Central Perk

joi, 21 noiembrie 2013

How to Improve Your Conversion Rates with a Faster Website

Posted: 20 Nov 2013 03:17 PM PST

Posted by Zoompf

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Back in August the team at Zoompf published a joint research study with Moz analyzing How Website Speed Actually Impacts Search Ranking. In this research, a surprise result showed no clear correlation between page load time and search ranking. This confounded us, since we expected to see at least some small measure of correlation, especially after Google announced in 2010 that site speed would have a partial impact on search ranking. We did, however, observe a correlation between "Time to First Byte" and search ranking, and we delved into more detail in our follow-up post.

In these two articles, it was noted by our readers that while page load time may not appear to directly impact search ranking, it still has an obvious impact on user experience and will likely have an increasing impact on search ranking in the future. In other words, page load time should still be considered a priority to the success of your site.

But how big of a priority is it really? Of course it depends: The slower your site is now, the greater your user experience lags behind your competitors. Additionally, the more traffic your site receives, the more benefit you'll receive from performance optimization (we'll dig into that more below).

The good news is that, unlike the impact on search ranking, there is a wide body of independent research showing clear causation between improved site performance and increased conversion rates, user engagement, and customer satisfaction. It also just makes senseâ€"we've all visited slow websites, and we've all bailed out when the page takes too long to load. On mobile we're even less patient.

What may be surprising, though, is just how big of an impact a slow performance can have on your conversions. Let's look at that first.

The research

Back in 2006, Amazon presented one of the first studies linking a clear causation between page load time and online customer revenue, summarized in Greg Linden's presentation Make Data Useful. Through A/B testing, Greg showed every 100 millisecond delay in page rendering time resulted in a 1% loss of sales for Amazon.

In more recent research, Intuit presented findings at Velocity 2013 from their recent effort to reduce page load time from 15 seconds to 2 seconds. During that effort, they observed a dramatic increase in conversions for every second shaved off their page load time, in a stair step that decreased with increasing speed. Specifically:

+3% conversions for every second reduced from 15 seconds to 7 seconds
+2% conversions for every second reduced from seconds 7 to 5
+1% conversions for every second reduced from seconds 4 to 2

So in other words there was tremendous value in the initial optimization, and diminishing value as they got faster.

In another recent report, Kyle Rush from the 2011 Obama for America campaign site showed through A/B testing that a 3-second page time reduction (from 5 seconds to 2 seconds) improved onsite donations by 14%, resulting in an increase of over $34 million in election contributions.

In fact, there's a wide body of research supporting clear economic benefits of improving your site performance, and clearly the slower your site is, the more you have to gain. Additionally, the higher your traffic, the larger the impact each millisecond will yield.

How fast should I be?

Whenever we talk with people about web performance, they always want to know "How fast should I be?" Unfortunately this one is hard to answer, since the result is subjective to your business goals. Those in the performance industry (of which, full disclosure, Zoompf is a member) may push you to hit two seconds or less, citing research such as that from Forrester showing that 47% of users expect pages to load in two seconds or less.

We prefer a more pragmatic approach: You should optimize to the point where the ROI continues to makes sense. The higher your traffic, the more monetary difference each millisecond gained will make. If you're Amazon.com, a 200-ms improvement could mean millions of dollars. If you're just launching a new site, getting down to 4-6 seconds may be good enough. Its really a judgment call on your current traffic levels, where your competition sits, your budget, and your strategic priorities.

The first step, though, is to measure where you stand. Fortunately, there's a great free tool supported by Google at WebPageTest.org that can measure your page load time from various locations around the world. If you receive a lot of international traffic, don't just select a location close to homeâ€"see how fast your site is loading from Sydney, London, Virginia, etc. The individual results may vary quite a bit! WebPageTest has a lot of bells and whistles, so check out this beginner's guide to learn more.

Where do I start?

Improving the performance of your site can seem daunting, so it's important you start with the low hanging fruit. Steve Souders, the Head Performance Engineer at Google, has famously stated:

"80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Start there."

This has come to be called the Performance Golden Rule. In layman's terms, this means that while optimizing your web server and database infrastructure is important, you will get a higher return on your time investment by first optimizing the front-end components loaded by your users' browsers. This means all the images, CSS, JavaScript, Flash and other resources linked as dependencies from your base HTML page.

You can see the Performance Golden Rule well illustrated in a typical waterfall chart returned by tools like WebPageTest. Note how the original page requested is a very small subset of the overall time. Generating this original base page is where all the back-end server work is done. However, all the other resources included by that page (images, CSS, etc.) are what take the large majority of the time to load:

So how can you speed up your front-end performance and reap the rewards of a better user experience? There are literally hundreds of ways. In the sections below, we will focus on the high-level best practices that generally yield the most benefit for the least amount of effort.

Step 1: Reduce the size of your page

Bloated content takes a long time to download. By reducing the size of your page, you not only improve your speed, you also reduce the used network bandwidth for which your hosting provider charges you.

