Jean-Marc Ly – Page 2 – Growth Markerter, Founder, Photographer & Whisky Enthusiast

Latest from Investing Brothers: Why You Should Consider Investing in the Stock Market

February 16, 2017 No Comments

We’ve published our latest post “Why You Should Consider Investing in the Stock Market.” It discusses the differences between owning a traditional business versus investing in publicly traded companies. This post is important because it highlights the value I believe in, investing smartly can make you richer.

Ill add the post below because I think everyone needs to learn this lesson. However follow my latest blog Investing Brothers because we will be showing you how to invest smartly and securely.

“If you look at anyone mildly successful, they may have a good job with a good salary but that is usually not the main reason they are wealthy. What separates them from being poor or average is that they either own a business or invested in real estate assets. Luck, effort, and skills are part of the equation but the vehicle of wealth these successful people get on, are the same.

Owning a business or acquiring real estate property can be a daunting tasks. So how can the common person begin the path of wealth if they neither have a business or own real estate?

INVESTING IN THE STOCK MARKET.

The stock market is the market where publicly held companies are traded and issued through exchanges. It’s a place where companies can have access to capital in exchange for giving investors an ownership interest of the company. For small individual investors, the stock market provides an opportunity to invest a small seed of money and potentially become wealthy without taking the risk of starting or running a business.

What are stocks?

A stock is a unit of ownership in a company. Stock represent claims on a company’s earnings or assets. You can own 1 or multitudes of stocks within a company. Each stock has a value price which you can pay for at the time of purchase. You buy stocks from another trader or owner. Other common stock terms are equity and shares. Buying a stock in a company makes you a shareholder of that company. As a shareholder, you may have rights for the company such as voting rights and can receive dividends, a portion of profits of the company paid out to its shareholders. Thus, public companies can have thousands of shareholder or owners (however the amount of stocks you have may be insignificant and thus cannot affect the direction of the company).

Learn more about stocks from Investopedia.

How Average People Invest

In our observation, most people are not proactive investors. In majority of cases, people start investing when they get a job which provides a 401(k) plan. A 401(k) plan is a savings retirement plan set up by an employer for the benefit of their employees, to make contributions from a portion of your salary on a post-tax or pre-tax amount into an account to kept for your retirement. Employers can choose to match your contribution or add profit-sharing to the plan. Earnings in a 401(k) plan accrue on a tax-deferred basis or tax-free. This means that capital gains and dividends earned can grow tax-free or tax-deferred. Over a period of many years, an employee’s retirement account can grow to a significant amount.

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb

What Should You Do?

How should the average person gain wealth if he/she does not have a business or own real estate? We believe investing in the stock market is one of the easiest and fastestway for the common person to create long-term wealth over a period of time.

The advantage of investing in the stock market as opposed to owning a business directly, is not having to deal with the everyday operations of running a business. Making sales, managing employees, inventory, customer management, and dealing with legal issues can be a daunting task. When we invest in the stock market, we are indirectly owning publicly traded companies that already have a management team in place. So, we as individual investors, have free time to hold another job or pursue other interests.

Let’s imagine what could happen if you decide to buy a business:

You buy a coffee shop. There is a learning curve and as you make mistakes; location is not good enough, the business potential is not there, employee problems, product issues etc. Your only way out is to sell the business (often at a loss). It’s also expensive to sell a business. You need to hire an agent, pay fees and negotiate on the price while still paying rent to the landlord. The biggest consideration of owning a business is that you have to be there to run the business. There is a time commitment to managing the business which leaves little to do anything else. And if the business isn’t making money, you are not getting a salary.

Now if you buy a publicly traded company but realize you do not agree with the fundamentals of the company and its vision. The cost to correct the mistake is minimal (you sell your shares right away).

