Have you been married before? Just wondering -- not trying to be sarcastic or anything.
760 karma · joined November 22, 2009
- Learn more about fundamental analysis and incorporate that with the current technical analysis style trading I currently do to get a better return in 2011 than 2010 (if it weren't for that speculative BP catching-a-falling-knife trade I would've beat the S&P)
- Learn more functional programming like F# (which might also help with starting up on automated trading again)
I think that's the money quote here. I think Steve Jobs said it best in a commencement speech:
...I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
If you don't love what you do it's probably not worth it in the long run. Doing a startup isn't necessarily going to put you in a financial disaster. It just makes the end result more volatile.
The way I look at it is with life there's a bell curve (maybe not normally distributed but still a curve distribution). Those with a steady consulting job will fall into the "average" middle area of the curve and be "safe" financially and might not ever be poor OR rich for that matter.
Those taking risks like in a startup would more invariably end up on one side of the curve (either on the side that makes you poor due to debt etc, or extremely rich but most likely you won't end up as an "average" middle area where everyone else is and regret not taking any chances in your life).
I got my BS degree in CS 8 years ago and although I learned some stuff from my CS class that I probably wouldn't have been exposed to if I learned on my own (like assembly, db query tree optimization, or 3d graphics).
Sure I might have learned those on my own; but I probably wouldn't have given that if I wasn't in college I'd probably be churning out business apps for a megacorp or something leaving little time to explore.
I think my time in college would've been better spent majoring in Business and then learning programming on my own. That would've given me a better edge in the startup world. But it is what it is.
1) Fix a PAIN point that people will pay money to make the PAIN go away.
2) Make them more money.
3) Entertain them enough that they'll be willing to pay.
I think there's a subconscious fear of something else that you need to get over. My guess is it's possibly a fear of rejection and/or failure once you do release it.
My only suggestion is to get over that fear and like the Nike commercials say, "JUST DO IT!"
Good luck!
I'd recommend putting most of your money in a safer place like low risk bonds just get past inflation instead of losing it in the market. You can allocate maybe at most 10 to 20% in some ETF funds of your choosing though just to have some stock market exposure.
And start right this minute. Good luck!
Plugged in some estimates if bought now and sold on August 1st with the same IV (implied volatility) at different price points assuming it goes back to it's normal trading range of 50 - 60. Profit per contract (% gain in parentheses - divided by current ask price of 214) at different stock prices for BP.
50: 187 (87%) 55: 479 (224%) 60: 852 (400%)
The risk of losing the entire premium of 214 per contract by Jan 2011 doesn't seem to likely and the risk/reward ratio seems to be favorable.