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Monetizing the Riots in Britain. The Legal Way.

August 9th, 2011
Pound Plummets Against US Dollar

Pound Plummets Against US Dollar

Okay, so – I hope – readers of this blog are not actually out on the streets looting and rioting. On the other hand there are plenty of people making a bomb this week betting against the pound on the currency markets as they fear that BritGov is proving unable to stem the idiotic behaviour of the nation’s “disaffected youth” (whatever that means).

This and the fact the the US Fed are going to make their interest statement later on today and a lot of the clever money is on positive news for the dollar though not an immediate raise in interest rates today, though that is now in the realms of the possible, make betting on the dollar quite popular today.

Even my stalwart silver is dropping against the instincts of the traders. Look at the order books and you will see a lot of exposed long positions from the current $38 all the way up to $41. Gold too, is dropping today- probably temporarily – below $1750 where it stood for a while.

Pound Plummets Against the Euro

Pound Plummets Against the Euro

It all goes to show that the markets are played like a game and have very little to do with real life. In real life, economies do not get turned around on a single decision or in a single day.

We are constantly fed the mantra that the markets are right and the markets make the right price. It is complete nonsense. What I see is a herd of sheep running this way and that in reaction to thunder and lightning that they have no control over.

There is no overall intelligence in this decision making, it is quite simply greed and fear. Currently the overriding mechanism controlling the markets is a sense of fear as the gamblers who call themselves financial experts scrape sweat from their necks and watch their quarterly bonuses slip away from their slimy nervous grasp.

So, if you’re are a small time currency trader what should you be doing? Well, if you don’t have the time to concentrate and watch the screens, walk away from the desk for the next few days as the roller-coaster ride is far from over. And with lower volumes during the holiday season volatility is exaggerated beyond normal levels.

However if you have the time to concentrate, there are plenty of opportunities to be had. Look out for areas where the fear has thrown the markets into disarray and watch for the sense to prevail, which is likely to occur toward the end of the week as banks need to reconcile their open books.

With things moving so wildly and so fast however, I won’t make any recommendations as to what to buy or sell. Just use your brain and common sense and note what others are doing. Run with the sheep! There is no money in being the prophet of doom – you may be right both in your prediction and morality but you’ll make nothing from it! Never try to get off a roller-coaster till the ride is over, jumping off a speeding train often leads to injury!

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Are We All Having Fun Now? Silver tops $40 again!

August 2nd, 2011
Silver Trades August 1-2, 2011

August tops $40 again

There was I chatting to my chum on the Forex forum and warning him that life over forty can get a little exciting. Lo and behold! the proof came at lunchtime (UK) as everybody realised that whatever comes out of the debt shenanigans, the dollar will be in as much trouble tomorrow as it was in last week.

Still, as loyal followers will know I’m the cautious sort of trader and took profit just below that magic $40 barrier on Silver giving myself a consistent five successful trades in a row.

I hope you’re all doing the same and are not sitting in those dreaded orange zones?

Tomorrow we get interest rate announcement from the Bank of England and European Central Banks. Most commentators anticipate both these institutions will hold off making any changes for now and I, for all I know, see no obvious reason to disagree.

Certainly in the British case there is no need to stimulate further inflation, on the contrary some are arguing for another round of printing banknotes and a further gilt issue would be hard to push with higher interest rates just now.

Anyway, I’m partying on down…

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Debt Crisis Resolved? Market Not So Sure…

August 1st, 2011
Silver biased strongly against the dollar

Order book on XAGUSD

So last night President Obama announced that agreement had been reached and a deal was ready to be put before both the Representatives and the Senate for a vote in time for Tuesday’s deadline.

But looking at the brokers order book there is a still strong short bias on the US dollar. Exposure is particularly noticeable in my chosen current playground of the Silver market.

That bodes badly for the dollar in the short term as the markets don’t like being wrong and the big players are likely to react against losing there positions in this particular manufactured political mess.

How it all pans out over he week is anyone’s guess but it is not a good time to go betting the farm, as the saying goes.

