The Evils of Collectivism

“Collectivism is a sociopathic mental disorder of tyrants, dictators and freeloaders. It has caused massive human suffering. It is responsible for the deaths of well over 100 million people. It is responsible for unbelievable environmental destruction. It has destroyed progress and innovation at every level. Collectivism creates poverty in finance, spirit and character at every turn. It creates shortages, black markets, unfairness, corruption and discrimination. It causes famine and sickness. It is dishonest, it is evil and it is just plain wrong.” – Jason Hartman

#59 – The Four Pillars of a Micropreneurs, by Jason Hartman

The path of a micropreneur is one with unique attributes and challenges.  With a business that you operate yourself, it may seem that resources for accomplishing your goals are severely limited.  However, it is quite possible to leverage business relationships so that you are able to take advantage of vast resources and knowledge.  By operating your own shop, it will allow you to maximize the time spent in pursuit of your business goals and personally control the direction of your business.  The fundamentals of being a micropreneur are articulated in the four pillars.  These four pillars are Passion, Profits, Control and Leverage.

1)      Passion

1. A primary purpose of becoming a micropreneur is the ability to pursue your life’s passion.  In some cases this passion can be a particular line of work or industry, and in other cases this passion can be time with family and freedom to travel.  The most important first step is to do some serious soul searching to determine your life’s passion.  Generally speaking, a burning passion is something that doesn’t feel like work when you are doing it.
2. A famous cliché of the professional world states that “If it was fun, it wouldn’t be called work.”  That sentiment is truer than many of us would like to admit.  By creating and building an entrepreneurial venture that is oriented around your personal passion, it will help to create the necessary fire for building a business that pushes past failure to cross the line of success.
3. It may be that your ventures as a micropreneur start in a small niche that is chosen specifically for its viability in producing immediate profits.  As your business ventures continue, you will have opportunities to shift the emphasis of your activities toward your personal passion.  You are in total control of the direction your business takes.

2)      Profits

1. One of the common characteristics of a micropreneur is somebody that is pursuing a personal passion, and in some cases there are more profitable business or employment opportunities available.  The hitch is that these other opportunities either require an onerous time commitment, are particularly unpleasant, or both.  While it is important for a micropreneur to pursue their passions, it is also critical to generate profits from your entrepreneurial activities.
2. In the beginning, many micropreneurs generate very modest revenue, but succeed because their expenses are kept very low.  When you engage in a scalable business with expenses that do not increase at the same rate as your revenue grows, it can allow you the opportunity to generate increasingly attractive profits in the future.  When you are starting as a micropreneur, it is most important to take action that generates immediate cash flow.  There will be time and opportunities to scale-up your revenue in the future, but nothing will happen if you do not take action.
3. It is certainly true that many people value lifestyle considerations over money, but it is equally true that money is a necessity of life.  As a micropreneur, it is critical to leverage your time and the time of people who you work with.  This will allow your business to accommodate your lifestyle, instead of forcing your lifestyle to accommodate your business.

3)      Control

1. Many people currently feel that their lives are spinning further out of control with each passing day.  It is well known that many corporations require employees to ‘play the game’ if they want to succeed and achieve promotions.  This frustration has left people with a feeling that their professional lives are being dictated by their company and that they must absorb ever increase time commitments.
2. There is also a sizeable population of people who are losing control of their financial life. In many cases, these are people who have been trained in an area of specialty that is not delivering the level of income that is necessary to support their lifestyle.  These people are facing a very real choice between lowering their lifestyle and finding a way to increase their income.
3. The path of a micropreneur is frequently appealing to both types of person, since it provides financial opportunities to people that do not fit into the mold for traditional corporate employees and provides control over time and work to experienced professionals who have grown tired of the demands placed upon them by their profession.

4)      Leverage

1. Robert Allen once commented that wealth is when small efforts produce large results and poverty is when large efforts produce small results.  Producing large results with small efforts is the fundamental basis of success, since it allows you to multiply the impact of your time.  As a micropreneur, one of the primary goals that you will be seeking to accomplish is both business and financial leverage.
2. Business leverage allows you to automate your business activities so that a maximum amount of activities are handled by somebody else or something else.  Business systems are a typical means by which this kind of leverage is achieved.  As a micropreneur, you can attain business leverage without the necessity of hiring employees.  This is accomplished by partnering with service agencies that will conduct routine business activities on your behalf in exchange for a negotiated fee.  By simplifying business activities, it allows more time for the entrepreneur to focus on the strategy of their venture instead of the day to day operations.
3. Financial leverage is the art of using other people’s money to capitalize your investments and ventures.  This will allow you to generate passive income, and larger rates of return on attractive investments.  By utilizing financial leverage, a micropreneur can minimize the amount of time devoted to work so that more time is available for other interests such as family, education, or personal hobbies.