An easy optimization is enabling HTTP compression, which can often reduce the size of your text resources (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) by 50% or more. WhatsMyIP.org has a great free tool to test if compression is turned on for your site. When using, don't just test the URL to your home page, but also test links to your JavaScript and CSS files. Often we find compression is turned on for HTML files, but not for JavaScript and CSS. This can represent a considerable potential performance boost when your server is configured for compression properly. Keep in mind, though, you do NOT want your images to be compressed by the server as they are already compressed. The extra server processing time will only slow things down. You can learn more in this detailed guide on what content you should compressing on your website.

If you find your server is not using compression, talk to your server admin or hosting provider to turn it on. Its often a simple configuration setting, for example see the mod_deflate module for Apache, IIS 7 configuration docs, or this article on enabling on WordPress sites.

In addition, images can often contribute to 80% or more of your total page download size, so its very important to optimize them as well. Follow these best practices to cut down your image size by 50% or more in some cases:

Don't use PNG images for photos. JPEG images compress photographs to significantly smaller sizes with great image quality. For example, on Windows 8 launch day, the Microsoft homepage used a 1 megabyte PNG photograph when a visually comparable JPEG would have been 140k! Think of all the wasted bandwidth on that one image alone!
Don't overuse PNGs for transparency. Transparency is a great effect (and not supported by JPEG), but if you don't need it, you don't always need the extra space of a PNG image, especially for photographic images. PNGs work better for logos and images with sharp contrast, like text.
Correctly set your JPEG image quality. Using a quality setting of 50-75% can significantly reduce the size of your image without noticeable impact on image quality. Of course, each result should be individually evaluated. In most cases your image sizes should all be less than 100k, and preferably smaller.
Strip out extraneous metadata from your images. Image editors leave a lot of "junk" in your image files, including thumbnails, comments, unused palette entries and more. While these are useful to the designer, they don't need to be downloaded by your users. Instead, have your designer make a backup copy for their own use, and then run the website image versions through a free optimizer like Yahoo's Smush.It or open source tools like pngcrush and jpegtran.

Lastly, another good way to reduce your page size is to Minify your Javascript and CSS. "Minification" is a process that strips out the extra comments and spaces in your code, as well as shortening the names of functions and variables. This is best seen by example:

Example: Original Javascript

   /* ALERT PLUGIN DEFINITION    * ======================= */    var old = $.fn.alert    $.fn.alert = function (option) {      return this.each(function () {        var $this = $(this)          , data = $this.data('alert')        if (!data) $this.data('alert', (data = new Alert(this)))        if (typeof option == 'string') data[option].call($this)      })    }    $.fn.alert.Constructor = Alert

Minified Version (from YUI Compressor):

  var old=$.fn.alert;$.fn.alert=function(a){return this.each(function(){var c=$(this),b=c.data("alert");if(!b){c.data("alert",(b=new Alert(this)))}if(typeof a=="string"){b[a].call(c)}})};

Your minified pages will still render the same, and this can often reduce file sizes by 10-20% or more. As you can see, this also has the added benefit of obfuscating your code to make it harder for your competitors to copy and modify all your hard earned work for their own purposes. JSCompress is a basic easy online tool for Javascript, or you can also try out more powerful tools like JSMin or Yahoo's YUI compressor (also works for CSS). There's also a useful online version of YUI which we recommend.

Step 2: Reduce the number of browser requests

The more resources your browser requests to render your page, the longer it will take to load. A great strategy to reduce your page load time is to simply cut down the number of requests your page has to make. This means less images, fewer JavaScript files, fewer analytics beacons, etc. There's a reason Google's homepage is so spartan, the clean interface has very few dependencies and thus loads super fast.

While "less is more" should be the goal, we realize this is not always possible, so are some additional strategies you can employ:

Allow browser caching. If your page dependencies don't change often, there's no reason the browser should download them again and again. Talk to your server admin to make sure caching is turned on for your images, JS and CSS. A quick test is to plug the URL of one of your images into redbot.org and look for the header Expires or Cache-Control: max-age in the result. For example, this image off the eBay home page will be cached by your browser for 28,180,559 seconds (just over 1 year).

Cache-Control is the newer way of doing things, but often times you'll also see Expires to support older browsers. If you see both, Cache-Control will "win" for newer browsers.

While browser side caching will not speed up the initial page load of your site, it will make a HUGE difference on repeat views, often knocking off 70% or more of the time. You can see this clearly when looking at the "Repeat View" metrics in a WebPageTest test, for example:

Combine related CSS and JS files. While numerous individual CSS and JS files are easier for your developers to maintain, a lesser number of files can load much faster by your browser. If your files change infrequently, then a one time concatenation of files is an easy win. If they do change frequently, consider adding a step to your deploy process that automatically concatenates related groups of functionality prior to deployment, grouping by related functional area. There are pros and cons to each approach, but there's some great info in this StackOverflow thread.
Combine small images into CSS sprites. If your site has lots of small images (buttons, icons, etc.), you can realize significant performance gains by combining them all into a single image file called a "sprite." Sprites are more challenging to implement, but can yield significant performance gains for visually rich sites. See the CSS Image Sprites article on w3schools for more information, and check out the free tool SpriteMe.

