touche, that makes sense because inflation is probably only slightly lower than the salary increase you'd get each year. On a bad year i'd guess it could be even more.
touche, that makes sense because inflation is probably only slightly lower than the salary increase you'd get each year. On a bad year i'd guess it could be even more.
HOFer
Partial, I think you are really UNDERESTIMATING what your earning potential could be. Practically, you probably couldn't predict it if you tried, but that's not what is really important.
Today, just earn what you can, and if you can save for retirement, do that.
Your 401K can be moved if you leave your employer. Any credible financial planner can help you move it. You may want to leave it right where it is at, if that is allowed under the terms of the plan. Otherwise, you can roll it over to an IRA with a planner or investment broker. Just work with someone that you can trust, and don't buy and sell frequently. Buy it, hold it and don't sell it unless something drastically changes with the investment vehicle you chose.
edit: May the force be with you. Never forget, even Darth Vader became a "good guy" in the end.
Starter
hey, hey, hey!!! it didn't happen 'til he saw all wrongs he committed and then it was to late.Originally Posted by retailguy
edit: May the force be with you. Never forget, even Darth Vader became a "good guy" in the end.
Partial don't be yelling at me now, its just not nice.
ANYBODY EVER HAD ANY POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE EXPERIENCES WITH OVERSTOCK.COM ?
Plz note I don't own the stock and am not pimping it for a good investment. I'm beginning to research it and view it as a high risk high reward stock if it turns out. Interesting read below, but don't take it as advice about anything
The tempting numbers behind Overstock
Latest Market Update
July 05, 2006 -- 16:20 ET
Recognizing multibagger opportunities is difficult for most investors. Even when the opportunity sits squarely in front of them, most investors fail to see it.
For instance, observers were bewildered when Bill Miller was aggressively buying shares of Amazon.com (AMZN, news, msgs) below $7 per share in 2001. These observers couldn't see the earnings leverage in the Amazon model because of an overwhelming cloud of negativity.
An opportunity of similar magnitude to buying Amazon below $7 in 2001 exists today for investors in Overstock.com (OSTK, news, msgs). Over the next eight to 10 years, it's reasonable to expect Overstock will reach $4 billion in annual sales. If the operating model matures as I anticipate, the earnings and free cash flow will justify a business value of at least $4 billion, or more than nine times today's market value.
Increased share of market
While that may seem outrageous to some, there's a good chance that I'm too conservative. My sales-growth expectations, at 17% annually, are probably too low. Sales may be closer to $5 billion to $6 billion in eight to 10 years as Overstock continues to take share in the excess-inventory market, which is currently a $60 billion addressable market. Inefficient distribution of excess inventory is an expensive "headache" for brand-name manufacturers.
Overstock cures that headache.
Excess inventory levels are notoriously irregular and difficult for manufacturers to manage. They have to deal with unpredictable change in both the nominal level and across product categories. Using a single distribution partner, like Overstock, requires no capital outlay by manufacturers and results in fast conversion of excess inventory to cash.
Another reason my calculations may be too conservative is that the advantages of Overstock's business model may eventually command a premium valuation, perhaps 1.5 times sales. This implies a business value that is about 15 times the current value within this eight- to 10-year time period.
A model like Amazon is subject to assault based on price. For example, Buy.com is advertising books at 10% below the Amazon price. Overstock's model doesn't have the same vulnerability:
The online space that Overstock competes in is a winner-take-all category. As with eBay (EBAY, news, msgs), in the online auction space, there's a self-reinforcing dynamic at work here. Buyers naturally migrate to the inventory liquidation site that has the most product, and sellers want to sell on the site that has the most buyers. It's a mistake to underestimate the importance of this dynamic -- or its potential long-term value.
The 'magic' of organic growth
Look at the analyst reports in the early years of every great organic growth story, and you'll see that analysts miss this critical variable each and every time. That is, they underestimate earnings leverage. Organic growth begets powerful earnings leverage because it's exponentially cheaper to grow organically than to grow via acquisition.
It's irrefutable that Overstock has generated significant organic growth. The company's 2002 sales were $92 million, and sales this year will exceed 10 times that, or over $920 million. While I estimate that the Overstock model will eventually mature at a free cash flow margin of 3.5% of sales, it may be materially higher.
When Home Depot (HD, news, msgs) was generating 3.5% to 4% net margins several years ago, analysts (including me) failed to identify the earnings leverage in the model that resulted in 7% margins. It's quite impressive that Dell (DELL, news, msgs) can sell a low-margin commodity product and generate well over 6% net margins (up from less than 2% in the early years). If I had been given Dell's operating metrics in the early days, my guess is that I would have estimated, at the very most, an ultimate net margin level of only 3% or so.
