First Time Buyer Quotes

As in many other games, moving first is an advantage in single-issue negotiations—for example, when price is the only issue to be settled between a buyer and a seller. As you may have experienced when negotiating for the first time in a bazaar, the initial anchor has a powerful effect. My

All that property porn, you know, about people buying a flat, doing it up and making thirty grand, it’ll just turn the whole bloody country into a nation of speculators, all the while making property completely unaffordable for anybody under 40. The average age of a first time buyer in the Thatcher era, about ‘84, was 25, it’s now 39.

From 2000 to 2007 the United States developed close to four million acres of farmland, spending billions tilling it and filling it with fast, cheap tract houses for first-time buyers.

put it up for sale at an asking price of $25 million. I first looked at Mar-a-Lago while vacationing in Palm Beach in 1982. Almost immediately I put in a bid of $15 million, and it was promptly rejected. Over the next few years, the foundation signed contracts with several other buyers at higher prices than I’d offered, only to have them fall through before closing. Each time that happened, I put in another bid, but always at a lower sum than before. Finally, in late 1985, I put in a cash offer of $5 million, plus another $3 million for the furnishings in the house. Apparently, the foundation was tired of broken deals. They accepted my offer, and we closed one month later. The day the deal was announced, the Palm Beach Daily News ran a huge front-page story with the headline MAR-A-LAGO’S BARGAIN PRICE ROCKS COMMUNITY. Soon, several far more modest estates on property a fraction of Mar-a-Lago’s size sold for prices in excess of $18 million. I’ve been told that the furnishings in Mar-a-Lago alone are worth more than I paid for the house. It just goes to show that it pays to move quickly and decisively when the time is right. Upkeep

So aggressive was the manner in which this question was put that at first I thought the pair of them were probably drunk: a state which, in addition, the discrepancy between their respective heights for some reason quite illogically helped to suggest.

In August 1946, exactly one year after the end of World War II, a tanker sailed into the port of Philadelphia laden with 115,000 barrels of oil for delivery to a local refinery. The cargo, loaded a month earlier in Kuwait, was described at the time as the first significant “shipment of Middle East oil to the United States.” Two years later, Saudi oil was imported for the first time, in order, said the U.S. buyer, “to meet the demand for petroleum products in the United States.”1 That year—1948—marked an historic turning point. The United States had not only been a net exporter of oil, but for many years the world’s largest exporter, by far. Six out of every seven barrels of oil used by the Allies during World War II came from the United States. But now the country was becoming a net importer of oil. By the late 1940s, with a postwar economic boom and car-dependent suburbs spreading out, domestic oil consumption was outrunning domestic supplies.

Gross rental income (including utilities fee) –  Mortgage payment (including principal, interest, taxes, and insurance) – Cost of utilities –  Vacancy allowance (10 percent of gross rents) –  Maintenance and CapEx (estimated at 1 percent of the property’s value, divided by 12 for monthly cost) –  Property management (10 percent of gross rents) Cash flow

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?

Okay, so how are you going to ask them for a referral without using the word ‘referral’,” Coach challenged him. Rick paused and took a deep breath, “David, it’s been terrific working with you and DeAnna; do you know anyone looking to buy a home soon?” Rick cringed, waiting for the cockamamie. “Rick, not great, but you would probably get a referral out of that,” Coach said approvingly, “Just a few small changes will increase your odds. Start with ‘who’ not ‘do’ and work ‘is another renter or first time buyer like you’ into your question.” Rick took a second. “David, it’s been great working with you. Who is another renter or first time home buyer like you who is looking to buy a home soon?” That sounded pretty good. “Yes,” Coach said, satisfied. “More specific is

I remember the time I went to my first rare-book fair and saw how the first editions of Thoreau and Whitman and Crane had been carefully packaged in heat-shrunk plastic with the price tags on the inside. Somehow the simple addition of air-tight plastic bags had transformed the books from vehicles of liveliness into commodities, like bread made with chemicals to keep it from perishing. In commodity exchange it’s as if the buyer and the seller where both in plastic bags; there’s none of the contact of a gift exchange. There is neither motion nor emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn’t consume anything or involve one person with another. Consumer goods are consumed by their owners, not by their exchange. The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire. He is a stranger seduced into feeding on the drippings of someone else’s capital without benefit of its inner nourishment, and he is hungry at the end of the meal, depressed and weary as we all feel when lust has dragged us from the house and led us to nothing.

ONCE, a youth went to see a wise man, and said to him: “I have come seeking advice, for I am tormented by feelings of worthlessness and no longer wish to live. Everyone tells me that I am a failure and a fool. I beg you, Master, help me!” The wise man glanced at the youth, and answered hurriedly: “Forgive me, but I am very busy right now and cannot help you. There is one urgent matter in particular which I need to attend to...”—and here he stopped, for a moment, thinking, then added: “But if you agree to help me, I will happily return the favor.” “Of...of course, Master!” muttered the youth, noting bitterly that yet again his concerns had been dismissed as unimportant. “Good,” said the wise man, and took off a small ring with a beautiful gem from his finger. “Take my horse and go to the market square! I urgently need to sell this ring in order to pay off a debt. Try to get a decent price for it, and do not settle for anything less than one gold coin! Go right now, and come back as quick as you can!” The youth took the ring and galloped off. When he arrived at the market square, he showed it to the various traders, who at first examined it with close interest. But no sooner had they heard that it would sell only in exchange for gold than they completely lost interest. Some of the traders laughed openly at the boy; others simply turned away. Only one aged merchant was decent enough to explain to him that a gold coin was too high a price to pay for such a ring, and that he was more likely to be offered only copper, or at best, possibly silver. When he heard these words, the youth became very upset, for he remembered the old man’s instruction not to accept anything less than gold. Having already gone through the whole market looking for a buyer among hundreds of people, he saddled the horse and set off. Feeling thoroughly depressed by his failure, he returned to see the wise man. “Master, I was unable to carry out your request,” he said. “At best I would have been able to get a couple of silver coins, but you told me not to agree to anything less than gold! But they told me that this ring is not worth that much.” “That’s a very important point, my boy!” the wise man responded. “Before trying to sell a ring, it would not be a bad idea to establish how valuable it really is! And who can do that better than a jeweler? Ride over to him and find out what his price is. Only do not sell it to him, regardless of what he offers you! Instead, come back to me straightaway.” The young man once more leapt up on to the horse and set off to see the jeweler. The latter examined the ring through a magnifying glass for a long time, then weighed it on a set of tiny scales. Finally, he turned to the youth and said: “Tell your master that right now I cannot give him more than 58 gold coins for it. But if he gives me some time, I will buy the ring for 70.” “70 gold coins?!” exclaimed the youth. He laughed, thanked the jeweler and rushed back at full speed to the wise man. When the latter heard the story from the now animated youth, he told him: “Remember, my boy, that you are like this ring. Precious, and unique! And only a real expert can appreciate your true value. So why are you wasting your time wandering through the market and heeding the opinion of any old fool?

