I travel a lot for work, or rather I used to until Covid19 hit. My last work related trip was to Florida to a convention on Robotic Process Automation (RPA). I stayed in a beautiful Hilton Hotel near a marina with a great resturant and bar. I’ve been a long time Hilton Honors member and use the AMEX credit card a lot to gain points, status, and rewards. My Hilton Honors came in handy when my family and I were stranded overnight in Miami because flights were cancelled due to a nasty storm.

I invested in Terra Tech Corp (TRTC) back in January 2018. Marijuana / Cannabis type stocks were making big moves back then and this company looked like it would capitalize on it. At the time it was trading around the $4 to $5 range and I picked up 200+ shares of it for about $4.82. Since then I watched it do a reverse stock split and get put on the Pink Sheets.

Every year in November investors and traders look toward ‘Black Friday’ as a way to gauge how well the end of the year is going to go. Black Friday is the day that retailers and shops are supposed to finally make money for the year, due to heavy demand for ‘stuff.’ It’s too early to tell but I want it to be a good year. Wanting and what will happen are two different things in reality.

Now that Wall Street has accepted a Biden win, we’ll see more easing from the Fed and hopefully a great Santa Claus rally. That should be good news for stocks and for the ones in strong uptrends, it will be awesome! However for the ones in downtrends, well they get coal in their stockings. Here’s a tale of two worlds, NVIDIA’s performance vs Intel’s. Machine Learning and Data Science in general requires big computers to do data processing.

There was a short time when at a previous Startup I moved out of Sales and into Marketing. I had to produce a lot targeted content in a niche market and that’s how I earned my living. A lot of the content I created ended up on the company’s blog, video library, or community boards so I considered myself a Professional Blogger back then. Now that I’m back in Sales and I Blog here for fun, I consider myself a writer and a Semi-Professional Blogger now.

Talk about scummy, Facebook is getting nervous. NYU Researchers @LauraEdelson2 and Damon McCoy were sent a cease and desist letter into their research on how Facebook is targeting political ads. To say the least this is a very hot topic considering all the voter suppression and false information that led to the current Administration. At a minimum, this question SHOULD be asked and it SHOULD be answered to everyone’s satisfaction.

I’m going to start this post with a big helping of gratitude. I’m so grateful to the 1000’s of readers that helped me get into the field of Data Science and Machine Learning. I was a part-time blogger that turned my passion into a full-time gig in the AI Startup world. This post is my way of paying it forward to you. Read below if you want to learn how to make money blogging.

We are living in crazy times. The (Stock) Market is reaching all time highs when the rest of Main Street is falling apart. Amazon is trading in the $5,000 range and people think the market doesn’t represent the majority of us. I agree. The Market is NOT for Main Street and it will never be. It’s for a small group of the population that’s seeking to reallocate your funds to their account.

My position on whether cryptocurrency is a fad or real changes from month to month. I had a hard time connecting the dots until recently. What changed? I discovered the Uphold Interledger. The Interledger is just what it sounds like, a ledger system between multiple currencies or ‘stores of value.’ It’s based on the distributed ledger that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have made famous. It allows you to easily convert between fiat and cryptocurrencies with a click of a button.

I was on Twitter one day and I came across an announcement that HackerNoon had joined the micropayment world and gotten an infusion of cash from Coil.com. That’s a cool $1 million to implement a new method of web monetization. Breaking: We Raised $1M From @Coil, Will Stream Micropayments from Readers to Writers via the Browserhttps://t.co/iquXY9j2Pm pic.twitter.com/bHRfhaenna — HackerNoon (@hackernoon) June 10, 2020 I think the current web monetizaztion model is broken and power is concentrated into too many corporate silos.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been a user of Dreamhost.com for over 13 years. It’s where I hosted my old blogs and registered my domains. I started with a basic hosting in the early days and switched over to a virtual private server (VPS) a few years ago because I need to run Cron jobs. .boxed { background: lightgrey; color: black; border: 3px solid black; margin: 0px auto; width: 456px; padding: 10px; border-radius: 10px; } **Disclosure:** Some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission.

As software continues to eat the world, we’re slowly becoming slaves to subscriptions. I don’t remember when I started thinking about this but it must’ve come up when I looked at our family budget. I realized that we as a family and I, are paying so much on monthly or yearly subscriptions that it just gives me great pause. What am I paying? On the surface, it doesn’t look like much but then you dig deeper and you realize you are hooked!

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you’d know that I like to try different CMS’s. I made some mistakes over the years and I transferred my posts between different CMS. This ended up killing a lot of my backlinks, but that’s ok. I ended up settling on using Markdown to write my posts (love it) and a static CMS generator. Originally I used Pelican and it was pretty good.

Apple was a great winner for me. Too bad I sold it on April 1st but hindsight is always 20-20. I think I went long sometime back DecemberDecember 2018 when the share price was around $160-ish. I screwed up in my brokerage account and put it on margin and when the markets sold off at the end of February and the beginning of March 2020, I decided to take my profit.

I was once told that the best time to start a business is in a recession. The reasoning behind it is that the business would get stronger once the recession is over. Essentially you’re starting at the bottom and can only go up from there. From my experience, this is true. I’ve started several businesses over my life and have closed several businesses too. Some were better than others too.

From the ‘sad news’ file, JC Penny is getting ready to file bankruptcy. That’s too bad. I remember JCP being one of those ‘stalwart’ companies I grew up with. Bradless, Woolworths, Rickles, Kmart, Sears. All of them are now dead, dying, or long gone. It’s a shame but my nostalgia doesn’t pay the bills for them and they have a lot of debt to pay back. When I think about it, why is that we operate on such an insane debt model?

I picked up a few shares of XLE yesterday. I figured it was beaten down enough and should revert back to the mean, hopefully around $60. Update: Now sold… Chart wise I see two things happening. First, I see a window was opened when XLE fell off the cliff in March. I should probably do the statistics on it but the general wisdom is that eventually this window would be shut.

I’m a reader of Reddit and I found a subreddit that makes me sad. It’s called r/WallStreetBets. Everyone is posting on how much money they make or lose from trading ‘stonks’ using put or call options. I ruminated about this in a video that I’m going to post soon. Everyone get’s making money confused with the real thing, time. You can’t make more time, you can always make more money.