Step 3: Reduce the distance to your site

If your website is hosted in Virginia, but your users are visiting from Australia, it's going to take them a long time to download your images, JavaScript and CSS. This can be a big problem if your site is content-heavy and you get a lot of traffic from users far away. Fortunately, there's an easy answer: Sign up for a Content Delivery Network (CDN). There are many excellent ones out there now, including Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare and more.

CDN's work basically like this: you change the URL of your images, JS and CSS from something like this:

  http://mysite.com/myimage.png

to something like this (as per the instructions given to you from your CDN provider):

  http://d34vewdf5sdfsdfs.cloudnfront.net/myimage.png

Which then instructs the browser to look out on the CDN network for your image. The CDN provider will then return that image to the browser if it has it, or it will pull it from your site and store for reuse later if it doesn't. The magic of CDNs is that they then copy that same image (or javascript or CSS file) to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of "edge nodes" around the world to route that browser request to the closest available location. So if you're in Melbourne and request an image hosted in Virginia, you may instead get a copy from Sydney. Just like magic.

To illustrate, consider the left image (centralized server) vs. the right image (duplicated content around the world):

In closing

While front-end performance does not currently appear to have a direct impact on search ranking, it has a clear impact on user engagement and conversions into paying customers. Since page load time also has a direct impact on user experience, it is very likely to have a future impact on search ranking.

While there are many ways to optimize your site, we suggest three core principles to remember when optimizing your site:

Reduce the size of your page
Reduce the number of browser requests
Reduce the distance to your site

Within each of these, there are different strategies that apply based on the makeup of your site. We at Zoompf have also introduced several free tools that can help you determine which areas will make the biggest impact, and we also support a free tool to analyze your website for over 400 common causes of slow front-end performance. You can find them here: http://zoompf.com/free.

Happy hunting!

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Introducing Place Pins, for the explorer in all of us

Here at Pinterest HQ, we're working on some new and exciting stuff we think you might like. Today, we're excited to introduce Place Pins, a new map-enabled Pin that makes it easier to plan things on your boards—like organizing a vacation with friends.

To get started, create a board of your choice (bucket list! places to visit! favorite coffee shops!) and edit its settings to add a map. Then, add inspiring Pins to your board!

With Place Pins, you can:

Map the things you love, near and far
Get a beautiful, interactive map on your board when you add places to your Pins. Use it to save some of your favorites: the best burgers and brews in the Big Apple, Britain's finest national parks, or a local guide to Paris.
Get more from your Pins
Each Place Pin comes with extra details on the Pin, like the address and phone number, so you can look up important info before a night out or on a weekend adventure. Even better, you can look up directions to places right from your Pins!
Find and collect places whenever, wherever
Place Pins are available on web and mobile, so it's simple to add and view places from just about anywhere. Take your Pins with you as you the navigate the busy streets of a foreign city or stroll through a quiet park in your hometown.

Happy (Place) Pinning!

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The First WHITE. Exchange

Posted: 21 Nov 2013 04:21 AM PST

This week we hosted our first WHITE. Exchange, a new event in Oxford focussed on digital marketing.

We held three talks:

The Evolution of Search – Daniel Bianchini.
What Content Does Your Site Need? – Bobby McGill.
The Fundamentals of a Healthy Website – Sam Gooch.

Whenever you start something new, it's always a bit nerve-wracking. Will people turn up? Are the topics we picked suitable? Will people get value out of it? These are just a small selection of the thoughts that were running through our heads at the time.

But we were really pleased with the turn out. To quote a film I'm a big fan of, it turns out that "if you build it, he will come". Or rather "they will come".

As it was the first one, we thought it wise to set the topics of the presentations at a level that everyone would find some value in. Considering that the members of the audience were all from very different businesses, with varying levels of experience in different fields, this proved the biggest challenge.

This post summarises the three presentations, with key takeaways.

First up, Daniel Bianchini:

The Evolution of Search

Daniel Bianchini – The Evolution of Search from White.net

Key takeaways:

Dan introduces us with two key time periods. 1993-1997 (BG (Before Google)). 1998-present (AG (After Google)).
Archie Query Form was perhaps the first search engine, allowing users to search for a specific file.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the World Wide Web.
During the BG time period, only a few hundred websites existed, and only a few search engines. Altavista, Lycos, and Webcrawler all showed their faces during this period.
The earlier search engines were not very complex, which meant you could rank by stuffing keywords here, there, and everywhere.
1998 was the birth of Christ… according to Dan. To the rest of the world, this was when Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. They wanted to deliver web users the best results possible, so they developed a "vote-based system" to encourage this.
Through a combination of on-site content (keywords) and links (votes), they were able to better define what users wanted to see.
Dan showed us a series of slides that demonstrate Google's many faces through the years that followed.
Over the years, Google developed a series of different results, such as Vertical search, Local search, Flight Search, and Sports Scores, until they decided to bring it all together. Dan called this "Universal Search", and then showed us a slide of the Google that we are all now very familiar with.
Whilst Google encouraged this change, they always faced stiff competition. There were direct competitors such as Bing and, more tenuously, Facebook, but also marketers who were trying to manipulate the algorithm.
This brought us to the most recent 2 years. In 2011-2013 there were more major algorithm changes than in the previous 12 years combined.
The Venice, Panda, and Penguin algorithm updates featured as some of the more prominent changes. Panda affected a massive 12% of search results. Penguin impacted about 3.1% of search results.
Then Hummingbird came. However, because this is such a recent update, there isn't much data available on its impact yet.
Google also introduced ways to personalise results for each user, as well as integrating social media signals to the algorithm.
Dan then gave us some predictions on what search will look like over the next 2-3 years. It will become quicker, more semantic, more social, and more mobile.