The public offering occurred exactly one week after Toy Story’s opening. Jobs had gambled that the movie would be successful, and the risky bet paid off, big-time. As with the Apple IPO, a celebration was planned at the San Francisco office of the lead underwriter at 7 a.m., when the shares were to go on sale. The plan had originally been for the first shares to be offered at about $14, to be sure they would sell. Jobs insisted on pricing them at $22, which would give the company more money if the offering was a success. It was, beyond even his wildest hopes. It exceeded Netscape as the biggest IPO of the year. In the first half hour, the stock shot up to $45, and trading had to be delayed because there were too many buy orders. It then went up even further, to $49, before settling back to close the day at $39. Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let him merely recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the shares he had retained—80% of the company—were worth more than twenty times that, an astonishing $1.2 billion. That was about five times what he’d made when Apple went public in 1980.

To summarize the VWAP Reversal Strategy: After I build my watchlist in the morning, I closely monitor the shortlisted stocks in the first five minutes after the Open. I identify their opening range and their price action. The stocks will either move higher or below the VWAP. Depending on the price action, I may be able to take an Opening Range Breakout to the long or short side. I monitor the price when it moves away from the VWAP and look for a sign of weakness. If it is above the VWAP, failing to make a new high of the day may be a sign that the buyers are exhausted. If it is below the VWAP, failing to make a new low of the day or a new 5-minute low can be a sign that the sellers are gone, and the stock can be ready for a squeeze back to the VWAP. I take the trade only if I can get a good entry and a good risk/reward ratio. Remember, most of the time stocks move really fast without offering a good entry and a good risk/reward ratio. If I am short above the VWAP, I cover my short at the VWAP and bring my stop loss to break-even. If I am long below the VWAP, I sell part of my position at the VWAP, and keep the rest for a squeeze above the VWAP (or as some traders would call it, a VWAP Pop). Do ensure you bring your stop loss to break-even, because sometimes the stock can bounce back from the VWAP as well.

In the field of education, it seems ‘normal’ to run stories about class sizes, teachers’ pay, the country’s performance in international league tables and the right balance between the roles of the private and state sectors. But we would risk seeming distinctly odd, even demented, if we asked whether the curriculum actually made sense; whether it really equipped students with the emotional and psychological resources that are central to the pursuit of good lives. When it comes to housing, the news urges us to worry about how to get construction companies working, how to make purchasing a home easier for first-time buyers and how to balance the claims of nature against those of jobs and businesses. But it doesn’t tend to find time to ask primordial, eccentric-sounding questions like: ‘Why are our cities so ugly?’ In discussions of economics, our energy is channelled towards pondering what the right level of taxation should be and how best to combat inflation. But we are discouraged by mainstream news from posing the more peculiar, outlying questions about the ends of labour, the nature of justice and the proper role of markets. News stories tend to frame issues in such a way as to reduce our will or even capacity to imagine them in profoundly other ways. Through its intimidating power, news numbs. Without anyone particularly rooting for this outcome, more tentative but potentially important private thoughts get crushed.

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals appeared in 1887. In it, he begins with an argument that might well have been taken directly from Adam Smith—but he takes it a step further than Smith ever dared to, insisting that not just barter, but buying and selling itself, precede any other form of human relationship. The feeling of personal obligation, he observes, has its origin in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is, in the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for the first time one person moved up against another person, here an individual measured himself against another individual. We have found no civilization still at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already perceptible. To set prices, to measure values, to think up equivalencies, to exchange things—that preoccupied man’s very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense it’s what thinking itself is. Here the oldest form of astuteness was bred; here, too, we can assume are the first beginnings of man’s pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals. Perhaps our word “man” (manas) continues to express directly something of this feeling of the self: the human being describes himself as a being which assesses values, which values and measures, as the “inherently calculating animal.” Selling and buying, together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings of any form of social organizations and groupings; out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal rights the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, law, duty, and compensation was instead first transferred to the crudest and earliest social structures (in their relationships with similar social structures), along with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating

The collapse, for example, of IBM’s legendary 80-year-old hardware business in the 1990s sounds like a classic P-type story. New technology (personal computers) displaces old (mainframes) and wipes out incumbent (IBM). But it wasn’t. IBM, unlike all its mainframe competitors, mastered the new technology. Within three years of launching its first PC, in 1981, IBM achieved $5 billion in sales and the #1 position, with everyone else either far behind or out of the business entirely (Apple, Tandy, Commodore, DEC, Honeywell, Sperry, etc.). For decades, IBM dominated computers like Pan Am dominated international travel. Its $13 billion in sales in 1981 was more than its next seven competitors combined (the computer industry was referred to as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs”). IBM jumped on the new PC like Trippe jumped on the new jet engines. IBM owned the computer world, so it outsourced two of the PC components, software and microprocessors, to two tiny companies: Microsoft and Intel. Microsoft had all of 32 employees. Intel desperately needed a cash infusion to survive. IBM soon discovered, however, that individual buyers care more about exchanging files with friends than the brand of their box. And to exchange files easily, what matters is the software and the microprocessor inside that box, not the logo of the company that assembled the box. IBM missed an S-type shift—a change in what customers care about. PC clones using Intel chips and Microsoft software drained IBM’s market share. In 1993, IBM lost $8.1 billion, its largest-ever loss. That year it let go over 100,000 employees, the largest layoff in corporate history. Ten years later, IBM sold what was left of its PC business to Lenovo. Today, the combined market value of Microsoft and Intel, the two tiny vendors IBM hired, is close to $1.5 trillion, more than ten times the value of IBM. IBM correctly anticipated a P-type loonshot and won the battle. But it missed a critical S-type loonshot, a software standard, and lost the war.