The most powerful earnings leverage is found in operating models, like those discussed above, where there is a combination of both organic growth and category dominance. Because Overstock has both organic growth and dominates a winner-take-all online category, it's reasonably likely that I have underestimated its long-term profitability.
Because of the way earnings leverage works, the transition from losing 2 to 3 cents to earning 3 cents or more per dollar of revenue requires nothing heroic for Overstock. At $1 billion in sales, the company generates $150 million in gross profit dollars. (I consider a 15% gross margin a conservative assumption.) At $2 billion it generates $300 million, and at $4 billion it generates $600 million. Costs such as marketing, technology and G&A (general and administrative) grow in nominal terms, but not as a percentage of sales.
Think of technology and G&A as the cost of "headquarters." Much of that cost is front-end loaded. While headquarters will cost more at $2 billion in sales than it does at $1 billion in sales, it will not cost anywhere near twice as much.
High-risk phase is over
That marketing expense will decline as a percent of sales is obvious. But building a No. 1 brand -- a top-five retail online destination -- is expensive. According to industry sources, Overstock has gone from zero unprompted name recognition a few years ago to 4% about 30 months ago, to 29% today (for purposes of comparison, Amazon is at 44%). Prompted name recognition is also impressive, at 70%. With the brand-building phase nearly complete, marketing dollars naturally decline as a percentage of revenue.
The high-risk phase in the Overstock evolution is over -- that's the early phase in which Overstock emerged as the clear leader from a pack of competitors such as Ubid, eCost, Buy.com, Mercata and SmartBargains.
There will be dozens of reasons over the next eight to 10 years for Overstock investors to short-circuit this multibagger opportunity. While this model is exceedingly well positioned, it will not grow in a linear fashion. Like most great organic growth stories, this one will grow in fits and starts, marked by periods of brilliance as well as error.
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com...Overstock.aspx
Well B, if it means anything to you, which is probably doesn't, i've heard of the site, and been to it, but i've never once considered shopping there. Whenever I need a specific product, I first go to Ebay, then I go to Froogle and find it there, and then I check a retail store. I do a TON of online shopping. Just figured i'd lay it out there, but it is probably meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
I have purchased twice from Overstock. Both were satisfactory purchases. The first purchase was a set of tools in a briefcase type carrier. That was when the site was very small and had very few products to sell, maybe three years ago or so. I was kind of worried at the time, wondering if the site was legit, but they had just what I was looking for at a very reasonable price. The second purchase was a set of outdoor solar lights last year.
Thanks for your comments guys; the more I research this stock, the more I realize that it's one that could garner a huge gain or lose all money invested. I'd like to see the price come back a little, but think it's likely I might take a flyer on them.
HEY PARTIAL AND TECHIES
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON 3COM ??
From what I can tell it's a badly beaten down stock that is improving it's profitability and Earnings the past few quarters. A cheaply priced stock at around $5 per share so I may throw a few bucks at it.
I love my really old 3com network card, but thats all I really know about them.
Just want to thank everyone for the wealth of knowledge you have shared. I'm 22 and it's scary to think that in a year I'll be off on my own trying to figure this all out by myself. I'd much rather have a plan ahead of time than learn everything by doing it wrong the first time.
Thanks again guys
Thanks for the kind words bossman; the goal of this thread is to share knowledge and learn from others. The smart ones will learn from the mistakes of others so the best thing you can do is start thinking about that plan and executing it.
Partial,
It definitely means something; it sounds a bit too simple, but before buying a stock I like to see how the company has treated customers. My wife has surfed there but never bought anything; if the customer service stinks the stock will fail and experiences people have had with overstock can go a longer than you think.
I owned Home Depot once; did well with it and at the time thought they gave pretty good service as well. My wife was never happy thought cuz I pushed her to shop there instead of Menards.
Cheers,
B
A financial planner or broker may charge fees that eat too far into your principal if you don't have a very large nest egg, so I'm not sure that advice would work for everyone. For many people, they can just roll it into a self directed IRA and buy a handful of mutual funds until they get the arms around what to do with the money.
Freescale first to put MRAM into mass production
Austin (TX) - Freescale, the former semiconductor arm of Motorola, today announced commercial availability of magneto-resistive random access memory, short MRAM. The technology could become a threat to common memory technologies such as SRAM, DRAM and even Flash, but faces the challenge to catch up with the capacity of its established competition.
Just about two years after the first completed samples, Freescale claims that it has begun offering MRAM in volume quantities. The debut chip, named MR2A16A, is a 4 Mbit (512 KB) device that is organized in 256K words by 16 bits and operates at 3.3 volts - which, according to the manufacturer, allows the device to run in a "commercial temperature range."
