Everything in life comes down to one thing – Timing

Well, alright, there are just a few more things involved, but for me timing is the most important.

I suppose it relates back to that ‘sliding doors’ moment. Had you not turned left when you got off the bus this morning and turned right instead, you might have bumped into the love of your life.

Depressing but a possibility.

But more to the point, I am referring to those who rave about how great they are because they made lots of money when they sold their house, or bought shares low and sold very high and gave their lives a freedom from financial woes that ninety percent of us go through each month (or at least every few months when the dreaded power bill arrives).

These people are not geniuses, they have not discovered the secret to the financial markets. Yes, they would like to think they have, and indeed tell us so, but no they haven’t.

How can I be so sure?

Do a quick search of the main so called ‘expert’ economists, financial ‘wizards’ and see what they wrote as their predictions at the beginning of last year. They are there for all to see. And the one common thread throughout? They are almost all completely wrong.

I saw one the other day, adamant that inflation would reach twenty percent by the end of last year in the US. I have seen others who predicted a major crash in China (which will no doubt occur one day but no-one knows exactly when).

Timing. It is like predicting an interest rate increase. If you predict one publicly and loudly and one actually occurs within a month you are an instant expert. You could have been predicting an increase every month for two years but because you finally got one right you know everything, right?

Wrong!

Or if you predict that the next Apple iPad will be a total flop, which very senior people have done every year since the first model was released, and that year you happen to be right, suddenly people think you know everything.

Sorry, but it was just a lucky guess.

The markets are mainly driven by emotion. Yes there are some facts in there that a very, very few can follow and predict how people will react, but no-one gets it right all the time. Not even Warren Buffett.

The vast majority get it utterly, completely wrong, especially now when our markets are so wildly unpredictable.

So the next time someone tells you of their great gain when they sold their property, think how lucky they were to find the one buyer who fell in love with it and had to have it. Or the shares that could easily have tanked because of a bad asparagus crop out of Croatia.

It is all timing. Yes some call it luck, and I suppose it is lucky to get the timing right, but I prefer simple timing.

So next time you get off the bus, walk a different way to work.

You never know.

Why are Tablets all 7-10 inches?? Yes, size does matter!!

And they wonder why overall tablet sales are declining!

Please, manufacturers, in much of the world we use A4 paper. All our documents are A4, our magazines, business documents and pretty much everything we want to read, without glasses like coke bottle bottoms, is in A4.

A4, for you are obviously unaware, is 14″ diagonally across.

Most of our phones are 5″ in size or over, so why would I pay up to $1,000 for a tablet only twice the size of my phone? Yes I know that measured diagonally it is actually more than twice, but I’m ranting here so give me a break.

Equally, the US market uses Letter (those funny people who refuse to go metric because it would somehow interfere with their masculinity, or something) so their Tablets should be 8.5″ x 11.5″.

Why is this so difficult??

If I walk into a meeting with all my documents on my tablet I do not want to spend my time apologising for the the small sized print and handing around magnifying glasses.

So give me a tablet that is the same size I have been looking at in business for the past several decades, not some small, so called ‘elegant’ sized tablet I can’t read because it was designed to “fit nicely in a small case or bag”.

Stuff the bag, that’s why I’m carrying a tablet, so I DON’T NEED a bag!

As always, either the entire world is bonkers or I am, and since I have been asking myself this question more often than not lately, it could go either way.

Am I crazy? People have said 14″ is too big for a tablet, but then they go into the newsagent and buy an A4 magazine to read.

And no, I don’t want a 14″ windows laptop. Windows is half my problem.

I have everything I need with the Google apps (which I protect like crazy and have three backups of, just because) such as spreadsheets, documents, presentations…all shrunk from A4 to make me feel blind, but it does fit into my jacket pocket.

That’s OK, I have arms, carrying one tablet (if it’s the right size!) is very doable.

Build it…and they will NOT come

Before 2003 when Steve Blank wrote his now famous best seller, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, the dot com bust need not have happened.

His book became the basis of Lean Startups with his Customer Focused model. Before then it was all Product Focused, in that startups planned their product or service to the nth degree and ignored customers because “If you build it they would come.”

They didn’t.

Unfortunately their budgets went into developing and producing the best, shiniest widget they could possibly make.