http://www.CreatingWealthPodcast.com & http://JasonHartman.com

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#38 – The Creating Wealth Show #105

The Creating Wealth Show #105:

Propelling investment success using econometrics and

competitive analytics

In the one hundred and fifth episode of Jason’s extremely popular Creating Wealth show, he interviews David Savlowitz, the head of Competitive Analytics (CA), a niche full-service market intelligence firm. In this show, David explains the way that his firm uses a multiplicity of data to generate more robust information for their clients than can be obtained by the simplistic scorecards that are employed by most of the financial media. The methods that CA employs analyze supply and demand by using statistics, econometrics, predictive modeling, comprehensive research, and applied mathematics.

In this show, Jason talks with David about the ways that Competitive Analytics uses comprehensive data analysis to drive prediction models for their clients. One of the methods that they frequently employ is an economic composite score that is based on a multiplicity of weighted indicators. When applying this methodology to the general economy, David’s model is predicting the bottom of the economic cycle in Q4, 2009 with a return to equilibrium by Q4, 2011. Furthermore, David’s models are forecasting a U-shaped recovery that will have an extended trough. This stands in sharp contrast to previous V-shaped recoveries that experienced an immediate “bounce back” from the market lows. The reason for this extended trough is because a significant adjustment needs to be made in order to equalize the debt-financed over-consumption that fueled the recent asset bubbles.

The unique part of David’s methodology is the fact that his team uses a very wide variety of input variables in an attempt to capture future items that may become big swing factors. He rightly understands the implicit danger that can be present within quantitative economics for people that do not fully understand the analysis. This danger stems from the fact that econometric analysis uses trends in the past to predict the future, and thus cannot anticipate the impact of events that have never happened before. The importance of this insight comes from the fact that rare events like September 11th, 2001, the Russian Financial Crisis, and the collapse of credit default swaps were never incorporated into any prediction models because they had never happened before.

Each of these events had an unfathomable impact on the marketplace that left people who were blindly following technical trends of the past absorbing unbelievable losses (or pushing those losses onto the taxpayer in the form of a government bailout). As a point of reference; the hedge fund “Long Term Capital Management” was the brainchild of Robert Merton and Myron Scholes. It made heavy use of econometrics to undertake highly leveraged arbitrage trades in the bond market, but nearly collapsed the financial markets after the Russian Financial Crisis in September of 1998. This became the first iteration of a “too big to fail” argument, and is being used as the precedent for the government bailouts of financial institutions that are currently being pushed on the marketplace.

This is not to say that quantitative analysis and econometrics are implicitly dangerous. It is simply to say that it is a tool . . . a very powerful tool that needs to be understood before it is used. When applied by knowledgeable professionals, it can generate valuable insights. When given over to pseudo-intellectual or short-sighted agents, it can become a tool of mass financial destruction as the algorithms become an item of blind faith that drives insane investment decisions. As with all tools, the result depends largely on how it is used. Thankfully, David keeps the scope and limits of his analytics in perspective. A strong dose of this perspective is highly advised for anybody that seeks to incorporate econometric analysis into investment decisions.

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#24 – Want Fries With That Seminar? by Jason Hartman

In today’s video from http://JasonHartman.com, we discuss how Platinum Properties Investor Network works, and why we give away so much properties investment information. http://CreatingWealthPodcast.com

What we do at Platinum Properties is not brain surgery.  There’s nothing in here that the average investor with an average head on his or her shoulders can’t comprehend.  The real trick, and the part where most people fail miserably, is to recognize what an amazing opportunity real estate ownership offers, especially in these tough economic times.

To be honest, we can’t stand the thieves on Wall Street, but there is one thing we learned – the real estate industry needs a good brokerage firm. That’s where we come in.  We aren’t self-anointed ‘gurus’ on an eternal mission to upsell you to the next product.  We sell education.  We don’t have a series of ever-more expensive seminars.  There’s only one and, while you might want to attend more than once to truly internalize the material, it’s not necessary.

We’re going to take you by the brain and show you step-by-step our Complete Solution For Real Estate Investors™.  This is our comprehensive guide to income property investing.  We’re going to show you a tried and true method to purchase property from the best builders in thriving local markets around the country.  How do we know it works?  We know because our own portfolios are built using this method.  It’s how company founder and CEO, Jason Hartman, made himself a millionaire while still in his twenties.

What’s the best way to become a millionaire?  A couple possibilities are to start with a billion dollars and start an airline, or start with two million dollars and buy stocks.  Another option is to use real estate to take advantage of leverage, cash flow, and appreciation as tools for steadily building wealth.  Let us teach you the investing secret that isn’t a secret – real estate.  It really works.

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