There are overwhelming evidence that investing in a well diversified portfolio of stocks has proven to be a great way to build long-term wealth. Historically, returns on investment from the stock market has been very generous (9-10%). On average, stocks have doubled every 7-8 years (with dividend reinvested). Over a long period of time, if you continue to invest and contribute to the stock market, you will probably have a decent nest egg. (you can view historic returns on investment from NYU.)

The market doesn’t go up every year. These are average returns. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. But if you build a well diversified and low-cost portfolio of high quality companies, there is a good probably for decent return.

Let’s say you invest $10,000 into the stock market at 25 years old. You could potentially double your money every 7.5 years. By the time you are 70 years old and assuming you make no more contribution; you could potential have $640,000 in your account. Now Imagine if you contributed more over your lifetime. Your money made money for you.

“It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.” – Robert Kiyosaki.

Investing can be fun and rewarding. Our next post will help you get started on opening a brokerage account. Subscribe to our blog to learn how to invest smartly and properly. We aim to make investing fun.”

Article original posted on Investing Brothers.

Business, Investments, Thoughts

Starting a New Finance Blog: Investing Brothers

February 7, 2017 No Comments

If people knew how to invest properly, everyone would live with a better state of mind. With that notion, I have decided to start a new blog with my cousin Mark, to teach regular folks how to setup an investment account, invest properly by setting up your portfolio smartly and grew a retirement nesting egg. This new blog is called Investing Brothers. Head over to our site and let me know your thoughts!

screen-shot-2017-02-06-at-1-56-57-pm — https://investingbrothers.com/

Business, Tech

Why Organizations should choose GCP – A Business Perspective

January 19, 2017 No Comments

Cloud services reduce the effort needed to manage infrastructure, provision servers and configure networks. Today the cloud market is primarily dominated by Amazon Web Services, followed by Microsoft Azure. As the new kid on the block, GCP is the newest entrant to a highly profitable and competitive landscape.

This post explores GCP from a business point of view — what you need know to make an informed decision for your organization.

Why go with Cloud computing?

For a company to remain competitive, it needs to reduce costs, increase business agility and remain flexible to handle growing needs. Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) or public cloud services, are an indispensable part of your IT arsenal that allow you to focus on your core business. Here are 5 reasons to move to the cloud:

Business Efficiencies – Freeing your organization from managing a large IT department allows you to efficiently run business operations and focus on decision making that affects the future of your company. You free yourself, and your team, from worrying about how business activity impacts IT.

Reduce Staffing – Keep only the key technical specialization and engineering staff that your business requires, without adding operational personnel.

Scaling – To handle seasonal spikes, unexpected growth, or other changes in traffic, use cloud services to ramp up resources without purchasing hardware and software that goes unused during the rest of the year.

Reduce Capital Spending – Why make large capital investments for hardware, data centers, and staff when you can use the savings for business investment? Instead of risky large outlays, your cost is reduced to monthly billing.

Instant Anywhere Access – Cloud services allow your team to work anywhere with instant access. Team members only need internet connections and authorized access. This means better work conditions, a larger pool of talent (they can work remotely from anywhere) and more efficiency at getting things done.

Why GCP?

We were invited to meet with Google at both their Chicago and Mountain View headquarters to discuss GCP from a .NET perspective. Since then, we have decided to move one of our applications from Azure to GCP, in part to see how easy it would be to migrate from one solution provider to another, and to compare performance between the two.

Although GCP is relatively new compared to AWS and Azure, Google has been beefing up their cloud offering. Not only has Google added new data centers worldwide since last year, they also offer one of the best pricing models. GCP does not require upfront payment or a lock-in commitment and offers discount for sustained usage. GCP charges you monthly for on-demand usage of instances by minutes used (minimum of 10 minutes). Google offers a sustained-use discount and publicly promised to pass along along to their customers any future price reduction. In contrast, AWS offers several pricing models; on-demand usage priced by the nearest hour, reserved instances – a commitment based pricing for a specific VM instance, and spot bidding for extra capacity available. Azure offers per minute billing with pay-as-you-go subscriptions, buying from a reseller, and an upfront usage commitment paid in advance or monthly.