There was just one problem – no customers. Their product was either too expensive, or didn’t have enough features or had too many.

It wasn’t their fault, this is the way they, and every other startup, were taught.

A precious few identified the one great but simple flaw in this way of thinking, in that the customer had not been consulted before the product had been produced. Until this ‘epiphany’ no-one had thought to ask the potential customer whether what they were building actually solved a problem for them, at a price they would be willing to pay.

One of the notable exceptions is Steve Jobs, who produced products we didn’t know we wanted until we saw them, and then we had to have them!

Until Steve Blank wrote his book pointing out this simple error, hundreds of millions of dollars had been wasted. True, some of them had successful IPO’s where the clever investors took their profit and ran before debtors came calling, but it was only a matter of time before the bust came after the emotionally charged boom finished.

Ignore potential customers at your peril.

And they did…and closed their doors.

Eric Reis wrote an excellent book nearly ten years later when the term ‘Lean Startup’ was born. He directly credits Steve Blank’s book as having been the catalyst for this.

Today one of the very first questions asked by potential investors, and on shows such as ‘Shark Tank’ is, “How many have you sold?” and “Have you researched the market to see if people want this and will buy it?”.

Strange as it may seem, but these questions are relatively new concepts to startups… except for the successful ones.

The idea of living on baked beans for six months to a year validating that your market exists, finding out what your customers want your widget to look like and how much they were prepared to pay for one (hopefully at a price point sufficient to make a profit), had only occasionally been considered.

Until Steve Blank wrote his book and out of it came the term ‘Lean Startup’.

It may seem obvious now that you must obtain customer validation before spending a fortune on manufacturing your goods and marketing them, but at the time of the dot com boom all investors wanted to know was; do you have a website and does it have ecommerce? That is, can customers buy online.

If the answers to both questions was yes then you received a rather large mountain of cash.

And ran out of it a year or so later.

So, if you are a budding entrepreneur, talk to potential customers before you build anything. Preferably, obtain contracts from one or three saying that if you make this product, and it does what they want it too at their acceptable price point, they would buy it. This way your first customer/s are already ‘in the bag’ and they can provide you with essential feedback as you make changes, fine tuning your product.

Knowing who your customers are, where they are and how you can reach them is critical these days. The dot com bust hurt a lot of people, thankfully most have learned from their mistakes and will not give you one cent if you cannot answer those simple questions regarding your customers. It also helps if you are already working with several customers, so you can receive their feedback and fine tune your product to make sure that when it is released it is successful.

Listen more than you talk, and do not spend copious amounts of money on your product until you know everything about your target customers.

Now we call this a Lean Startup, however I call it common sense.

Good luck to entrepreneurs everywhere, may your customers be eternally happy and grateful that you solved a real headache and seemingly insurmountable problem for them.

Or if you are Steve Jobs, or know where his crystal ball is, please ignore me entirely.

Craig Pickering, 31st March 2018

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Centrelink policies a DISGRACE!

Centrelink is there for the needy, sick and disadvantaged, and yet provides the worst service of any government agency.

The top level of management needs to be sacked immediately, along with their middle management that publish outrageously incorrect phone answering statistics.

Then, and I know this will cost us, but there needs to be a Royal Commission into the whole Department and the policies currently in place. It could easily be a case of the right people being tied up by stupid beaurocracy. Until such a public, complete investigation is done those most in need of help in our society will continue to be treated with disdain.

We should all be ashamed, especially the policy makers who make it so difficult for Centrelink staff to do their job, for treating our people so badly.

To read the original story click here.

Do media headlines or economic data rule the global financial trading markets?

Over the past two years unprecedented international market volatility, caused by the Global Financial Crisis, have made all previous methods of predicting market directions obsolete.

Will this continue? If so, in what form? Has the market always been driven by media releases and the Global Financial Crisis has exposed this, or do ‘tested’ methods of market prediction such as charting still have a place in funds management, stock trading and currency movements?

Here in South Australia, where the full effect of this crisis has yet to be realised, will investors react to the media or market data? Or both? When the media is negative and market data positive which direction does the market move in?

The recent volatility has irrevocably altered how investors view market information, and the intellectual conundrum I intend to question is “In future will traders be swayed by analysis of market data or by collective media reports?’.