Apple, please support exchange, do a deal with RIM, buy Good from Motorola, launch your own version of Exchange or do something … manually syncing sucks…
Since I started using Google Spreadsheets I have started to think about other hosted applications … I have used salesforce.com for true CRM before, but what I hadn’t explored was their force.com platform for creating totally custom applications. They call it a “platform as a service” … I am intrigued and as such I created a developer account and have started exploring using the platform to manage our equity and futures positions for work … I have always loved the idea of having a drag and drop online application building system. Maybe this is it … Time to start watching the stock too (CRM)
The tag line for Sun is slowly coming true on many fronts. There are larger scale applications like Salesforce.com and then niche applications from vendors solving very specific business needs. Just yesterday I started looking at a company that provides “Performance Reporting” for money managers called Black Diamond Reporting. A fully hosted online web-based platform for aggregating and reporting multiple custodians (as they call them) or accounts so that financial advisors/money managers can offload the need to buy, install, maintain the software and do the reconciliation themselves. And of course it allows the client to login and see the aggregated information via the web. On a more personal, yet still business oriented level… I love my Mac and all it does and I like my Windows XP Pro as well, so the vision of a completely dumb terminal accessing every application via a host is probably not in the cards? (never say never). I just feel like it will be a long time before all the native applications are displaced. But for my simple spreadsheet needs nothing beats the convenience and speed and reliability of network access to a spreadsheet … I haven’t tried Microsoft’s answer to this yet, but Google Spreadsheet is quite incredible. It’s a very big difference from having to dig around on my hard drive … I have two PC’s at work, a Mac laptop and a desktop Mac at home … So instead of networking (which isn’t so hard now on a Mac) my laptop which might contain my spreadsheet, it’s one click of my Browser, my iGoogle page comes up and bam! one more click and I can see my Futures positions in near real-time (pulling quotes from the web using importXML) from any of my 4 machines.
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This is not only easy for me to access, but I have also published one or more of my spreadsheets into our Basecamp site and apparently I can also share the spreadsheet(s) with my colleages to collaborate. How could you ever publish and collaborate on a regular Excel spreadsheet? This is serenity in a world of enormous amounts of data deluge.
A great article about the other Las Vegas?
I need to read some of the books that are referenced in this article (Winning the Loser’s Game and A Random Walk Down Wall Street). But for now, I still think I can outperform with my small speculative accounts! However, for my long term retirement money I prefer indexing or a professional money manager that has a long term buy and hold stint.
I also believe there are systematic traders who can outperform by exploiting human behavior (namely Abraham Trading) .. and a few hedge funds that can outperform provided they are great stock pickers and great short sellers (very hard to find).
Yahoo! Groups is another thing I always thought Yahoo! should “corporatized” and they just didn’t get it … Yahoo! Groups could be (or maybe I should say could have been) a Basecamp type product …
I have written before about how Yahoo! has “dropped the ball” and missed opportunities … Here is another one … Google Apps is something a small team at Yahoo! called “Corporate My Yahoo!” or later “Corporate Yahoo!” tried to bring to market … the vision was to take the My Yahoo! interface and use it as a “desktop” for corporations and then sell hosted features like Calendar, Email, Address Book, Instant Messaging etc… The idea of the “Portal” as the desktop was written about many times as early as 1999 … At Yahoo! the idea of addressing the corporate market never got enough top executive support (probably for lack of understanding it …).
Now Yahoo! finds itself playing catch-up … Yahoo! recently purchased Zimbra which looks very interesting and promising, but in my opinion they must truly integrate it into the Yahoo! ecosystem to make it comparable to Google Apps.
I started using Basecamp for work and it’s great. Simple and useful … I share information with colleagues and our outside service providers. I love being able to post documents, ideas, articles, etc …
I have also integrated some Google Spreadsheets of our futures and stock positions using iframes … very very useful.
In the process of researching return on cash, I discovered that TradeStation a) only pays 1.25% APY on idle cash and b) allows you to buy Money Market Funds, but they aren’t marginable, and c) thus if you are an option seller you can’t take advantage of buying treasuries like you can at Schwab, E*Trade, and Fido. I guess my “love” for TradeStation is fading …
I think this fact is little known, but at Schwab, Etrade, and Fidelity if you are an active option seller you can buy 1 to 6 month treasuries and get paid around 4.25%+ and the amount you buy is still 90%+ (some slightly higher than others) marginable. In a $100,000 account you are getting paid at least $350 a month in interest and you can use $90,000 to $95,000 of the value as margin (with no margin fee). Obviously, you will need to leave some cash to cover any losses you may realize.
Don’t let the discount brokers screw you on your cash. A little secret they won’t tell you about (unless you complain and ask) is that you are only getting paid about 1.2 to maybe 2.0% APY on your idle cash. However, as an example at Schwab you can buy the SWVXX or SW2XX “Investor Fund” and get paid over 4.5% APY. More details on this to be posted later …
