Wealth through sharing...

Wealth is not without sharing... in fact, the very act of sharing it, is the creation of wealth. It's why I find Empire Avenue quite facinating. It's not really a status of wealth, but rather, a thermostat of activity. The quality of contribution is left for debate, but the idea is there. I find that there is a lot of typical behaviour in trying to do what typically most do to trying to increase their worth... of course, that is not possible without sharing. Sharing of your wealth through investing in others. Sharing of your knowledge and thoughts through posting and replies. Even Empire Avenue does the same. It invests in you blindly when you sign up. It buys any shares you sell whatever the price. This is where I would like to see them be a little more realistic, but I see that they are actually trying to expand their site, not get people to act like they do in real life (hording)! Not to say everyone keeps to their own, but if we invested more freely in our own needs like we do when a newbie signs up from across the world... we would be sharing a lot more and not worrying about how much we have. For others will do the same for us...

Influencing your investments...

Today I bought 200 shares in CDELIA. Was an impromptu bias decision, she's my sister. Of course, I know her more than the average investor thus, I can say honestly, her stock will be worth the buy when it is low right now. That's Buffet style investing, knowing your investment really good. Visiting it, understanding it, recognizing potential and believing in their plan for growth... so I made a good investment today, but how do we get that from everyone else we decide to invest? Or is it not worth it? I guess it all depends how much fun you want to have here on EA rising your portfolio. Your next best bet than investing personally in a relationship in one of your investor is to actually encourage them. You could pick out your top potentials based on their high connections and low activity. This post is not meant to go into detail, but rather bring up interest in certain areas of this economical game. But you can be creative. Just letting them know how much you enjoyed a post, pic, etc. (of course don't lie) can change their course of online activity. But more importantly of all, helping do what they do love to do... which could backfire as I did for others when I left twitter... for the second time. Made me realize I rather focus on other things, like this!

EA Commodities?

An interesting site has come up to my attention worth noting. Commodity trading public tracking of portfolios. Like EA crossed with Facebook. I won’t review the site as the link below does, but did want to shine the spotlight on it for a bit since I used to be a commodity trader back in the early 2000’s. I did quite well until Orange Juice got the better of me (It’s not that I should have gone long on the contract, but that I moved my trailing stop. Big time no no. It was going to protect me and I unplugged it like BP’s oil spill). However, I am happy to say that I left the game with a small profit and tons of experience. What I didn’t know at the time despite my father’s warning of investing “indirectly” (for profit, rather than for results), was that the commodity market is a big time control network for the food industry (second link). Thus, I do not intend to touch that method of investing until there is accountability for the investment other than gain/loss profit. And this site I mentioned did an interesting job of putting together the trading and the profiling.


http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/12/etoro-who-doesnt-want-a-little-social-mixed-with-commodities-trading/

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled-on-starvation-2016088.html#mkcpgn=twstdwytk

Don’t get stuck in the slow lane...

Many of us can begin to get comfortable to our stock price's range. Although many of my previous posts give low importance to this "number", EA makes it a point to fluctuate your stock price with your engaging activity online. So therefore, if you are active but you seem to be stuck in a certain range, like say 10e-15e/share, then ask yourself if that’s your real reflected value. If it is not, then signal and turn into the faster lanes. Find out what it takes to get to the next range and signal others you are about to make the move (holds you accountable and alerts those who speculate to buy)... of course, maintaining it requires that much more effort. So really, if you are like me... going after those precious dividends... you’ll just look at your portfolio and laugh (well maybe giggle silently) at all those who work so hard to drive up there stock price... and yet have little show for it. So if you are going to do it, make sure you put your hard effort to good investment use.

Bridging the gap...

Interestingly enough, it is the gap in value that causes speculation and thus, activity. But activity in trading in itself is worthless in the real world. Results form it may influence what otherwise may not have been put into motion, but generally it is inefficient. What will help you close the gap, is putting a little research in your investments, be slow to buy and slow to sell. Be confident, but be open to learning from each trade. Because you are after value... if you want to increase your net worth. I’m used to watching my portfolio grow every day. My goal is not to just keep it growing, but to have it grow exponentially. Or how else are you ever going to catch up to JOSH? Bridge that gap by learning a little bit more every day about the system works. You'd be surprised how far that puts you ahead of everyone.

Confessions Of A Man On Pogie

I'm going to be very honest with you when I say this, I can't wait for the API to be updated. Not because I want to spend hours playing with it, well maybe just a little. Not because I'm curious to see what they're gonna add to it based on user feedback; another lie.

The truth is, I'm really lazy when it comes to investing or handling my own money. Even in my own personal life I'm lazy when it comes to figuring things out. Specifically related to EA though, I have a hard time finding something that I want to invest in. I've had at least 10k in E credit sitting in my account for the last few weeks. Built up from a combination of dividend returns as well as my own stock being sold.

