sâmbătă, 1 noiembrie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Christmas Shopping Season Starts Today: Walmart Leads the Way with Price Cuts on 20,000 Items for the Holiday Season

Posted: 01 Nov 2014 11:58 AM PDT

In the past few years the Christmas shopping season moved from the "Black Friday"  the day after Thanksgiving, to earlier and earlier starts on Thanksgiving, then to the day before Thanksgiving.

Today Walmart leapfrogged the pack with 20,000 items on sale for the holiday season.
When Halloween ends on Friday, Walmart will be switching over its stores to greet the holiday season.

On Saturday, the retailer will offer more than 20,000 "rollbacks" or sale prices on items including groceries and popular brands such as Disney "Frozen," Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Samsung, and Dell.

Then, on Monday, Walmart will relaunch its 24-hour holiday cyber savings event, in which customers can take advantage of free shipping on millions of items from Walmart.com. Orders must exceed $50 for free shipping. Walmart said it has expanded its online offerings to include 7 million items – one million more than last holiday season.
At the current rate of accelerated progression, the Christmas shopping season will soon move to October, then September. Christmas year round, anyone?

Commenting on the news, Janet Yellen said "Damn Walmart to hell! They should be raising prices not lowering them". 

Actually, I made that up, but it's likely what's going on in her mind. Indeed, it's precisely the way Keynesian and Monetarist clowns think.

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

Chris Martenson and Mish Audio on Bank of Japan's Surprise Move on Friday

Posted: 01 Nov 2014 12:14 AM PDT

Every other Wednesday or so, Chris Martenson and I get together for a podcast. Sometimes one of us or the other is out of town, and sometimes Chris has other guest speakers.

Because of scheduling difficulties, Chris and I got together today instead of Wednesday. I asked Chris to make today's podcast generally available.

For our take of Friday's BoJ surprise move, please play the audio on Chris' Peak Prosperity site: Off the Cuff: Japanese Central Bank Throws Granny Under the Bus.

The audio is about 25 minutes long. The podcasts are not scripted. Chris and I just talk "off the cuff" on events of the day or the week.

In case you missed my Friday commentary, please see Nikkei Futures Up Limit, Yen Collapses, Dollar Up, Gold Down as BoJ Pledges "Unwavering Determination" to Get 2% Inflation

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

Seth's Blog : Organizing for growth

 

Organizing for growth

Maybe it’s (finally) working. Maybe demand is up, opportunities keep presenting themselves and people want to work with you.

So why are you so stressed out? It might be because different organizational choices lead to different paths for growth.

Consider a house painter. His business has always been okay, but thanks to his skill and a local building boom, jobs keep showing up.

The traditional method: He lays out the money for paint, he does the work, he sends a bill, and soon, he gets paid.

The good news is that as a freelancer, he's super flexible and can withstand tough times. But in this environment, all sorts of trouble hits. First, there's a cash flow issue. New jobs mean more need for paint and materials, but he has to lay out his own cash to pay for it. Second, new jobs mean more work, but he's the best (and the cheapest) employee, so he ends up working way more hours. No cash, no time, no joy.

An alternative is for the painter to create a scalable system. He could require a down payment on every job, an amount calculated to cover all of his cash costs. Second, he could spend the time to build a pool of journeyman painters, a Rolodex of talent ready when he needs it. In this scenario, the painter becomes a foreman, not a painter any longer.

Or, consider one step beyond that, in which the painter hires several foremen, each responsible for his own Rolodex. Now, the painter is a CEO, a salesperson, the architect of a brand, an organization and its growth. But that still involves a lot of risk as he scales.

The last structure I'll point out is the idea that the painter could refine his system and instead of dealing with homeowners, he could find partners, and license them the system. The system might include his brand name, his sales approach, a computerized, data-driven direct marketing program and most of all, a rule book that lets people who don't have his iniative enter this business. By charging every partner who joins an upfront fee (this is how franchises work) as well as a share of their income, he can grow from state to state, building a nationwide painting behemoth.

There's no right answer. Not everyone should run a national painting franchise business. The key insight is to feel the pain that an organizational choice leads to and fix that instead of merely chasing demand and embracing each opportunity (no matter how juicy) as it comes along.

The key things to focus on, I think, are:

Cash flow

Demand enhancement

Increasing the ability to keep your promises by investing in a pipeline of talent

And most of all, reminding yourself why you're doing this in the first place.