Let’s talk about services. The array of storage options are impressive: from temporary and persistent disks storage for arbitrary objects (Google Cloud Storage), to relational databases (MySql, Sql Server), BigQuery (used by Google Analytics and SnapLogic), and BigTable ( “NoSql” database used by Google Search and Gmail). You have storage options for cost-efficient data storage based based on frequency of use and the geographic location of your customers.

GCP and .NET

Google also supports .NET technologies like SQL Server, Windows Servers, Visual Studio tools and offers a .NET Framework (currently in Beta) of the Windows dev stack featuring IIS, SQL Express and ASP.NET. You can also use Google’s Cloud APIs (with tons of supported libraries), Cloud Tools for Visual Studio and a even work in PowerShell using the Cloud Tools for PowerShell extension. It is impressive to see that Google is pushing for a more robust .NET environment, with help from people such as Jon Skeet and other notable developers. To learn more, check out this article: Making ASP.NET apps first-class citizens on Google Cloud Platform.

Adoption Costs

There are inherent adoption costs to consider. While cloud platforms have common features, GCP, AWS, and Azure all offer unique services which promise faster time-to-market and lower costs. For example Google’s BigTable vs. Amazon’s DynomoDB vs. Azure’s DocumentDB. And for common features that everybody offers, implementation varies.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”

On one hand, there might be little new learning if your engineers already know a specific tech stack (e.g. .NET or Java or Node.js). While cloud platforms can be accessed in a variety of programming languages, some implementations are easier to use. Google is growing it’s list of “idiomatic” client libraries that are true to the flavor of each language, particularly .NET.

Likewise, infrastructure management operations performed by IT are unique to each platform. Azure has it’s “Blades” web user interface, while AWS and GCP have a more standard web console. As Adam noted in his intro report on Google Cloud Platform, the GCP portal feels like a middle ground between Azure and AWS’s portal:

“My initial impression is that the GCP portal feels more approachable and snappier than the Azure portal. Another really impressive thing is how Google has really gone all out to make their tooling really accessible directly within the browser.”

Hybrid Cloud

Private servers are costly and difficult to scale, as opposed to public clouds. But you may be reluctant to give up private services and storage that are known to work well for critical applications. In this case, you might consider a hybrid cloud environment that uses a mix of public cloud with your own on-premise, private solutions. By moving the workload between the two, you can limit computing needs and manage cost more efficiently. This gives you greater flexibility and more options to deploy data when and where you need it. For example, you could use a cloud provider to host your development environment and less critical data.

An important caveat: While AWS and Azure offer hybrid cloud infrastructure, Google does not currently support a dedicated hybrid cloud solution. Physical bulk data import and export can only be done via third parties currently. However, Google does offer simple data transfer options for business migrating from AWS onto GCP through Google Stackdriver (Google’s platform for managing applications on Google Cloud Platform and AWS). If a hybrid approach is necessary for your organization, you may want to wait until GCP catches up or look into AWS or Azure for a more robust hybrid implementation.

Security

Security is one checkbox that no organization can afford to skip. GCP has numerous International Organization for Standardization certifications for its cloud security. The standards serve as assurance that Google has taken specific internal measures to secure its users’ data and protect it from unwanted intruders. GCP has the following certifications: SSAE16 / ISAE 3402 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, FedRamp ATO (Google App Engine), PCI DSS v3.1 and conducts annual audits with an independent auditor.

Planning for the future

Although Google Cloud Platform is the new entrant to the public cloud space, it offers tons of capability, resources, and competitive pricing that is attractive to businesses considering a move to the cloud or switching from AWS or Azure. Google has put strong emphasis on growing its cloud platform and we will only see improvement from here on. Anticipating the future for your business begins with making the correct business decision. The first step starts here. Why not take a free spin with Google Cloud and see the benefit for yourself?.

This post originally appeared on Falafel Blog.