Ok.. so it's decided... If you have a PHD with tons of experience and superior quant skills, you can find a job. But everyone doesn't have 140+ IQs. The problem isn't finding jobs for the niche, highly skilled positions, the problem is providing work for middle class America. They are the ones who keep this economy going, pay the taxes, etc. Two questions: 1. How do you explain America's prosperity over the last 50 years? What made us different? 2. What competitive advantages do we have going forward? I have friends of college age in Vietnam and China. They're all studying IT, business, law, and English. America's arrogance and elitism ignores this.
Shoe Shine Boy -- probably don'e work as much as you used to, what with all these casual shoes instead of dress shoes being worn to the office. Utto ohhh, too many people working from home, and there's no more office, they're all virtual... utto ohhh, here come's casual Friday's, and now casual Mondays too. so, how does it feel to loose an entire industry due to obsolesence? or even worse, exporation of those job to other regions?
Casual shoes? You'll have to explain that one to me - not sure what you mean there. But I find the whole IT situation depressing. The reason is that I love database work and there are very few jobs right now. I can't imagine what it will be like in 5-10 years! If you get laid off, you'll probably limp along with a few contract jobs, but you're basically toast shortly thereafter. It's a little depressing cuzz I found a career that I love and it may vanish overseas...I'm scratching my head over what to do about it: I've had three careers and I wanted to stay in this one because I enjoyed it so much...oh well...
Agree. I mentioned four friends in my previous post. Two of them are database developers. One works on Sybase; the other Oracle.
Just hope your friends saved up a nice nest egg during the good times so they can DO something about it, like go back to school, or start a business...whatever. I've got mine. But i've been focused on trading as my next career. I'll go full time when im laid off I'm sorta looking forward to it. peace axeman
I'm working on it. I'm just not there yet. I'd love to trade full time, but I haven't proven myself yet nor raised the capital. Someday maybe...#sigh# Glad to hear to someone is pulling it off!
I took a leap of faith fourteen months ago. Trading is my only source of income since then. Although my capital gains in 2003 is less than 40% of the salary of my last job, it is good to be the boss, and control my own destiny. Besides, I may do much better in 2004.
Would love to hear about your path, how capitalised you were, the ups and downs. What you trade. (options on QQQ I know)
I had about $90,000 of trading capital at the beginning of 2003. My main strategy was to sell out of money Put options of NASDAQ stocks. Being ignorant of the risk, I tried to use up 90% the option buying power few days before expiration. It was a stupid move, as I would blow out my account, if the market crashed the day before expiry. In July, I realized that I was not opening a fashion shop. There was no point to have dresses with different brand names like MSFT, QLGC, SMH, IBM, KLAC, etc. Hence, I closed all positions that were not related to QQQ in September. A seller of Put options will lose money only, if the stock market plunges. That has not happened for over one year. Hence, I did not have any losing month since November 1, 2002. However, I do have a lot of losing trades. For example, when QQQ drops near/below the strike price of a Put option that I have sold, instead of selling more Puts, which is the correct approach, I sometimes get scared and try to hedge by writing out of money QQQ Calls. We all know the trend of the stock market in 2003. All of my losing trades over $300 are related to naked Calls. In the last few weeks, I acted smart again by selling many contracts of QQQ Calls. I am regretting it now. I have been writing a lot of QQQ Put recently to hedge. When NASDAQ goes up 30 points, and the account value decreases, I know that something is wrong. I decide to write QQQ Put options, because the price of the underlying can never drop to zero. If I am forced to buy QQQ due to assignment, theoretically I can recover all the loss by writing covered Call repeatedly, that is, in the worst case scenario, I'll become a Long-Term Investor. In practice, I may act differently since I do not have infinite funding or patience. Liquidity is an important consideration too. So far, I have been experiencing an up market. The real test will be: To make money in a secular bear market.
Indian accent makes Dell move support ops back to US - Hindustan Times After an onslaught of complaints, direct sales computer king Dell Inc has stopped routing corporate customers to a technical support call center in Bangalore. Tech support for Optiplex desktop and Latitude notebook computers will be handled from call centers in Texas, Idaho and Tennessee, Dell spokesman Jon Weisblatt said on Monday. http://www.nrilinks.com/news/n/7/8865.aspx I got route to oversea service and didn't understand a thing they said, may be they didn't understand me either, lol