       

 

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vineri, 31 octombrie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Could Non-Citizens Determine the Outcome of the Midterm Elections?

Posted: 31 Oct 2014 01:30 PM PDT

Here's the question of the day: Could Non-Citizens Determine the Outcome of the Midterm Elections?

Some elections, especially for Senate are so close, the unfortunate answer is "yes" as the following video insight from Insight from the Libre Institute explains.



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

Nikkei Futures Up Limit, Yen Collapses, Dollar Up, Gold Down as BoJ Pledges "Unwavering Determination" to Get 2% Inflation

Posted: 31 Oct 2014 10:38 AM PDT

"Whatever it Takes" Japanese Style

It's a world truly gone mad.

In a surprise move today, the Bank of Japan announced further quantitative easing, dominated by long-term Japanese government bonds. The BoJ also announced it  and would triple annual purchases of exchange traded funds and property investment trusts.

BoJ governor Haruhiko Kuroda defied objections from four fellow board members, arguing that a tax-hit economy and a lower oil price have led to "a critical moment" in the country's bid to escape from deflation.

The Financial Times quotes Kuroda as follows: The extra action "shows our unwavering determination to end deflation. There was a risk that despite having made steady progress, we could face a delay in eradicating the public's deflation mindset. This is a pretty drastic step, so I think there will be a significant effect [on the economy]."

Stunning Market Reaction

  • Nikkei futures up lock limit (1160 points)
  • S&P 500 up 1.0% (new all-time high)
  • Yen plunges 2.5%
  • Dollar rises 0.9%
  • Gold sinks 2.75%
  • Oil down 1.1%

Nikkei Futures



S&P 500 Futures



Yen Futures



US Dollar Futures



Gold Futures



Oil Futures



One of my top two trade ideas worked today: Long the Nikkei hedged with a short-yen position. Gold certainly didn't. I still have faith central bank madness will eventually light a fire on my second key idea.

Buyer of Only Resort

Not only is Japan's population in decline, the remaining population is aging. Somehow, Japan believes its economy ought to grow anyway. In addition, Japan wants 2% inflation even though that is the last thing Japanese savers need.

Given that Japanese pension funds are now net sellers of Japanese government bonds, and given Japan's pledge to destroy the Yen to fight deflation, the buyer of only resort of Japan's government bonds is the Bank of Japan.

Currency Crisis Awaits

Japan's government debt is over 250% of GDP. Japan's debt is so high that an interest rate of somewhere between 2 and 3 percent will consume 100% of tax revenue.

Amusingly, the central bank wants 2% inflation and 0% bond rates. How's that going to work?

The answer is "It's not".

Today's message is clearly "get the hell out of the yen".

Somewhere down the line, a global currency crisis awaits. I am willing to hold gold indefinitely until that happens.

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

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


21 Things You Need To Be Ready For When You Live With A Girl

Posted: 31 Oct 2014 10:14 AM PDT

Living with a girl is an adventure, so you need to be ready for it.





















The Cast Of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" Then And Now

Posted: 31 Oct 2014 10:01 AM PDT

A lot can change in 17 years.






















What SEOs Need to Know About Topic Modeling & Semantic Connectivity - Whiteboard Friday

What SEOs Need to Know About Topic Modeling & Semantic Connectivity - Whiteboard Friday


What SEOs Need to Know About Topic Modeling & Semantic Connectivity - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 30 Oct 2014 05:15 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Search engines, especially Google, have gotten remarkably good at understanding searchers' intent—what we mean to search for, even if that's not exactly what we search for. How in the world do they do this? It's incredibly complex, but in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the basics—what we all need to know about how entities are connected in search.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking topic modeling and semantic connectivity. Those words might sound big and confusing, but, in fact, they are important to understanding the operations of search engines, and they have some direct influence on things that we might do as SEOs, hence our need to understand them.

Now, I'm going to make a caveat here. I am not an expert in this topic. I have not taken the required math classes, stats classes, programming classes to truly understand this topic in a way that I would feel extremely comfortable explaining. However, even at the surface level of understanding, I feel like I can give some compelling information that hopefully you all and myself included can go research some more about. We're certainly investigating a lot of topic modeling opportunities and possibilities here at Moz. We've done so in the past, and we're revisiting that again for some future tools, so the topic is fresh on my mind.