John Bradshaw, in his best-seller Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, details several of his imaginative techniques: asking forgiveness of your inner child, divorcing your parent and finding a new one, like Jesus, stroking your inner child, writing your childhood history. These techniques go by the name catharsis, that is, emotional engagement in past trauma-laden events. Catharsis is magnificent to experience and impressive to behold. Weeping, raging at parents long dead, hugging the wounded little boy who was once you, are all stirring. You have to be made of stone not to be moved to tears. For hours afterward, you may feel cleansed and at peace—perhaps for the first time in years. Awakening, beginning again, and new departures all beckon. Catharsis, as a therapeutic technique, has been around for more than a hundred years. It used to be a mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment, but no longer. Its main appeal is its afterglow. Its main drawback is that there is no evidence that it works. When you measure how much people like doing it, you hear high praise. When you measure whether anything changes, catharsis fares badly. Done well, it brings about short-term relief—like the afterglow of vigorous exercise. But once the glow dissipates, as it does in a few days, the real problems are still there: an alcoholic spouse, a hateful job, early-morning blues, panic attacks, a cocaine habit. There is no documentation that the catharsis techniques of the recovery movement help in any lasting way with chronic emotional problems. There is no evidence that they alter adult personality. And, strangely, catharsis about fictitious memories does about as well as catharsis about real memories. The inner-child advocates, having treated tens of thousands of suffering adults for years, have not seen fit to do any follow-ups. Because catharsis techniques are so superficially appealing, because they are so dependent on the charisma of the therapist, and because they have no known lasting value, my advice is “Let the buyer beware.

Over the next three weeks Yeltsin’s approval ratings jumped from 22 to 28 percent. For the first time since his campaign began, people started to factor in a real possibility that Yeltsin would win. New buyers entered the stock market, pushing my fund up 15 percent.

Most buyers will go in aloof and reserved. They’ll shoot down ideas and inject cautionary responses at opportune times. They act like a conservative investor who must be convinced to be brought to the table, and if they do, their actions warn, it’s going to be hardball. This is not a trust but verify approach. It’s a prove it and then I’ll consider trusting you approach. There is a time to be a conservative investor during this process. This book, however, is not about how to become a conservative investor; it’s about acquisition entrepreneurship. Any acquisition will obviously include volumes of cautious investing analysis. Buying your first business is usually the largest investment you’ve ever made in your life and you will research accordingly. If there are snakes in the bushes, you will simply walk away later. The best buyers, however, understand that they too are entrepreneurs, just like the seller. The transaction will be completed within a few months after meeting the seller and then the buyer will be in the driver’s seat for the next four to forty years. Acting like an entrepreneur and not a venture capitalist during the interactions with the seller is the key to winning the seller over, getting the best deal outcome later, and behaving like the new CEO of the company—which you may or may not be, but that will be up to you and not them if you play your cards right.

craft your landing page effortlessly and not have to stare at a blank template for long, you need the following elements: • The title of your lead magnet • The main benefit or main promise of your lead magnet • What your lead magnet teaches or what your subscribers will learn from it? o What will they achieve or overcome by consuming your lead magnet? o What pain points or problems does your lead magnet solve? o What desires or motivations does your lead magnet fulfill? o What mini transformation does it give? • Testimonials for social proof • A screenshot, mock-up, or visual of your lead magnet Note: You want to convert these benefits into 3–7 bullet points. These bullet points should begin with an action verb, with “how to” or “why,” or with a number. They should also include specific details such as page numbers or time stamps in videos where key information is found. For example, • How a 20-minute video recording turned into my first digital product that brought in $36,429.56 in the first month • 13 limiting beliefs that keep 99% of people from ever launching their ecommerce store—and how to beat them (Hint: You’re probably suffering from at least 5 of these) – pg. 3 • The ONLY two blogging rules ever (seriously, if you ignore these it will take you YEARS to launch your blog and business!) – 1min 37sec Your landing page should be a reflection of the words and sentences your target audience uses to describe their pain points. When it does, your target audience recognizes and identifies with the problem. Your lead magnet also becomes immediately more attractive.

What constitutes a brand? There are several aspects. First, it is a promise, or at least a belief. Customers cannot test every product that they buy, so they draw on their own past experience or on the recommendations of others. Through consistent and reliable experience achieved over a long period of time, trust in the promise is created. Trust reduces complexity and shortens buyers’ deci[1]sions. Often decisions are based not on specific attributes but on the holistic emotions that a product engenders. Young men do not buy expensive Swiss watches because they tell the time better, but because they appeal to their aspi[1]rations. A brand must differentiate itself against the plethora of so-called ‘me too’ alternatives. Against these measures, ‘Swissness’ has become a brand in its own right – and this may be the country’s most precious and enduring comparative advantage.

The easiest way to describe how to harness the galvanizing power of why is with a tool I call the belief statement. For example, most of Apple’s product launches in recent years feature slick videos with commentary from Apple designers, engineers, and executives. These videos, while camouflaged as beautiful product showcases, are actually packed with statements not about what the products do but about the design thinking behind them: in essence, the tightly held beliefs with which Apple’s design team operates. We believe our users should be at the center of everything we do. We believe that a piece of technology should be as beautiful as it is functional. We believe that making devices thinner and lighter but more powerful requires innovative problem solving. Belief statements like these are so compelling for two reasons. First, the right corporate or organizational beliefs have the ability to resonate with our personal belief systems and feelings, and move us to action. In fact, the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand study revealed that nearly two out of three people are now belief-driven buyers.4 And as we saw in our discussion of buyers’ emotional motivators in chapter 3, this works even if the beliefs stated are aspirational. For example, if my vision for my future self is someone who weighs a few pounds less and is in better physical shape, a well-timed ad from a health club or fancy kitchen blender evangelizing the benefits of a healthy lifestyle may be enough to rapidly convert me. In the case of Apple, the same phenomenon results in mobs of smitten consumers arriving at stores in droves, braving long lines and paying premium prices, as if to say, “Yes! I do believe I should be at the center of everything you do! Technology should be beautiful! Thinner? Lighter? More powerful? Of course! We share the same vision! We’re both cool!” (Although these actual words are rarely spoken aloud.) The second reason belief statements are so compelling is because they help us manifest the conviction and emotion critical to delivering our message in an authentic way.