Traders are, after all, basically herd animals – accidentally continuing the farm analogy – but do you really want to live on a farm where the sheep are in charge and the sheep dog is powerless?

There is no logic to this.

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Make Money Filling in Surveys

July 30th, 2011

As you will know if you have been following this project this area of income generation is surprisingly successful and also quite fun to do. It also costs absolutely nothing to get involved.

If you have not entered the phrase “paid online surveys” into a search engine and found the hundreds of companies that offer to pay you for your time, do so! From that selection you will be wondering which are the best survey organisations to use.

To make your life a little easier I’ll tell you about the two companies I used during the project and what I thought of them. The links below are not affiliate links, I won’t get any commission if you decide to sign up so my opinion can be objective.

MySurvey is a reputable company, probably having the largest survey panel in the world and is a trading mark for Lightspeed Research. They have country specific questionnaires and your surveys will be targeted such that you will generally be qualified to complete. Of the two I found this one to pay a better rate and to provide more interesting surveys. It also has the advantage of letting you get paid through PayPal.

Valued Opinions is a UK based company and although they provided surveys pretty much every single day I found that, often, I was not qualified to fill them in – the main reason being that I do not have a television in the home (it’s true I don’t!) The other snag is that payment is by voucher to a limited number of stores.

If you decide to go out and find your own survey company first check the website thoroughly. Check the privacy policy and check that there is a postal address and phone number for the company behind the website. Any website without these details is likely to be dodgy!

Ask your friends if they are filling in surveys online. It’s quite likely that those with a similar lifestyle to you may enjoy doing the same sort of things. Word of mouth recommendation is always the best and you might even earn your friend a little money by getting them to refer you in to the site. The vast majority of the websites you saw in your search are just gateways looking for a commission!

No legitimate survey site will ever ask you to pay them! Leave any site that even hints that you might be asked to pay immediately.

The surveys vary a lot in length and style. You will be warned how long each one is likely to take which varies between about ten minutes and an hour. Sometimes you will find the questions a little bemusing, sometimes funny.

Occasionally you will be asked to type in a wordy response as to your opinion but more often it’s just a case of ticking boxes. In general the surveys are well designed and user friendly but they will require a decent internet connection and up to date browser to take advantage of the more sophisticated animation and graphics that are often used.

Payment will only be credited to your account when you complete the whole survey and if you leave half way through it is likely you will not be able to go back later to complete the survey so ensure that you have the requisite time available before you begin.

The two companies above only pay out when you accumulate enough to get a reward. MySurvey uses a points system and you can start claiming rewards from about 300 points (around four surveys), Valued Opinions records your earnings as a cash value and pays you in £10 reward vouchers each time your earnings accrue to that amount (probably fourteen or fifteen surveys).

As you can see, it’ll take you more than your lifetime to make billion in surveys but and extra ten or fifteen pounds a month fun money can be useful!

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If Gold is a little dull, Silver is Exciting

July 29th, 2011
Live Trades on Silver

Live Trades on Silver

Of course, what with the United States debt crisis coming to a head in the next three days traders still run for the safe havens of Gold and the Swissy. But with Gold at all time record levels it’s going to be tough to push the price up much higher.

However Silver is not at an all time high at the moment and though it doesn’t hold the magic of Gold it shares its advantage of being tied to a material substance. So using extreme caution with leverage the small trader can make quite an increase to net asset value with careful trading in Silver.

This is how I did with my three trades since going live on Oanda with the Spare Time Billionaire profits. Two longs and a short increasing my NAV by over 10% in a week!

It feels good to be back in the saddle again after a couple of years away from the trading floor and, as I get my hand back in, I’ll spend more time on it and increase the capital committed.

Alex Hope – increasing the family silver

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A momentary pause… Now to spend the profits!

July 28th, 2011
The Seventy Pound Note

The Seventy Pound Note - Arash & Kelly

Okay, I’ve been approved as a live up and running trader on my chosen broker Oanda and transferred the profits from the STB project into the fund. The thing is, I got it up and running before I remembered that I wanted to share the ongoing performance on Myfxbook. So now I’ve got to set it up slightly differently and transfer the money into a sub-account.