That in itself was kind of daunting. I mean, one day I logged in and 50 shares were sold. Score! The next thing I knew, 150, 75, 50, 125, 150. WTF was going on? I hadn't seen sales in my stock for a while and only out of pity from people I actually knew. So to see my own stock sell to randoms was a little weird.

Then came the matter of actually having cash to play with. I think in the last few weeks I've only invested in one or two people. Sure it was a flat out purchase of 200 shares but they were of friends. Yup, I was subjecting my cash to what the likeliest denomination of mass purchase comes down to: relational understanding that you help a brother/sister out, even if their stock currently doesn't look like it's going to do so well.

And that's the heart of my problem, I know I can spend money cause I've got tons I just don't know where. I don't want to do the research, like Arturo over there, to figure out who my best dividend returner is going to be. Much less track all my stocks to see whether they're trending an upwards motion because they're actually worth value or downwards because of a lack of activity and discontinued connections.

What I want is, the app I have in my mind. I want it to pull all the data I'm expecting the API to provide. I want it to crunch all those little numbers. I want it to store the important, but not personal, data regarding historical changes for those users that fit the data model requested. I want it to be pretty. I want it to give me all the answers I want. I want it to tell me when to act and when to wait.

But until such a time, despite what Arturo says to me, I'm going to let my bank account accumulate through current investments only. Even though I know that in the long run that if I were to invest the money the returned dividend value should offset that amount at least by some marginal amount but that would require work to figure out and as we already know, I'm waiting.

When it comes down to it I think that for me this has become a numbers game in my head to figure out. I'm still having fun, just not playing well with others.

The mirage of stock prices...

As previously hinted in my last blog, stock prices are not really that important when it comes to long term wealth. In fact, as long as it remains active on the exchange and is one of the top dividend payouts around, stock prices should be irrelevant to you. Because if you don't intend to buy or sell, stock price has no difference to your true wealth. Buying low and selling high is fun... but not as much fun to me as logging in and seeing my spending account up again. So because I’m always buying (always investing), I am looking for a bargain... but never forgetting the cost of waiting as well, the dividend payout of an investment can surpass the difference of paying too much for a stock.
Besides, you are buying the stock to have a share in the dividend anyways, right? And if the dividends are really good, then you would not want to sell right?


Now there is a natural positive cycle with this theory which ads ammo to my peaceful consciousness... and that’s by the time your investment begins to pay lower dividends due to higher amounts of shareholders buying into the same person, the price of that stock naturally rises, leaving you with not only a profit on the capital, but all those great dividends you have been investing...


It’s all about the dividends... don’t let stock prices fool you.

Oh, dividends... where do we go from here?

As the dividend changes took effect, it through my math out of the window, on to the road and ran over several times. While we try to work out what the heck EA did, I've resorted to purchasing based on the undervalue change on the stock with an increase in dividend... meaning.... if the stock has dropped, but their dividend has gone up, it's a very ROUGH indicator they are undervalued. While Mike figures out the new launch codes, I'll use my account to continue testing new methods.

Lest not we forget... it's all about dividends. Unless you are into day trading, you want to be securing high dividend paying people. Of course, EA has done a great job to keep your portfolio active because as more buy from that same person you just did, your share of those dividends go down. This is unlike real life, but it keeps your portfolio refreshing, which keeps activity up.

The Math

Now that we had the technique to pull and play with the data, we had to get the math working in our favour. So let's examine for a moment what we were trying to achieve using the following flow of logic and what had available to us from the API:

1. We want the top payout per share for dividend returns.
2. As noted in discussion on the API Discussion board, Dividends is purely based on the users Outstanding Shares. This makes sense because it shows that it's based on what's owned and not what's been available.
3. Based on the available api post calls currently available the only way to get what we want is to:
• Grab the amount paid out from the 100 top dividend payouts using the leaders/dividends list.
• Using the top 100 list, grab each of the user tickers.
• With the tickers, use the Profiles/Info api post to grab each user's outstanding shares.
4. Once we had those two pieces of data we divide dividend amount by outstanding shares to get our value.
5. Right?

Wrong. Wait, wrong? Something was wrong with our math when compared to the real world (heh, real) numbers. No matter who or what I looked at, it just didn't add up. (For those of you who know where the mistake was, shhh. No spoilers).

I'll use Fray (Pooka) Close's payout as an example:

•  According to data pulled from the api Pooka paid out a total of 3823.75.
• At the present moment, because it does fluctuate, she has 6278 out standing shares.
• With that in mind, I should've made roughly 0.6082 credits per share I own.
• I own 38 shares in Pooka, so in all I should've gotten roughly 23 shares paid out.
• What did I really get? 0.884 credit. What gives?