What should a cold call sound like?* Reach prospect: Hi, is [First Name] in? Introduction:** Hi [First Name], this is [Name] at [Company], how are you doing? Permission: I called to see if what we do for [Problem] can benefit your team. Did I catch you with two minutes? Value proposition: We help [Buyer persona] who [Problem] by [Solution]. In fact, [Customer success story]. Question + leading statement: I’ve seen a lot of [Buyer persona] who are dealing with [specific facet of problem]. How are you addressing that today? Qualify for interest + fit: [This is the part you cannot script - you have to know what makes a qualified buyer and really listen to their answers.] Ask for the appointment: Well, you’ve been kind to give me a few minutes today and it sounds like there’s reason to continue the conversation. Do you have time this coming [Day] or [Day] that we can get into more detail and determine if there’s a mutual fit? *This structure demonstrates how a call can go if the prospect has no objections. It’s best to also script effective responses to common objections. **There is an entire school of thought around using uncommon conversation starters to take the prospect out of his or her standard reaction to cold calls. This strategy is smart and merits testing once you’re ready to focus on improving your call effectiveness.

Purina’s exposure to the hog business was not limited at all. The volatile markets exposed that fact. In 1998, the US hog market experienced a shock comparable to the stock market crash of 1929—a market convulsion that obliterated all the rules everyone thought applied to the business. The root of the problem could be traced to the very industrialization that created Purina Mills’ feed business in the first place. Now that hogs were raised on factory farms, the supply of animals was enormous and inflexible. Farmers were raising herds of tens or even hundreds of thousands of pigs. When prices started to fall, these industrial farms couldn’t adapt quickly. They had mortgage payments to meet on the big pig houses, and they needed to keep production high. Factory farms were a machine that wasn’t easily turned off. The flow of pigs continued into the slaughterhouses, and prices fell even further. Then everything spun out of control. Hog prices plummeted, sucking the entire business into the ground almost instantly. The price of hogs fell from about 53 cents per pound to 10 cents per pound in a matter of months. When adjusted for inflation, this was the lowest price for pigs in US history. It cost far more to raise a pig than the animal was worth. Purina Mills should have been insulated against this crisis. It only sold feed, not the hogs themselves. But with its decision in 1997 to start buying baby hogs, Purina had exposed itself to the risk of falling pork prices. Dean Watson began to discover just how large that exposure was. As one farm economist put it at the time, the rational number of hogs to own in 1998 was zero. Purina discovered this fact quickly. It bought baby hogs, and turned around to sell them to the farmers. But there were no buyers. The farmers refused to take them. “The people who we were supposed to be selling the pigs to were basically saying: ‘Sue me.’ The people we had bought the pigs from were saying: ‘You’re not getting out of my contract or I am suing you,’ ” Watson said. “All of this ownership risk that I was assured didn’t exist started to just come out of the woodwork.

Despite arguments against speculation and its place in the commodity markets that shape our economy—and, therefore, our lives—without it, producers and users of commodities would have a difficult time facilitating transactions. Thanks to speculators, there is always a buyer for every seller and a seller for every buyer. Without them and the liquidity they provide, hedgers would likely be forced to endure much larger bid/ask spreads and, in theory, price volatility. Consumers would also suffer in the absence of speculators simply because producers would be forced to pass on their increased costs to allow for favorable profit margins.

Most’s eclectic background also provided the spark behind the invention of what would become known as the ETF. During his travels around the Pacific, he had appreciated the efficiency of how traders would buy and sell warehouse receipts of commodities, rather than the more cumbersome physical vats of coconut oil, barrels of crude, or ingots of gold. This opened up a panoply of opportunities for creative financial engineers. “You store a commodity and you get a warehouse receipt and you can finance on that warehouse receipt. You can sell it, do a lot of things with it. Because you don’t want to be moving the merchandise back and forth all the time, so you keep it in place and you simply transfer the warehouse receipt,” he later recalled.19 Most’s ingenious idea was to, after a fashion, mimic this basic structure. The Amex could create a kind of legal warehouse where it could place the S&P 500 stocks, and then create and list shares in the warehouse itself for people to trade. The new warehouse-cum-fund would take advantage of the growth and electronic evolution in portfolio trading—the simultaneous buying and selling of big baskets of stocks first pioneered by Wells Fargo two decades earlier—and a little-known aspect of mutual funds: They can do “in kind” transactions, exchanging shares in a fund for a proportional amount of the stocks it contains, rather than cash. Or an investor can gather the correct proportion of the underlying stocks and exchange them for shares in the fund. Stock exchange “specialists”—the trading firms on the floor of the exchange that match buyers and sellers—would be authorized to be able to create or redeem these shares according to demand. They could take advantage of any differences that might open up between the price of the “warehouse” and the stock it contained, an arbitrage opportunity that should help keep it trading in line with its assets. This elegant creation/redemption process would also get around the logistical challenges of money coming in and out continuously throughout the day—one of Bogle’s main practical concerns. In basic terms, investors can either trade shares of the warehouse between themselves, or go to the warehouse and exchange their shares in it for a slice of the stocks it holds. Or they can turn up at the warehouse with a suitable bundle of stocks and exchange them for shares in the warehouse. Moreover, because no money changes hands when shares in the warehouse are created or redeemed, capital gains tax can be delayed until the investor actually sells their shares—a side effect that has proven vital to the growth of ETFs in the United States. Only when an ETF is actually sold will investors have to pay any capital gains taxes due.

Carson used a number of tricks to get Hyplains the best cattle without spending a penny more than he had to, a process called “putting the kill together.” To assemble a good kill, Carson employed a team of buyers who visited the feedlots and reported back to him what they saw. Carson employed a strategy called “laying the noose.” He gave each of his buyers a secret order to buy several pens of cattle at a given price. Then at an appointed time later in the afternoon, Carson instructed all of them to make the trade. That was called “pulling the noose.” Within minutes, Hyplains locked up thousands of cattle before the competition could get at them. The competitors found out the next morning that the first cut of cattle was off the market.