MRAM has been considered for at least five years as a potential successor technology for NOR and NAND Flash, both of which are nearing their 20th birthday: Intel was the first company to offer a (256 Kb) NOR Flash module back in 1988; Toshiba is credited with inventing NAND Flash. MRAM is promised to combine the non-volatile storage characteristics with the speed of SRAM devices and offer unlimited read/write cycles. Compared to today's NAND Flash - the technology typically used in Flash storage cards - MRAM is about 1 million times faster to write the first bit and about 1000 times faster to read the first bit. Flash has also a limited number of read/write cycles, usually somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million, depending on the device.
The challenge of MRAM is to match the storage density of Flash. Flash still scales very well and remains a moving target for upcoming technologies - not only MRAM, but also ovonics memory (OUM), FRAM, Polymer memory (PFRAM), PCRAM or NRAM (Nanotube RAM). The cell sizes of MRAM are still more than 100 times larger than those of Flash, which explains the fact that we can buy Flash memory chips with capacities of up to 16 GB today and Freescale's new chip comes with "only" half a megabyte space - which is just about 0.003% of the status quo of its assumed competition.
The comparison may not be fair - yet - but the substantial distance is one of the reasons why MRAM isn't aimed at Flash at this time. Instead, Freescale believes that MRAM could become an option to replace (volatile) SRAM modules in portable devices, eliminating the need for a battery to feed the SRAM. "This technology could hasten new classes of electronic products offering dramatic advances in size, cost, power consumption and system performance," Freescale said.
But even in this segment, capacity may become an issue, especially if the premium price tag of MRAM is considered. In a demonstration to prove its capability to manufacture 45 nm devices, Intel announced in January of this year that it has produced a 153 Mbit SRAM chip that carries more than 1 billion transistors on a die with a size of 110 sqmm. The memory cell size of Intel's SRAM is 0.346 μm2 - while most prototypes of recent MRAMs used cell sizes of more than 1 µm2. Freesclae did not disclose the cell size of its first commercial MRAM chip.
Ricoh develops dual-format HD laser
The battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD to control the high-definition DVD market could be solved by a laser that can read the two competing formats.
According to reports in the Japanese press, Ricoh is developing a system that uses a single component to read both kinds of discs.
HD-DVD discs and regular DVDs hold data 0.6mm from the surface of the disc, while Blu-ray discs must be read at 0.1mm from the surface.
Ricoh's optical laser technology uses a "diffraction grate" to read the discs at the correct level.
However, the technology will initially be used only in high-definition DVD players because the process decreases the intensity of the beam. To counterbalance this effect, the devices will use higher powered lasers.
The technology will be on show for the first time at Tokyo's International Optoelectronics Exhibition on Wednesday.
According to Ricoh, the optical laser will be ready for use in devices by the end of the year and will be offered to OEM companies at that time.
Since you guys have all shared you wealth of knowledge with me whenever requested, I am going to do the same. I have started a thread where I will post the latest technology news that could have an impact on the economy or a large impact in the tech world. For example, both of those posts above are pretty cool and could make a huge impact. We can discuss the articles I pull, and I can give my opinion on them. That's what I know, so I'll try and help you guys out!!
edit - it may not be too useful, but it will be interesting atleast!! Right now, on the computer front, a lot of change is underway.
AWESOME !!
Let's find that next world changing technology like the Internet and a few bucks will turn into an awful lot of them.
B
HOFer
How much retirement funding is it worth it to forgo in order to go to grad school and take up something that you would enjoy more, but potentially make less?
"Greatness is not an act... but a habit.Greatness is not an act... but a habit." -Greg Jennings
HOFer
Well, I'll take a stab at this one. The only one who can truly answer that question is YOU. Quite simply, I can tell you what the financial ramifications are of the "switch" and you then have to decide "is it worth it?"
The older I get, the less important money becomes. I'm not saying I want to be a pauper, nor that I want to give it away, but making XX dollars per year is not nearly as important as it once was.
I put greater value on being happy and saving some money than I do in working a job that I "hate" and putting away more money. What good is money if you're not happy?
I went back and got my MBA a few years ago. Best move I ever made. Without a doubt. There are MBA programs out there that'll bleed you dry until you never see the financial light of day, but there are lots of programs at smaller regional colleges that are just a good and half the price.
If you need that Master degree to get your "dream career" just do it. You may find that you don't lose that much money as the advanced degree makes you more marketable, and might open a door or two in the future that you can't conceive right now.
So, lets say I am fresh out of school with a job and the wind to my back. I have 3,000 riding in the bank and 10k in student loans the day I graduate. I need a place to live. What is the best thing to do to maximize wealth later on in life?
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