That’s going to take me a few days to ensure I do everything right.

What I’ll also be doing is adding a few categories here for those of you who have come to this site looking for ideas and wanting an easy source and reference location from where to spark off your home-based business plan.

On the site, you’ll find a variety of legitimate schemes that you can link into and ideas to supplement a minimal income. What you will not find are any illegal or morally questionable schemes or ideas. If you are looking for more off the wall ideas that could make you money more quickly but might be a little more risky or complex, you’ll need to sign up for the Spare Time Confidential letters – which you can easily do at any time, from any page on the site.

In the, nearly, three months of investigations I think it is fair to say that I have explored all of the obvious options available to me in the art of on-line money making. Some of them have proved more lucrative than others and some of them proved to be not much more than a con trick by exploitative hustlers. The one consistent thing I have found is that there is NO WAY to make $150 per hour without doing any work.

Although we all knew this in May, it was worth a shot. As projects go, this has been one of the more fun ones that I have undertaken, primarily because I have made new contacts in places and with life experiences way outside my own wide circles of wandering.

However, while you are not going to make your own money printing machine on-line there are a number of ways that you can supplement your income in your idle moments and if you have more time than me, you’ll make considerably more than the paltry £70 that I managed in the 86 hours that I spent on the project (an average hour per day earning or trying to earn).

Here’s a summary of how much I have made so far net of charges and commissions:

File downloads: £3.45
Answering surveys: £36.50 (plus £10 Amazon voucher)
Paid advertising: £0.14
Sales from Direct Mail: £18.98
Affiliate sales: £5.13

And my costs, over and above my normal spending, hosting was free because I used existing facilities:

Domain names: £4.98

Looking back it’s quite surprising that the most lucrative activity proved to be answering on-line surveys. I spent considerably more time on that activity than anticipated and found myself enjoying answering the questions and watching the ads. In fact, I am going to keep up with that activity because I do not begrudge the £1.75 per hour or whatever it is. I could have earned more but was disqualified for many surveys because I have neither a television, nor children in the home. If you have either or both of these, it’s certainly worth thinking about.

On balance, I’m glad I did it and will be applying the lessons learned to my main business activities while playing the forex markets with the accrued profits from the scheme in my idle moments.

Alex Hope – relieved to be back in the real world!

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Google Plus, have you been invited yet?

July 26th, 2011

If you haven’t come across the +1 button yet you must be living in a hole even deeper than mine! There are currently around 20 million people worldwide testing the new new Google + platform and it promises to be a better method of staying in touch with your contacts and friends than any social networking platform yet.

Okay, I’ll be honest with you and tell you that I haven’t spent a great deal of time exploring it but I love the concept of circles where, just as in real life, you can segregate your friends into different levels of intimacy. I have been lucky, hold thumbs, so far in that nothing too untoward has happened to me on the web but the story of the misbehaving employee getting fired for bad-mouthing her boss a while back or the possibility of more staid family members discovering what their children get up to on a stag night makes me pretty cautious about what I share.

It seems to have all the other ingredients of facebook with a stream, news feeds, likes and so on and so forth. On the other hand it seems to have its own quirks and peculiarities and it’s difficult getting used to the concept of dealing with people as people instead of “friends”, “fans” or “followers”. The question is whether G+, as its techy users are calling it, will take over from Facebook which has reached saturation point in most of the countries where it is available.

Anyway, if you’d like to try it for yourself and have not already applied for a place on the waiting list, I have a special opportunity for up to twenty readers to get an invitation when you sign up to Spare Time Confidential. I’m limiting it very strictly as there are rumours that the mighty Google are keeping an eye out for rogues in the system and I don’t want to get in trouble myself. You will need a valid and genuine gmail account to ensure your profile and identity are accepted, so if you don’t use one I won’t send you an invite.

Alex Hope, from the deep dark hole

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