But simple consumer reluctance to switch providers is a major obstacle to competition in retail financial services. It is a well-known joke in the industry that customers change their spouses more often than their banks. They all seem the same: why transfer your loyalty from Tweedledee to Tweedledum? This inertia on the part of retail buyers is common across all financial products. Credit cards have consistently been one of the most profitable retail banking products. Bank of America, ‘first mover’ in this industry, continues to hold a strong position, despite aggressive attempts by entrants to solicit new business. Many people just do not like buying financial services, and minimise the time and effort they devote to their purchase as a result. The days when retail customers of financial services were rewarded for their loyalty are long gone. The replacement of a relationship-based culture by a transaction-based one means that the best deal is almost always obtained by shopping around aggressively rather than by building trust. Customer perceptions have lagged behind this harsh reality. But

OF APPRECIATION.     5.  WHAT DID THE CLIENT SAY OR DO TO LET YOU KNOW YOU DID WELL? (INCLUDE THEIR TESTIMONIAL OR THAT THEY REFERRED ME. FOR EXAMPLE, THEY REFERRED ME TO CHRIS HILLS, ANOTHER FIRST TIME HOME BUYER.)     6.  ASK FOR SPECIFIC AND RELEVANT REFERRALS EXAMPLE: WHO IS A PERSON YOU KNOW BUYING THEIR FIRST HOME - COULD BE A RENTER OR EVEN A SON OR DAUGHTER OF SOMEONE YOU KNOW?     7.  CALL TO ACTION. USE A SENTENCE LIKE: “PLEASE REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL WITH THE NAME AND THEIR SITUATION. I PROMISE THEY’LL GET THE EXCELLENT SERVICE THEY DESERVE.

An integral part of a public offering is a “road show,” during which company leaders pitch their prospects to bankers and investment gurus. Brin and Page refused to see themselves as supplicants. According to Lise Buyer, the founders routinely spurned any advice from the experienced financial team they’d hired to guide them through the process. “If you told them you couldn’t do something a certain way, they would think you were an idiot,” she says. The tone of the road-show presentations was set early, as Brin and Page introduced themselves by first names, an opening more appropriate for bistro waiters than potential captains of industry. And of course they weren’t attired like executives—the day of their presentation of Google’s case to investors was one more in a lifetime of casual dress days for them. Google had prepared a video to promote the company, but viewers considered it amateurish. It was poorly lit and wasn’t even enlivened by the customary upbeat musical sound track. Though anyone who read the prospectus should have been prepared for that, some investors had difficulty with the heresy that Google was willing to forgo some profits for its founders’ idealistic views of what made the world a better place. On the video Brin cautioned that Google might apply its resources “to ameliorate a number of the world’s problems.” Probably the low point of the road show was a massive session involving 1,500 potential investors at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Brin and Page caused a firestorm by refusing to answer many questions, cracking jokes instead. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Some investors sitting in the ballroom began speculating with each other whether the executives had spent any time practicing the presentation, or if they were winging it.” The latter was in fact the case—despite the desperate urging of Google’s IPO team, Page and Brin had refused to perform even a cursory run-through.

THE 7 STEPS TO A SUCCESSFUL SUCCESS STORY:     1.  WHAT WAS THE CLIENT’S NAME AND SITUATION? (BE SPECIFIC ABOUT THE PROBLEM OR CHALLENGE.) FOR EXAMPLE: JOSH AND JILL WERE FIRST TIME HOME BUYERS.     2.  WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU WEREN’T INVOLVED? (WHAT IS THE WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED?) JOSH AND JILL COULD HAVE BOUGHT THE FIRST HOME THEY SAW - BACKED TO HIGHWAY.     3.  HOW DID YOU HELP THEM SOLVE THE PROBLEM? EDUCATED THEM ON WHAT MAKES A GOOD INVESTMENT.     4.  WHAT WAS THE RESULT? BE SPECIFIC. THEY BOUGHT A GREAT HOME THAT IS A GREAT INVESTMENT. ON CUL-DE-SAC, DESIRABLE PLAN, AND NEIGHBORHOOD THAT HAS A GOOD HISTORY

At least 1000 searches per month for your keyword on Google: (3 Points): If you are not getting at least 1000 searches per month on Google (you can check using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool here), you need to find a different keyword that your buyers will use, not you, or simply choose another niche if there is not enough interest. Less than 50 backlinks to the top 5 pages as an average: (2 points) This is because it is fine to have one web page over you, but you don’t want to be below the top three, or you’re basically invisible to anyone searching for the term (just look at this graph of the click through rates [percentage of searchers who click] based on position in search results.) Just the falloff from number one to number two goes from 37% down to 12.5%, and anything below the top three is basically irrelevant. Let’s be honest, how many times have you clicked to the second page of Google or beyond? It’s less than 1% of searches, and that’s why it’s so important to have your site on the first page (and on the top three if you want to make serious money!). No more than half of the webpages on the search results page (first one) with over PR3: This is important because it is very difficult to beat PR4 or higher pages on Google (especially when you’re a new site that is almost guaranteed to be

the iMac sold well to first-time computer buyers and unhappy PC users, with an impressive 32 percent of the sales going to first-timers and another 12 percent to “switchers.

Sec. Particulars Amount 80C Tax saving investments1 Maximum up to Rs. 1,50,000 (from FY 2014-15) 80D Medical insurance premium-self, family Individual: Rs. 15,000 Senior Citizen: Rs. 20,000 Preventive Health Check-up Rs. 5,000 80E Interest on Loan for Higher Education Interest amount (8 years) 80EE Deduction of Interest of Housing Loan2 Up to Rs.1,00,000 total 80G Charitable Donation 100%/ 50% of donation or 10% of adjusted total income, whichever is less 80GGC Donation to political parties Any sum contributed (Other than Cash) 80TTA Interest on savings account Rs. 10,000 1              Tax saving investments includes life insurance premium including ULIPs, PPF, 5 year tax saving FD, tuition fees, repayment of housing loan, mutual fund (ELSS) (Sec. 80CCB), NSC, employee provident fund, pension fund (Sec. 80CCC) or pension scheme (Sec. 80CCD), etc. NRIs are not allowed to invest in certain investments, such as PPF, NSC, 5 year bank FD, etc. 2              Only to the first time buyer of a self-occupied residential flat costing less than Rs. 40 lakhs and loan amount of less than 25 lakhs sanctioned in financial year 2013-14 Clubbing of other’s income Generally, the taxpayer is taxed on his own income. However, in certain cases, he may have to pay tax on another person’s income.  Taxpayers in the higher tax bracket (e.g. 30%) may divert some portion