Next, we had Bobby Mcgill.

What Content Does Your Site Need?

Bobby McGill – What content does your site need? from White.net

Key Takeaways:

Every search query is a question. Your content should provide the answer. Your content can answer these questions by sharing YOUR expert knowledge.
Picture your website as a shop, and your content as your sales team. Does your content present you in the best light, as your staff would? And, like a good salesman, does your content persuade your customer to purchase your product?
Bobby introduced us to the content matrix by Smart Insights. It gives examples of different types of content, and which demographics particular pieces of content would appeal to. It is also something you should make sure your content fits into before creating it.
Your product pages (or your equivalent), should be the hardest working pages on your site.
Pillar Content is content that usually comes in the form of a tutorial style and has a long-term appeal. It is useful to your customers and has the intention of supporting your website and driving traffic.
Evergreen content is timeless content that can be re-promoted because the topics it covers are always relevant to your industry. . It can help to position you as leaders in your field.
Content Marketing means developing content that appeals to readers and compels them to share, spreading your brand's message. It can be short, viral content that may only be current for a day but it needs to grab your readers' attention, if only for a minute.
You need to get a balance between quality and quantity with your content creation. Don't compromise on the quality just to get more content out there.
Don't rely on users to generate your content for you. If you go down this route, have a solid plan and make sure you interact and incentivise your users.
Don't make it all about you. Think about what your users and readers would like to see and read.
With every piece of content, always ask yourself "why am I creating this? How does it fit in the content matrix?"

Finally, we had Sam Gooch.

The Fundamentals of a Healthy Website

Sam Gooch – The fundamentals of a healthy website from White.net

Key Takeaways:

There are three main elements of a healthy website:
- Technical SEO – Making the search engines' lives easier when crawling and indexing.
- On-Site SEO – This is everything that can be done on your site.
- Off-Site SEO – This is the activity that happens outside of your website.

There are three main pillars of SEO. Technical – Making your website 'search engine friendly'. Content – Gives the search engines something to feed on. Links – Act like votes – the more reputable sites that link to you, the more authority you will gain.
When you search on Google, it is not the internet you are searching, it is Google's representation of the Internet – its Index. Google gathers its index by 'crawling' the internet.
Google is good at finding your pages, but XML sitemaps make it easier to find and index the pages of your site, while providing extra data, such as how important the page is and how often it is updated.
Robots.txt provides instructions to web robots. You can use them to stop certain pages being indexed, and also to reference the location of your sitemap.
With most websites, all pages should be accessible within three clicks of the homepage. But you always need to consider your user's experience when doing this.
If you're updating or removing a page URL, then Google won't know. 301 redirects are the answer.
Try to avoid duplicate content issues, as search engines try to ignore copies of original content.
Use Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to help you monitor the health of your website.
Search Engines treat subdomains as entirely separate domains, so it would be more beneficial to have your entire site on the same main domain.
There are lots of things you can do to optimise your pages to make them more relevant to your keywords.
URLs should be easy to read, contain keywords, and reflect the user's journey. This helps the search engines understand the topic of a page.
Title tags should be under 70 characters, include one or two keywords, and also the brand name. Meta descriptions should be under 156 characters, and be able to attract attention – it appears below the title in the search results, so the more attractive your message, the better the click-through rate.
Use keywords in the body of your page content, but don't overdo it!
Use keywords in your Header Tags and breadcrumbs.
Use keywords in your Product Titles and Alt Tags.
Links leave a trail across the World Wide Web, which the search engines follow to build their indexes.
Forum Comments were spammed as a link building method. Google spotted this and it's not a viable tactic any more.
Article distribution was spammed as a link building method. Make sure you're only linking from relevant sites.
Low quality directories were also spammed.
The best ways to build links now are to create the best content on your site, and other relevant sites. This will attract attention naturally. Use competitor research to identify opportunities. Who is linking to them and why. Consider high quality, relevant directories that your audience will actually use. Find broken links that point to your site, and get them fixed or use a 301 redirect. This is link reclamation.

So, that rounds up everything that happened. We'll be doing this again in a few months' time, with a different set of topics, and maybe even a special guest or two.

We will announce the next event on our twitter stream once the line-up has been announced. Hope to see you there!

The post The First WHITE. Exchange appeared first on White Noise.

Seth's Blog : Who is this marketing for?

Who is this marketing for?