Stop me right there. You know where I went wrong? No, it wasn't the fact that I was taking current out standing shares. That's what I originally thought but it didn't add up either.

Truth is, the flaw is in my reading skills. Apparently I missed the fact that /leaders/dividends is a weekly value. That meant that I still had to divide that value by seven.

This is starting to sound less accurate, isn't it? That's the problem. Our dividend information isn't updated. How are you supposed to figure out the best dividend pay outs if you only have a weekly average. Considering how subjective stock is and how much it can change over the course of a day or two. That number could've easily been paid out in large sums at the start of the week and by the end of it basic pennies.

Ruined. There was nothing we could do but wait...and plan. We sat down and for a second time and started to devise an understanding of what we needed and wanted to do with the data. If and when they ever released what we wanted to actually work with was secondary to the discussion. The problem was that with the exponential growth of the site, being able to pump out that much data and then play with it was to say the least, cumbersome. We figured the best way to to get what we wanted to was to hope that they'd put search parameter requirements into the request that would return a limited number of results. That would at least give us the opportunity to work with a limited list of tickers that fit the exact criteria we wanted.

I was also able to explain to Arturo the benefits of oAuth and how it could easily get tied into our larger plan. How it would allow us to garner trust from our users without having to actually ask for credentials from them. That we would then be able to use their own personal data for things like approved notification of certain filtered market alerts. In short, it meant a bunch of stuff for what we wanted to do with this all.

That's sort of where we've been for the last week, stranded. I've optimized some of the code (aka cleaned and moved around) but much more than that, we just wait for Empire Avenue to release new api strings.

Days After We Started

As I've mentioned, I'm not a developer by any means. This meant I actually had to figure out how we were actually going to accomplish what we wanted to do.

First thing first: What the hell was json? What could be used to parse it? How would I go about sorting the data? Was I using the right terminology?

I didn't have a clue where to start but I had heard a lot about people starting to use Frameworks. I had bought a book on Ruby a few months ago and had trudged through some of that but I wasn't anywhere near confident with it. So a good old Google searched returned a number of results. I'd talked about it with a friend (Adam Patterson) and couldn't quite remember the name of the project he'd recommended.

I did a bunch of searches and started to take a stab at Code Igniter. I liked the framework but the REST client documentation made no sense to me. I went through a few days of just watching tutorials trying to make sense of what I wanted to do with the framework. Being new to how the framework worked out and really being a noob with PHP, it all just confused me.

What was I to do? Clearly the answer was to tweet about my frustration. Luckily Adam Patterson was listening and was willing to help. After a bit of discussion he threw some code together but it didn't work out the way intended. The problem was mostly the array that was created by using the jsondecode function. I had him sucked in, awesome. He had to figure it out the next morning and emailed me a snippet of code that worked perfectly.  After playing around with it, I was off and running with the code...so much as my limited ability could do.

Next was to play with the data provided.

7 Days In

Blarg. I've restarted this post four times now and still not sure what the best approach is. So I think I'm just going to start from where we are now, discuss where we came from and finally where we plan to go.  Considering we're at a stand still it seems like a good idea to go over what we've been through and waste some time explaining why we're...stuck.

I'm not going to lie to you, I'm not a developer. I took a few semesters at NAIT, read a book on learning PHP in 24 hours, sign up to every beta project I hear about, even follow TechCrunch and Mashable on a daily basis to see what start ups are out there, but I'm not a developer. I hadn't even looked at any form of source code in at least a year or two. And that book on PHP? It had been purchased five years ago and since been somewhat outdated. So when Arturo emailed me with a link to the Empire Avenue api asking if I was in, I got little nervous.

Arturo's always been financially minded so naturally Empire Ave was right up his alley from the get go. However, unlike real life, it was pretty hard to replicate relatively accurate stock trends. We had to figure out what, if anything, still applied with somewhat quantifiable analysis.

Clearly the solution was to have a bunch of drinks and figure out what still applied to the equation. The biggest problem we found was that individual stock prices were speculative and subject to change for arbitrary reasons based on too many undefined factors. Unfortunately aside from a couple user profile related api calls nearly everything else had to do with just that, stock price.

After looking through the api data for some time we found what we were looking for, dividend return data. If we could figure out how many credits each user was spitting out as a dividend return to it's investors each day then we could accurately figure out who was the best investment.

It was like predicting the lottery before the numbers had been pulled. Or like getting unemployment insurance for being homeless. You didn't have to do anything, really, and your wealth would still increase. What's more is that your earned credits wouldn't disappear with market trends because it was actually in your Empire Avenue bank account as cold hard cash, ready to be invested others or spent on advertising or upgrades. And so long as we could nail the calculation and get the right information, we'd be in business.

Now that we knew what data we wanted to work with we, well I, had to figure out how we were going grab, manipulate and finally return that data. Gulp.