Having grown rapidly, many PC software companies were stretched to the limit simply building their programs. With customers clamoring for new products, testing inevitably had to take a backseat. In addition, though it was eroding, there remained a pejorative attitude toward testing: “Let the customer test the program.” That saved the builder money and time, but it frustrated buyers, who came to view the first release of a program as a gamble. Microsoft

In a market where multiple offers are raising prices, Teri Toombs, Principal Broker at Living Room Realty, says she discourages people from overpaying for homes. But some can’t resist. Some people don’t want to continue renting. And they don’t care what that costs. An in-house poll led by Toombs’ colleague Alyssa Isenstein Krueger, Living Room found more than a few first-time buyers with cash to throw around. The Living Room agents that responded said that of 148 first-time buyers served in 2014, 42 percent came to the table with funds from friends and relatives to help grab whatever edge they could leverage. The sums ranged from up to $470,000. It’s not scientific, but it suggests a hard new reality in the market. For those without cash? Those that can’t overpay? “It’s torture. And I try my best to prepare them for what they’re in for and I see them starting to glaze over like, ‘Why is this lady saying all this? Why can’t we just start looking at houses? Why is she bringing us down like this?’” said Toombs. “With determination and being really diligent about it, they can get into a house. But they have to realize that they’re going to be moving into emerging neighborhoods.

A management team brought in by George to restructure Lucasfilm seemed concerned mostly with cash flow, and as time went on, they became openly skeptical that our division would ever attract a buyer. This team was headed by two men with the same first name, whom Alvy and I nicknamed “the Dweebs” because they didn’t understand a thing about the business we were in. Those two guys threw around management consulting terms (they loved to tout their “corporate intuition” and constantly urged us to make “strategic alliances”), but they didn’t seem at all insightful about how to make us attractive to buyers or about which buyers to pursue. At one point, they called us into an office, sat us down, and said that to cut costs, we should lay off all our employees until after our division was sold—at which point we could discuss rehiring them. In addition to the emotional toll we knew this would take, what bugged us about this suggestion was that our real selling point—the thing that had attracted potential suitors thus far—was the talent we’d gathered. Without that, we had nothing. So, when our two like-minded overlords demanded a list of names of people to lay off, Alvy and I gave them two: his and mine.

Depressed shopping” is something therapists see all the time. People go shopping because they feel lonely, empty, bored, and they hope that buying something new will relieve those distressing feelings. In the process, they experience a little thrill of acquisition, but then they get buyer’s remorse and feel worse. Most likely they’ve spent money they didn’t have and added to their indebtedness to get something they really didn’t need in the first place.

Often buyers make the mistake of believing they must have a specific home in mind first. That’s counterproductive, counter-successful thinking. Moving through the loan application process early is the most productive and most successful.

While he was in school, we needed to pay our bills. I had to get a job. I'd majored in music (piano). I had no business credentials, connections, or confidence, so I started as a secretary to a retail sales broker at Smith Barney in midtown Manhattan. It was the era of Liar's Poker, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Working Girl. Working on Wall Street was exciting. I started taking business courses at night and I had a boss who believed in me, which allowed me to bridge from secretary to investment banker. This rarely happens. Later I became an equity research analyst and subsequently cofounded the investment firm Rose Park Advisors with Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School. When I walked onto Wall Street through the secretarial side door, and then walked off Wall Street to become an entrepreneur, I was a disruptor. "Disruptive innovation" is a term coined by Christensen to describe an innovation at the low end of the market that eventually upends an industry. In my case, I had started at the bottom and climbed to the top—now I wanted to upend my own career. No wonder my friend thought I'd lost my sanity. According to Christensen's theory, disruptors secure their initial foothold at the low end of the market, offering inferior, low-margin products. At first, the disrupter's position is weak. For example, when Toyota entered the U.S. market in the 1950s, it introduced the Corona, a small, cheap, no-frills car that appealed to first-time car buyers on a tight budget.

It is not easy to hold this kind of quality leadership for three big reasons. First, no one will believe you have the longest-lasting trucks until they have already lasted a long time on the road. It’s a reputation that takes a while to earn and can be lost quickly. Second, designing a very high-quality piece of machinery is not a textbook problem. Designers learn from other designers over time, and the company accumulates these nuggets of wisdom by providing a good, stable place to work for talented engineers. Third, it is usually quite difficult to convince buyers to pay an up-front premium for future savings, even if the numbers are clear. People tend to be more myopic than economic theory would suggest.

Trader Joe’s first private label food product was granola. We installed Alta Dena certified raw milk, to the disgruntlement of Southland, and within six months were the largest retailers of Alta Dena milk, both pasteurized and raw, in California. We began price-bombing five-pound cans of honey, and then all the ingredients for baking bread at home. We installed fresh orange juice squeezers in the stores, and sold fresh juice at the lowest price in town. By late in 1971, we were moving into vitamins, encouraged by my very good friend James C. Caillouette, MD. Jim spent a lot of time talking with the faculty at Cal Tech. He was convinced that Linus Pauling was on to something with his research on vitamin C. I set out to break the price on vitamin C. At one point, I think, we were doing 3 percent of sales in vitamin C! Later, Jim forwarded articles from the British medical magazine Lancet, describing how a high fiber diet could avoid colon cancer. But where could we get bran? The only stores that sold it were conventional health food stores, who sold it in bulk, something that I have always been opposed to on the grounds of hygiene. And still am! Leroy found a hippie outfit in Venice—I think it was called Mom’s Trucking—which would package the bran. But bran is a low-value product. They couldn’t afford to deliver it. Since they also packaged nuts and dried fruits, however, we somewhat reluctantly added them to the order. And that’s how Trader Joe’s became the largest retailer of nuts and dried fruits in California! Brilliant foresight! Astute market analysis! By 1989, when I left Trader Joe’s, we regularly took down 5 percent of the entire Californian pistachio crop, and we were the thirteenth largest buyer of almonds in the United States—Hershey was number one.