Before you spend a minute or a dollar on marketing, perhaps you could answer some questions:

Who, precisely, are you trying to reach?
What change are you trying to make?
How will you know if it's working?
How long before you will lose patience?
How long before someone on your team gets to change the mission?
How much time and money are you prepared to spend?
Who gets to approve this work?
Who are you trying to please or impress?

It's cheaper to answer these questions than it is to spend time and money on marketing, but, alas, it usually doesn't happen that way.

• Email to a friend •

miercuri, 20 noiembrie 2013

7 Days of Complimentary Downloads: 100,000 Video and Audio Clips

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Video Blocks is only giving this complimentary access to a limited number of users, so start downloading now:

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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish Fined 8,000 Euros for Quoting French Blog
Gambling On No Healthcare Insurance: Is it a Good Deal? Here's the Math; Obamashock! Work More, Get Less!
JPMorgan's $13 Billion "No Admission of Wrongdoing" Settlement (and a $7 Billion Tax Deduction)

Mish Fined 8,000 Euros for Quoting French Blog

Posted: 20 Nov 2013 04:05 PM PST

A few days ago I learned, via a French blog, that I was fined 8,000 euros for quoting a French blogger. I would have known earlier, but the letter notifying me of the fine was sent in French.

In an earlier express letter packet, I could make out a few of the words, in particular noting a summons to appear before a tribunal in France. Needless to say, I did not go.

Let's backtrack to my blog post that started it all.

On August 15, 2011, I posted BNP Paribas leveraged 27:1; Société Générale Leveraged 50:1; Sorry State of Affairs of U.S. Banks; Global Financial System is Bankrupt

In that post I quoted Jean-Pierre Chevallier on his Business économiste monétariste béhavioriste blog, that BNP Paribas leveraged: 27!
I also cited Chevallier's Société Générale leveraged: 50!

Société Générale took exception to the numbers and came up with its own set of numbers. According to SG, its leverage was 9.3%.

A day or so later, Chevallier redid his calculations and I added this addendum.

Addendum:

Société Générale disputes the numbers and new calculations using the banks' numbers are 28:1 or perhaps 23:1 not 50:1 as noted on Forex Crunch.

My position has not changed much. Something is seriously wrong at Société Générale. Banks do not plunge out of the blue on rumors. I do not know the precise leverage, but shares are acting as if Société Générale has severe capital constraints (which of course they will deny) and/or other major problems.

Société Générale was not happy to say the least. They wrote the SEC (in English) complaining about my blog.

The lengthy complaint went along the lines "I should accept as fact any numbers given to me by Société Générale".

French Banking Primer

On September 2, 2011, the Wall Street Journal chimed in with A French Banking Primer

The effects of a system that 'encourages excessive financial leverage'.

By its own account, Credit Agricole's tangible common equity is just 2.1% of its assets—which means its €1.6 trillion balance sheet is leveraged nearly 49-to-1. Credit Agricole argues that €500 billion of that should be netted out because of its hybrid banking/insurance business model, which still leaves it leveraged 33 times.

BNP Paribas and Societe Generale are somewhat less leveraged, at 24 and 23 times their tangible equity, respectively. As a group, these three banks have some €4 trillion in assets on their balance sheets, supported by €129.3 billion of tangible common equity. By contrast, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America have nearly $4.4 trillion in assets between them, supported by $253 billion in tangible common equity. That's a leverage ratio of 17 for the U.S. banks versus nearly 27, on average, for the French big three.

An IMF report in July offered one explanation for why French banks remain so heavily leveraged compared to their U.S. counterparts. The authors note "the bias of the present system" in France, "which encourages excessive financial leverage, and contributes to a dearth of equity financing for innovative projects and an inefficient allocation of resources." Among France's peculiarities, the IMF cites France's high financial-sector corporate tax rates and generous credits and subsidies to debt-financed investments, which effectively reward borrowing over equity financing or retained earnings.

According to the Bank for International Settlements, the French banking system's total exposure to the riskiest euro-zone countries is $671.7 billion (€489.9 billion) as of March. That figure is equal to nearly 7% of all banking assets in France, more than a quarter of France's 2010 GDP and more than three times the combined equity of France's three biggest banks, which together account for 65% of the country's total banking assets.

Those facts did not stop Societe Generale from whining to the SEC.

My SEC contact said that he was obligated by agreement to pass on the complaint, adding something along the lines of "French banks were notorious about filing frivolous complaints".

Summoned to French Witch Hunt

I received one more express letter from France, in English, telling me subsequent letters would be in French and that I had to respond to the complaint in French.

I received a few more correspondences, totally in French, but did not scan them or translate them, although I could make out a few words in one of them, specifically noting that I was personally summoned to a witch hunt.

8,000 Euro Fine

The tribunal ruled "Mish is a Witch".

A few days ago I received an email about my fine, and an offer of support from the French blog Les-Crises.

Here is the email.

Hi Mish,

I'm Actuary, and I've created the blog Les-Crises.

