The site plan should contain the following sections;
Short Goal Statement;
This section contains a brief discussion to explain the overall purpose of the site and its basic success measurements.
Detailed Goal Discussion;
This section discusses the site’s goals in detail and provides measurable goals to verify the benefit of the site.
Audience Discussion;
This section profiles the user who would visit the site. The section would describe both audience characteristics as well as the tasks the audience would try to accomplish at the site.
Usage Discussion;
This section discusses the various task/ visit scenarios for the site’s users. Start first with how the user arrives at the site and then follow the visit to its conclusion. This section may also include a discussion of usage measurements, such as number of downloads, page accesses per visit. Forms being filled out, and so on as they relate to the detailed goal discussion.
Content Requirements;
The content requirements section provides a laundry list of all text, images, and other media required in the site. A matrix showing the required content, form, existence, and potential owner or creator is useful, as it shows how much content may be outstanding. A simple matrix is shown below;
Technical Requirements;
This section provides an overview of the types of technology the site will employ, such as HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, CGI, Java, plug-ins, and so on. It should cover any technical constraints such as performance requirements, security requirements, multi-device or multiplatform considerations, any other technical requirements that are related to the visitor’s capabilities.
Visual Requirements;
The visual requirements section outlines basic considerations for interface design. The section should indicate in broad strokes how the site should relate to any existing marketing materials and provide an indication of user constriants for graphics and multimedia, such as screen size, color depth, bandwidth, and so on. The section may outline some specifics, such as organizational logo usage limitations, fonts requirements, or color use; however, many of the details of the site’s visuals will be determined later in the development process.
Delivery Requirements;
This section indicates the delivery requirements, particularly any hosting considerations. A basic discussion of how many users will visit the site, how many pages will be consumed on a typical day, and the size of a typical page should be included in this section. Even if these are just guesses, it is possible to provide a brief analysis of the server hardware, software, and bandwidth required to deliver the site.
Content
Item Description Content type Content
format Exist? Owner
Butler Robot
Press Release Press release for new Butler 7 series robot that ran in Robots Today Text Microsoft Word Yes Jennifer Tuggle
Software
Agreement form Brief description of legal liability of using trial robot personality software Text Paper Yes John P. lawyer
Handheld Supercomputer
Screen Shot Picture of the new Demo Company Cray-9000 handheld palm size computer Image GIF No Pascal Wirth
Welcome form
President
Message Brief introduction letter from President to welcome user to site Text Microsoft Word No President’s
Executive
Assistant
Miscellaneous Requirements;
Other requirements may need to be detailed in the site plan, such as language requirements, legal issues, industry standards, and other similar considerations. They may not necessarily require their own separate discussion, but instead may be addressed throughout the other sections of the document.
Site Structure Diagram;
This section provides a site structure or flow diagram detailing the various sections within a site. Appropriate labels for sections and general ideas for each section should be developed based on the various user scenarios explored in earlier project phases. Organizations of the various sections of the site is important and may have to be refined over time. Often, a site diagram will look something like the figure below.
Staffing;
This section details the resources required to execute the site. Measurements can be in simple man-hours and should relate to each of the four staffing areas; content, technology, visual design, and management.
Time Line;
The time line should show how the project would proceed using the staffing estimates from the preceding section combined with the steps in the process model outlined earlier in this post.
Budget;
A budget is primarily determined from the staffing requirements and the delivery requirements. However, marketing costs or other issues such as content licensing could affect the site cost as well.
This is just a suggested site plan- the actual organization and content of the site plan is up to the developer. However, don’t skip writing the plan even though it may seem daunting. Without such a fashion (almost trial-and-error manner), which may result in many false starts and waste time bids form outside vendors on the Web site without a detailed specification.
A site diagram will look something like this one shown;
Search Home copyright key
Site map database-driven
About Contact Us Jobs
History News
Products Releases FAQs
Domes Corporate Events
Robots Production
Balloons Economy
PSVs luxury
Cargo
Sport
A finished plan doesn’t allow you to immediately proceed to implementation. Once the specification is developed, it should be questioned one last time, preferably by a colleague or someone with an outside perspective. The completed specification may reveal unrealistic estimates that will throw you back to the stage of questioning initial goals or audience. If it survives, it may be time to actually continue the process with the design and prototyping stage.