Investment firms are buying up more vacation homes, aiming to cash in on growing demand from tourists and remote workers. Most vacation rental homes are owned by small-time owners who list their properties on websites such as Airbnb Inc., but the number of financial firms investing in the sector is growing. New York-based investment firm Saluda Grade is launching a venture with short-term- rental operator AvantStay Inc. to buy about $500 million of homes, the companies said Tuesday. Saluda Grade said it is also looking to raise debt by selling mortgage bonds backed by its homes to investors, the first vacation-rental mortgage securitization, according to the company. Andes STR, a startup that buys and manages short-term rental homes on behalf of investors, also recently signed a deal with Chilean investment firm WEG Capital to buy roughly $80 million of properties in the U.S., Andes said. These investors are betting they can get higher returns if they rent out homes by the night instead of by the year. Low-interest rates have made it more attractive to borrow and Buy Traditional Rental Homes, inflating property prices and making it harder for new buyers to turn a profit. That has prompted some institutions and wealthy families to look in more obscure corners of the property market where competition is smaller, investment advisers say. Some are turning to investments in vacation homes, where demand has surged in many places during the pandemic as more people choose to work from remote locations and leisure travel heated up last year. “There’s a lot more yield available in the short-term market,” said Saluda Grade’s chief executive, Ryan Craft. It is the latest sign of how the pandemic is changing the way people work and live, and how real-estate investors are angling to find new ways to profit from these shifts. Saluda Grade is targeting homes within driving distance of major population centers, Mr. Craft said. His company will buy the homes and AvantStay will manage them for a fee. But while vacation-rental homes can offer higher returns, they also pose challenges to investors. Mortgages are usually more expensive and harder to get for short-term rentals than for owner-occupied homes, said Giri Devanur, CEO of reAlpha Tech Corp., a startup that wants to pool money from small-time investors to buy short-term-rental homes.

In its 150 years of existence, Dar es Salaam had grown from a small settlement and prospective summer home of Sultan Seyyid Majid to one of the largest cities in Africa, with a population of more than four million. People from all over Europe and Asia poured into its streets daily, jockeying for space with local tribesmen. Dar es Salaam was a disorienting experience for the first-time visitor. Hawkers and peddlers sold their wares in the crowded streets. Muslim women scurried by, shrouded in buibuis. Indian traders enticed prospective buyers with a myriad of spices and silks from the world’s most exotic corners

Everything You Need to Do Freelancing One must possess some basic skills to do freelancing work. For example, a good computer, internet, and browsing should be well understood. Freelancing work is mostly hired by foreign buyers. In that case, you must have English speaking skills, know how to write good English while chatting, and keep practicing speaking English regularly. How to Get Work at Freelancing? Freelancing means being contracted to other people or companies and working as a contract. To do this, you need to have some special creativity in freelancing, which you can sell to clients as a service. How You Can Get Work: First, you need to select a freelancing platform from which you want to work. Decide in which category you want to make your career. Then open an account there, add your portfolio, and post it through a blog. Then start promoting your freelancing skills and talent. You can also get work by promoting your skills on Linkedin, Pinterest, and Twitter. Search for jobs based on your skills on various job forums (Upwork, Fiverr) and others. By doing these above tasks, you will get a job according to your needs, InshaAllah. Some Principles to Be a Good Freelancer: Time-sharing: You can create a timetable for when you will do a task. For example – You can keep morning time for various practices, afternoon time for study or other research, and night time for work. It will reduce the pressure on you. Eat meals on time: Never have irregular meals, if you do you will get sick very soon. And if you get sick, you can't work. As a result, you will suffer both physically and financially. So eat food on time. And remember, "Food first then Work". Don't Embrace Loneliness: People who are freelancing have to be alone most of the time. As a result, they cannot give time to everyone and become lonely. But you should never make this mistake. You will find time for yourself outside of your work to spend time gossiping with family or friends. How to Increase Your Workload: Increase work efficiency, and present the nature of work attractively and accurately. Quality of work will help you get additional work. Keeping the client happy at work is paramount. If you want, you can provide a little more service than the client asked to do without any charge. And can request you to give a 5-star rating. Clients may be happy with you for additional services and offer more work. Never overprice your work or service unless you are a popular freelancer in the marketplace. Please visit Our Website (Bhairab IT Zone) to Read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing. Thank You.

Given these dynamics, high switching costs can spur a race in which first-time customers are the prize. First-time customers are new to a product category and they don’t yet have an affiliation with any provider. Consequently, compared to stealing a rival’s customers, first-time buyers will be much cheaper to acquire. They won’t incur any switching costs upon purchasing, so they don’t require a subsidy. Lower CAC means that first-time customers are more profitable to serve, and they also broaden the startup’s total addressable market. Specifically, with lower CAC, the startup can afford to acquire first-time buyers who have lower LTV, while still keeping their LTV/CAC ratio within an acceptable range.

first-mover advantages can be especially strong in new markets where customers face high switching costs. The first mover in a new product category has a chance to acquire first-time buyers before any rivals enter the market. But this advantage disappears once the second entrant arrives; then, the race is on.

Were the United States an emerging market, its exchange rate would have plummeted and its interest rates soared. Access to capital markets would be lost in a classic Dornbusch/Calvo–type sudden stop. During the first year following the crisis (2007), exactly the opposite happened: the dollar appreciated and interest rates fell as world investors viewed other countries as even riskier than the United States and bought Treasury securities copiously.33 But buyer beware! Over the longer run, the U.S. exchange rate and interest rates could well revert to form, especially if policies are not made to re-establish a firm base for long-term fiscal sustainability.