My post of the day is to criticize our AMF, explaining why they are wrong: [GROS DÉLIRE] Quand l'AMF sanctionne les blogueurs plutôt que les financiers!

The decision if really incredible. I'd like to help you.

Regards

Olivier Berruyer
Paris, France

The title translates roughly to "Gross Delirium: The AMF sanctions bloggers rather than financial corporations!"

I asked my friend Pater Tenebrarum at Acting Man for a synopsis.
With thanks to Pater:

The French authorities accuse Chevalier of 'knowingly disseminating false information' about SocGen and you to have disseminated it further on 'Chevalier's urging', although you should have known better and it was your duty to check if his numbers were right (that is the basis for fining him 10,000 and you 8,000 euros).

Les-Crises shows that Chevalier wasn't 'falsifying' anything. He merely did not use the so-called 'risk weighting' of assets in his calculations (whereby e.g. Greek sovereign debt has 'no risk') . What he did was calculate a kind of leverage ratio, apparently following a standard for calculation very similar to one laid down by Alan Greenspan some time ago.

Les-Crises points out that Chevalier did not 'invent' any numbers - he used only data published by SocGen. Chevalier never asserted that his calculations represented a 'tier 1' ratio according to the Basel rules with their risk-weighting - it always was a 'Chevalier leverage ratio' so to speak, calculated using SocGen's publicly available balance sheet data.

Banksters Strike Back

Today a second article came out regarding the witch hunt, this time in English: France: Banksters Strike Back Against Bloggers

Societe Generale was not happy with Jean Pierre Chevallier's blog and lodged a complaint aith the the French financial market supervisory authority, Autorité des marchés financiers (AFM), and the AMF has now astonished Mr Chevallier and a lot of others, including this blogger, by upholding the complaint and fining Jean-Pierre Chevallier €10,000 for publishing "inexact" information which might influence the share price.

Mr Chevalier intends to appeal against the AFM verdict and says he is also planning to sue the AFP for making false and defamatory accusations against him.

The AMF has also fined Mike Shedlock €8,000, of Mish's Global Trend Analysis, published in the USA, for the same offence against Societe General. Shedlock reported the Chevallier analysis.

No Jurisdiction

The Witch hunt is now over and I was fined nearly as much as Chevallier. It's absurd enough to fine someone for a quote, and even more so when the facts are accurate.

The AFM has no jurisdiction over me, so they won't collect. As a US citizen living in the US, I am not subject to the absurdities of French laws, or French witch hunts. All they get from me is a vow to never go to France.

Best wishes to Chevallier in his fight against absurd fines and bureaucratic madness gone wild. Hopefully he can use the article from the WSJ in his defense.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Gambling On No Healthcare Insurance: Is it a Good Deal? Here's the Math; Obamashock! Work More, Get Less!

Posted: 20 Nov 2013 01:03 PM PST

The idea behind Obamacare is to make the young and the healthy overpay for insurance to subsidize everyone else.

In an effort to persuade individuals to purchase insurance, the law provides a scale of escalating penalties starting in 2014 and increasing in 2015, then again in 2016.

Actually, there are two penalty rates, and you pay the higher of the two, not both.

2014 Penalties

1% of your yearly household income. The maximum penalty is the national average yearly premium for a bronze plan.
$95 per adult ($47.50 per child under 18). The maximum penalty per family using this method is $285.

2015 Penalties

2% of yearly income
$325 per adult ($162.50 per child under 18)

2016 Penalties

2.5% of yearly income
$695 per adult ($347.50 per child under 18)

If you're uninsured for just part of the year, 1/12 of the yearly penalty applies to each month you're uninsured. If you're uninsured for less than 3 months, you don't have a make a payment.

No Enforcement of Penalties in 2014

By the way, Bloomberg reports ... "As Peter Gosselin, a senior health-care policy analyst at Bloomberg Government who worked on the early implementation of the law, explained to me before the change was announced, the IRS has already signaled in Senate testimony that it will use a light hand in enforcing the penalties in 2014. Gosselin says he interpreted the testimony to mean "there isn't a soul in this country that is going to pay an individual mandate penalty" next year."

Nonetheless, inquiring minds should be interested in a math table on penalties for all the years.

Income Table

Income	2014 Penalty	2015 Penalty	2016 Penalty
0	0	0	0
20,000	200	400	500
40,000	400	800	1000
60,000	600	1200	1500
80,000	800	1600	2000
100,000	1000	2000	2500
120,000	1200	2400	3000
140,000	1400	2800	3500
160,000	1600	3200	4000
180,000	1800	3600	4500
200,000	2000	4000	5000
220,000	2200	4400	5500
240,000	2400	4800	6000

The table shows that beyond a certain income range, you will be mathematically forced to buy insurance. But non-insurance in upper income groups was not a huge problem in the first place.

It is healthy low-wage to mid-range wage earners, working part-time, or multiple part-time jobs, that is the primary target of Obamacare policies.

In addition to penalties, one needs to consider cost of policies, subsidies, and factor deductibles into the equation.

Subsidies

The Henry H. Kaiser organization has a nice Subsidy Calculator that you can use.

