The Raging Tech

JustTrade: A New Digg for Stock Trading Tips?

If you’ve been looking into ways to save or invest your money lately like I have, you might have taken a daunting look over at the stock market exchange. If you’re already familiar with trading stocks, you may already have been helped or hurt by OTC (over-the-counter) stock trading tips, or maybe a shady broker.

JUSTtrade is a neat site because you can rate individual tips and posters to the site, meaning that their future tips might be rated higher and be considered more trustworthy. Also, you can pick up some good advice on how to trade and what to trade.

A post on the homepage, for example, hasn’t been rated much yet, but sounds like a neat tip on buying gold low this morning and if the price holds, could see a huge rise later in the day for a nice profit. If I had the money to invest, I’d have gone through to the exchange mentioned and invested in gold and made a killing by this afternoon.

I don’t have the stock savvy or the finances to lose while learning right now, but maybe some of you who do own stocks could take a look at this site and gain some more insight into OTC trading, or maybe even offer some to others.

Entrepreneurs: Custom Plastic Shopping Bags

Is your new business some sort of retail store? Do you interact with customers directly and in person? Or maybe you do online or mail-order sales and you need plastic bags for wrapping up goods to mail to customers?

Any dime-store marketing, small business, or entrepreneurship book will tell you that brand awareness is the easiest way to supplant your company’s name in the customer’s mind in the category of product you sell. People can often be trained like animals - repetition is key. Why not, then, plaster your name all over your shipping materials, your shopping bags, your box liners, and Retail Trade Show Bags?

International Plastics is a company that specializes in making custom-ordered polyethylene film and bags for various companies and manufacturers. They offer all you could need in plastic bags for your business.

Imagine a customer walking into your store, purchasing their items, and upon checking out their merchandise is placed in a specially created plastic shopping bag. Instead of looking small-time with a generic plastic bag, you could look like a much larger business by having your business name and logo imprinted on every bag.

Then imagine at the same time, somewhere online a customer is placing an order, and you’re going to pack their order in your own custom-logo plastic packing materials. That’s the kind of professionalism that brings customers back for repeat business.

More on Loans and Finance

I’ve written previously about my experiences with credit cards and the like, but one facet of personal finance I have yet to experience is getting a mortgage loan. One thing that bothers me about mortgage loans is that the entire loan is centered around the house you’re buying.

Basically you either pay them back, or they take your house. The collateral for this particular loan, is the thing you’re buying with the loan. A house actually costs so much that you really couldn’t put something up against it for collateral, besides another house.

However, I can remember several times when I was a kid and my mom and dad would tell us they were getting the house appraised to see if they could easily refinance their credit cards and other debt and consolidate at a lower interest rate with a new mortgage. They always seemed optimistic about it, so I never really worried.

Now I understand things like interest rates and principle amounts and consolidation.

It still doesn’t scare me. It’s just a huge amount of debt to think about - but it doesn’t seem feasible to purchase a house at my age with just saved up money.

Marketing on MySpace

Lots of people have their own opinion on using social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook for marketing their own business or online affiliate marketing, but I’m not here to tell you what I think about it. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already made up your mind to use it or not.

What I do want to share with you is a convenient, non-invasive way to gather marketing and demographic data without pissing people off.

One of the things I notice about MySpace bulletins is that they are used almost every day by millions of people to fill out irrelevant surveys for fun. Why couldn’t you just as easily leverage the readiness of people to share information, to gather statistics on what people like - to most effectively direct and target your advertising campaign?

This doesn’t have to be just for a big corporation either - you can just as easily get free myspace surveys to use on your own MySpace profile to gather information about the people who have already expressed interest in your business by adding your profile as a friend. Just be careful and be aware of MySpace’s Terms of Use, so that you don’t violate them and get your account deleted.

Go Back to School with Scholarships, Not Loans

In an earlier post, I talked about how you could find some financing to go back to school and get more education. I focused primarily on getting different kinds of loans to pay for your education, but you may also qualify for a multitude of financial aid scholarships or Pell grants.

From even way back when I was applying to colleges, I remember taking a look at Scholarships.com and their collection of academic and other types of scholarships. Well, they’re still around and still up-to-date with the latest information on scores of scholarships to help you go back to school. Take a look at their site and you may just find a scholarship you didn’t even know you could qualify for.

Nouveau Riche University: Real Estate School

Real estate can be a lucrative and prolific source of income. Especially if you’ve honed your skills at buying and flipping houses. But there’s so much more than just buying, fixing up, and selling a house!

There’s a reason being a certified Realtor means you have to pass an exam and know your stuff. You have to know about financing, market values, cash allowances, and a flurry of home improvement skills.

Featured in the January 2008 issue of Your Business at Home Magazine, Nouveau Riche University has the education available to teach you everything you need to know about being a top-notch Realtor and start your own realty business. They offer classes in Short Sales, Foreclosures, Buying and Holding, Lease Options, Tax Strategies and more topics related to real estate investment.

If you’re looking at making an entrepreneurial leap, or just want to do some investing on the side, NRU may be the choice for you.

Network Admins: Take Advantage of NetFlow

Most modern Cisco networking equipment has what’s called NetFlow technology built right in. A company called NetQoS has a software program called ReportAnalyzer which it claims is the only NetFlow monitoring software that has the ability to scale data from the world’s largest networks, and give network admins and engineers insight into the amount of traffic and how it is flowing through their network.

To the people who use this sort of technology, its use is already apparent. For those of us who are not network admins, this means the people in charge of your company’s network would have a better idea of how loaded down the computer network is getting. That way, if there’s too much load on the network, they can check their load-balancing systems and see if something is wrong. That way, they can provide better quality of service (or QoS) to you!