Of course, “conventional wisdom” at the time held that there could never be a pickup in demand for homes. Instead, most people were convinced that the American dream of home ownership was over; demand for homes would remain depressed forever; and thus the overhang of unsold homes would be absorbed only very slowly. They cited the trend among young people — having been burnt by the collapse of the housing and mortgage bubbles — to rent rather than buy, and as usual they extrapolated it rather than question its durability. As in so many of the examples in this book, for most people, psychology-driven extrapolation took the place of an understanding of and belief in cyclicality. It was clear to me and my Oaktree colleagues, from the graph and from our knowledge of the data behind it, that because the greatest economic crash in almost eighty years had halted additions to the housing supply, home prices could recover strongly if there was any material increase in demand. And, rejecting conventional wisdom, we were convinced that housing demand would prove cyclical as usual, and thus would pick up sometime in the intermediate-term future. This conclusion — supported by other data and analysis — contributed to our decision to invest heavily in non-performing home mortgages and non-performing bank loans secured by land for residential construction, and to purchase North America’s largest private homebuilding company. These investments worked out quite well. (It’s interesting in this context to note what the Wall Street Journal said in a May 12, 2017 article headlined “Generation of Renters Now Buying”: “In all [first-time home buyers] have accounted for 42% of buyers this year, up from 38% in 2015 and 31% at the lowest point during the recent housing cycle in 2011.” So much for extrapolating widespread abandonment of home ownership.)

NeighborhoodScout.com and Movoto.com offer information about neighborhoods and crime statistics. NextDoor.com helps you identify neighborhoods you might want to live in and connect with neighbors, while Safewise.com helps you figure out how safe that neighborhood is.

A home in a fast-growing city, next to a popular park and high-end grocery stores, in a great school district, that is also the worst home on its block is likely to experience a wonderful appreciation rate.

On average, property management will cost about 10 percent of gross rental income.

These four make up the holy quartet of home expenses: mortgage, maintenance, CapEx, and utilities.

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped “in a futile attempt to attract white residents,” as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood’s future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties. Thus many white neighborhoods began declining before colored residents even arrived, Hirsch noted. There emerged a perfect storm of nervous owners, falling prices, vacancies unfillable with white tenants or buyers, and a market of colored buyers who may not have been able to afford the neighborhood at first but now could with prices within their reach. The arrival of colored home buyers was often the final verdict on a neighborhood’s falling property value rather than the cause of it.

1. Opportunity. What is the best opportunity for a new entrepreneur to build a successful business? Why is now the time to do it? How does the new landscape of e-commerce and social media create an environment of opportunity? And how do you fit into it all? You will discover why now is the perfect time to create your pie, and why there are others who are ready and willing to buy a slice. 2. Mindset. There’s a reason not every wantrepreneur becomes a successful entrepreneur, and psychology is a big piece of the puzzle. I’ll take you through the development of the right mindset to take a business from zero to one million in a year. 3. Getting customers. A million-dollar business doesn’t start with a product; it starts with a person. Your first step in building your business must be identifying your customer, and then answering his or her need. This builds a real brand, not just a revenue stream. If you get this piece right, you will have droves of repeat buyers who will eagerly “overpay” for your products, thank you for it, and tell all of their friends about you. 4. Product. Choosing your first product will be the biggest hurdle you face. It will take research, patience, and determination. Most importantly, it will require listening to what your customer is saying. I’ll take you through the whole process, from ideation to prototyping and refinement, helping you clear this hurdle in no time flat. 5. Funding. Sure, you’ve got a great product, and you know to whom you’re selling—but how do you fund your inventory? Here’s how to bootstrap, borrow, and build your way to a self-sustaining revenue machine, without stressing about money. 6. Stacking the deck. How do you nearly guarantee that your first product is successful, right out of the gate? Once you’ve decided what business you’re in, we will work to ensure that you don’t get stuck holding a product no one wants; this is where you stack the deck so your launch day is set up to blast off. 7. Launch. Your first product is ready to launch. What do you do now? Do you just let it ride? No. Here’s where building relationships and a few strategic marketing tips will take your business from a single product to a world-class brand, as we cover what you need to do to reach the key growth point of twenty-five sales per day.

Over a period of time, I became adept at spotting non-serious buyers, because they all tend to talk and behave in the same manner.  For example, if you ask a non-serious buyer about his guidelines for purchasing properties, he will most likely tell you that he doesn't have any guidelines and that he's "willing to look at anything."  But the fact is that most serious buyers do have definite guidelines, because they know exactly what they're looking for. Another tip-off to a non-serious buyer is that he tends to dwell on questions of secondary importance, such as those pertaining to location, construction, and/or age of the property.  As I previously pointed out, such questions are reasonable, but not until the buyer is first satisfied with the numbers and has decided that he has a definite interest in purchasing the property.  If the numbers don't add up, it doesn't matter where the property is located, how well it's built, or how old it is.  Serious, sophisticated buyers get down to the nuts and bolts of the numbers right away, because they understand the mathematical guidelines for evaluating cash flow—again, the key factor when it comes to evaluating income-producing properties.

What else should you watch for? Most fund buyers look at past performance first, then at the manager’s reputation, then at the riskiness of the fund, and finally (if ever) at the fund’s expenses.8 The intelligent investor looks at those same things—but in the opposite order. Since a fund’s expenses are far more predictable than its future risk or return, you should make them your first filter. There’s no good reason ever to pay more than these levels of annual operating expenses, by fund category: Taxable and municipal bonds: 0.75% U.S. equities (large and mid-sized stocks): 1.0% High-yield (junk) bonds: 1.0% U.S. equities (small stocks): 1.25% Foreign stocks: 1.50%9 Next, evaluate risk. In its prospectus (or buyer’s guide), every fund must show a bar graph displaying its worst loss over a calendar quarter. If you can’t stand losing at least that much money in three months, go elsewhere. It’s also worth checking a fund’s Morningstar rating. A leading investment research firm, Morningstar awards “star ratings” to funds, based on how much risk they took to earn their returns (one star is the worst, five is the best). But, just like past performance itself, these ratings look back in time; they tell you which funds were the best, not which are going to be. Five-star funds, in fact, have a disconcerting habit of going on to underperform one-star funds. So first find a low-cost fund whose managers are major shareholders, dare to be different, don’t hype their returns, and have shown a willingness to shut down before they get too big for their britches. Then, and only then, consult their Morningstar rating.10 Finally, look at past performance, remembering that it is only a pale predictor of future returns. As we’ve already seen, yesterday’s winners often become tomorrow’s losers. But researchers have shown that one thing is almost certain: Yesterday’s losers almost never become tomorrow’s winners. So avoid funds with consistently poor past returns—especially if they have above-average annual expenses.

The median home price in the U.S. is six times the median annual income—fifty years ago it was two times—and the share of first-time buyers is barely half the historical average and the lowest on record.