Illinois Single Person

Condition will widely vary, but let's do an Illinois example, single person, age 25, non-smoking, no children, with income of $40,000. Here are the results.

Seattle Family of Four

Let's now try a Seattle family of Four, zipcode selected at random. with household income of $80,000, parents both age 25.

Out of Pocket Costs

Your out-of-pocket maximum for a Silver plan (not including the premium) can be no more than $12,700. Whether you reach this maximum level will depend on the amount of health care services you use. Currently, about one in four people use no health care services in any given year.

Deductibles

Bloomberg reports Obamacare Deductibles 26% Higher Make Cheap Rates a Risk

On California's state-run exchange site, the standard low-premium "bronze" plan carries a $5,000 deductible per person, a $60 co-pay to see a doctor and a 30 percent fee, known as coinsurance, on hospital care. In Rhode Island, Blue Cross Blue Shield's bronze plan has a $5,800 deductible while Missouri's U.S.-run exchange offers plans by Anthem Blue Cross with the maximum-allowable $6,350 in out-of-pocket costs.

Deductibles vary. Silver plan deductibles are more likely to be in the $2,000-$3,000 range.

Opting Out

The risk in opting out is a catastrophic healthcare need. Yet, that is precisely what some will do if they feel (and rightfully so), that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), is anything but affordable.

I wrote about one family of four already. Please see Reader Explains Why Her Family of Four (with existing coverage) Opts Out of Obamacare

Here is the email again.

Hello Mish!

My husband and I are both 28. (Healthy, non-smokers and no preexisting conditions) We also have two young daughters who are healthy.

Our plan was to sign up for another year of coverage through my husband's employer. Due to increase costs, they are only offering one plan with an HSA. However, these HSA deductibles are higher than I have ever seen. For our family it is $12,000 (in-network). The premiums are $720 per month. $720 a month for the privilege of getting worse coverage.

The exchange is offering similar coverage and premiums. Thus, we are making a tough decision. We are opting out of coverage. It is cheaper for us to use cash only clinics, eat organic food and continue to pay for our gym membership.

I believe the Obama administration thought no one with existing coverage would opt out. But when new "affordable" premiums are roughly 25-30% of a healthy, young family's total income, what do they expect?

Healthcare premiums should not be the same percentage as a mortgage payment.

Thanks for all you do,

Stacie

Several readers did not believe Stacie's math, but the math is easily explained.

Stacie said "premiums" when she meant to say "premiums plus deductibles" in reference to 25% of [potential] family income.

Stacie decided to opt out and take her chances. There are millions more like Stacie (as well as individuals) who may come to the same conclusion.

Opting Out in Washington and Oregon

In any one year, the odds that things go seriously wrong for healthy, young individuals and families are not very high. This is of course exactly why millions will opt out, possibly even in cases of huge subsidies.

Inquiring minds may wish to consider actual results in Oregon and Washington.

Washington: 57,730 Washington State Obamacare Sign-Ups, 51,368 of Them for Medicaid; Obamashock Theory and Practice

Oregon: Oregon Obamacare Success Rate: 0 for 18,000 Applications; Musical Tribute: Just My Imagination

What If Catastrophe Strikes?

What if you opt out and then get diagnosed with cancer. Is all lost?

Not necessarily. If your healthcare renewal is coming up, and you can wait, then you opt back in by purchasing insurance. You can do this easily because you cannot be denied for preexisting conditions.

You may have to pay a higher rate, but you will be able to get coverage.

You can also get insurance if you have a Qualifying Life Event.

QLE Examples

Moving to a new state
Certain changes in your income
Change in your family size such as Marriage, Divorce, Baby, Adoption, Legal Separation, death of spouse or dependent
Change to or from part-time status

More QLE details can be found at Changes You Can Make Outside of Open Season.

Obamashock! Work More, Get Less!

In regards to a change from or to part-time status, please consider Look out below! Work more, get less in Obamacare 'cliff'

Be careful you don't fall off the Obamacare "cliff" when the boss asks you to put in some overtime.

Working more could ultimately mean thousands of dollars less for you under a quirk in the new health-care law going into effect this fall. This could prompt some people to cut back on their hours to avoid losing money.

"Working more can actually leave you worse off," the price-comparison site ValuePenguin.com notes in a new analysis.

"It's sort of an absurd scenario," said Jonathan Wu, ValuePenguin.com's co-founder. "It's something for people to be aware of."

Value Penguin Math

"If your income is at or below the above 400% FPL figure for your household size, the government will subsidize your healthcare so that you spend no more than 9.5% of your income. Earn a dollar above the 400% FPL threshold and the subsidies disappear completely. This obviously creates a problem! If insurance costs substantially more than the capped premium for your family, that extra dollar may actually cost your household a huge amount in actual dollars."

So Screwed Up Even the Liberals and Socialists Hate Obamacare

I have one final parting thought: Obamacare is so screwed up that even the extreme liberals think it's worse than what we had before.

For example, please consider these comments by Michael Olenick, a writer on Naked Capitalism.

... This is the sorry state of the Affordable Care Act, the ultimate betrayal of the self-employed middle class who are supposed to magically produce income to single-handedly support those who are uninsurable. As I demonstrated in prior articles this promise, when objectively judged, borders on sadistic. Politicians must have looked towards the student loan system for inspiration and forgotten to tell the public this was their goal. In that system students from families of about the same "rich" income bracket – in Jessica's case a high-flying $62,000 a year for a family of two – are forced to take out loans so those slightly poorer can go to school for free, or to skip school altogether. ...

ACA supporters – among whom I counted myself until I saw the policies – oftentimes cite the "better" coverage but the facts of the real policies just don't support this. Mandating residential drug treatment may help some people doing so at the cost of making more mundane medical events affordable is just not fair. Maybe I'm more old fashioned than I thought but jacking up the price for a visit to cure strep throat, to subsidize a person's seventh stay in drug rehab, seems unethical. ...

We were led to believe that the political cost of the ACA was high, that Obama spent a lot of progressive chips to get it. Yet we ended up with something that is arguably worse than the current system.

Ultimate Betrayal

Indeed, Obamacare is the ultimate betrayal of Promises, Promises, all unmet.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

JPMorgan's $13 Billion "No Admission of Wrongdoing" Settlement (and a $7 Billion Tax Deduction)

Posted: 20 Nov 2013 08:43 AM PST

JPMorgan agreed to pay a record $13 billion following a probe of its mortgage operation, Washington Mutual bad loans, and mass waivers on misrepresented products.

Specifically, JPMorgan knowingly bundled toxic loans into packages sold to unsuspecting investors.

But all's well that ends well.

JPMorgan was assessed a $13 billion fine but apparently did nothing wrong. As an added bonus, $7 billion of that $13 billion settlement is tax deductible.

Please consider JPMorgan $13 Billion Mortgage Deal Seen as Lawsuit Shield

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)'s record $13 billion deal to end probes into mortgage-bond sales may save the bank billions more because of what the agreement lacked: an explicit admission of wrongdoing.

Employees of JPMorgan and two firms it acquired knew some of the loans included in bonds didn't meet underwriting standards, a fact not shared with buyers of those securities, the U.S. Justice Department said yesterday in a statement. That doesn't mean the company misled investors, said Chief Financial Officer Marianne Lake, disputing how some state and federal officials characterized the deal.

No Admission

"We didn't say that we acknowledge serious misrepresentation of the facts," Lake said yesterday in a conference call with analysts. "We would characterize potentially the statement of facts differently than others might."

JPMorgan acknowledged the statement of facts -- the settlement's official narrative of events leading up to the infractions -- without admitting violations of law, Lake said. The bank also denied any violations in an accompanying slide show.

Separate agreements with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and National Credit Union Administration, both disclosed yesterday, and an accord last month with the FHFA all contained explicit denials of wrongdoing by JPMorgan.

Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. "JPMorgan was not the only financial institution during this period to knowingly bundle toxic loans and sell them to unsuspecting investors, but that is no excuse for the firm's behavior."

U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner in Sacramento, California, said a criminal investigation of the bank's conduct in the sales of residential mortgage-backed securities began less than a year ago, and while "active and ongoing," isn't far enough along to say whether anyone will face charges.

The six biggest U.S. banks, led by JPMorgan and Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp., have piled up more than $100 billion in legal costs since the financial crisis, a figure that exceeds all of the dividends paid to shareholders in the past five years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Penalty for Doing Nothing Wrong

As compensation to homeowners for doing nothing wrong, JPMorgan will devote $4 billion to consumer relief for affected homeowners, including principal forgiveness, loan modifications and efforts to reduce blight.

Tax Deductions

JPMorgan's $2 billion penalty (also for doing nothing wrong) isn't tax deductible, but $7 billion in compensatory payments are, according to Chief Financial Officer Marianne Lake in the conference call.

Ongoing Investigations

Bloomberg notes "The firm is still the subject of Justice Department probes into its energy-trading business, recruiting practices in Asia and its relationship with Ponzi scheme operator Bernard Madoff."

Expect those (nothing to see here, so please move along charges) to be swept under the rug as well, also with corresponding tax deductions, and of course "no admission of wrongdoing" by anyone.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

joi, 21 noiembrie 2013

How to Improve Your Conversion Rates with a Faster Website

How to Improve Your Conversion Rates with a Faster Website

The research

How fast should I be?

Where do I start?

Step 1: Reduce the size of your page

Step 2: Reduce the number of browser requests

Step 3: Reduce the distance to your site

In closing

Introducing Place Pins, for the explorer in all of us

Hi, Hari!

Happy (Place) Pinning!

The First WHITE. Exchange

The First WHITE. Exchange

Seth's Blog : Who is this marketing for?

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joi, 21 noiembrie 2013

The research

How fast should I be?

Where do I start?

Step 1: Reduce the size of your page

Step 2: Reduce the number of browser requests

Step 3: Reduce the distance to your site

In closing

Hi, Hari!

Happy (Place) Pinning!

More Recent Articles

miercuri, 20 noiembrie 2013

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