So here's the basic concept. The idea is that search engines are smarter than just knowing that a word, a phrase that someone searches for, like "Super Mario Brothers," is only supposed to bring back results that have exactly the words "Super Mario Brothers," that perfect phrase in the title and in the headline and in the document itself. That's still an SEO best practice because you're trying to serve visitors who have that search query. But search engines are actually a lot smarter than this.

One of my favorite examples is how intelligent Google has gotten around movie topics. So try, for example, searching for "That movie where the guy is called The Dude," and you will see that Google properly returns "The Big Lebowski" in the first ranking position. How do they know that? Well, they've essentially connected up "movie," "The Dude," and said, "Aha, those things are most closely related to 'The Big Lebowski. That's what the intent of the searcher is. That's the document that we're going to return, not a document that happens to have 'That movie about the guy named 'The Dude' in the title, exactly those words.'"

Here's another example. So this is Super Mario Brothers, and Super Mario Brothers might be connected to a lot of other terms and phrases. So a search engine might understand that Super Mario Brothers is a little bit more semantically connected to Mario than it is to Luigi, then to Nintendo and then Bowser, the jumping dragon guy, turtle with spikes on his back -- I'm not sure exactly what he is -- and Princess Peach.

As you go down here, the search engine might actually have a topic modeling algorithm, something like latent semantic indexing, which was an early model, or a later model like latent Dirichlet allocation, which is a somewhat later model, or even predictive latent Dirichlet allocation, which is an even later model. Model's not particularly important, especially for our purposes.

What is important is to know that there's probably some scoring going on. A search engine -- Google, Bing -- can understand that some of these words are more connected to Super Mario Brothers than others, and it can do the reverse. They can say Super Mario Brothers is somewhat connected to video games and very not connected to cat food. So if we find a page that happens to have the title element of Super Mario Brothers, but most of the on-page content seems to be about cat food, well, maybe we shouldn't rank that even if it has lots of incoming links with anchor text saying "Super Mario Brothers" or a very high page rank or domain authority or those kinds of things.

So search engines, Google, in particular, has gotten very, very smart about this connectivity stuff and this topic modeling post-Hummingbird. Hummingbird, of course, being the algorithm update from last fall that changed a lot of how they can interpret words and phrases.

So knowing that Google and Bing can calculate this relative connectivity, connectivity between the words and phrases and topics, we want to know how are they doing this. That answer is actually extremely broad. So that could come from co-occurrence in web documents. Sorry for turning my back on the camera. I know I'm supposed to move like this, but I just had to do a little twirl for you.

Distance between the keywords. I mean distance on the actual page itself. Does Google find "Super Mario Brothers" near the word "Mario" on a lot of the documents where the two occur, or are they relatively far away? Maybe Super Mario Brothers does appear with cat food a lot, but they're quite far away. They might look at citations and links between documents in terms of, boy, there's a lot pages on the web, when they talk about Super Mario Brothers, they also link to pages about Mario, Luigi, Nintendo, etc.

They can look at the anchor text connections of those links. They could look at co-occurrence of those words biased by a given corpi, a set of corpuses, or from certain domains. So they might say, "Hey, we only want to pay attention to what's on the fresh web right now or in the blogosphere or on news sites or on trusted domains, these kinds of things as opposed to looking at all of the documents on the web." They might choose to do this in multiple different sets of corpi.

They can look at queries from searchers, which is a really powerful thing that we unfortunately don't have access to. So they might see searcher behavior saying that a lot of people who search for Mario, Luigi, Nintendo are also searching for Super Mario Brothers.

They might look at searcher clicks, visits, history, all of that browser data that they've got from Chrome and from Android and, of course, from Google itself, and they might say those are corpi that they use to connect up words and phrases.

Probably there's a whole list of other places that they're getting this from. So they can build a very robust data set to connect words and phrases. For us, as SEOs, this means a few things.

If you're targeting a keyword for rankings, say "Super Mario Brothers," those semantically connected and related terms and phrases can help with a number of things. So if you could know that these were the right words and phrases that search engines connected to Super Mario Brothers, you can do all sorts of stuff. Things like inclusion on the page itself, helping to tell the search engine my page is more relevant for Super Mario Brothers because I include words like Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Bowser, Nintendo, etc. as opposed to things like cat food, dog food, T-shirts, glasses, what have you.

You can think about it in the links that you earn, the documents that are linking to you and whether they contain those words and phrases and are on those topics, the anchor text that points to you potentially. You can certainly be thinking about this from a naming convention and branding standpoint. So if you're going to call a product something or call a page something or your unique version of it, you might think about including more of these words or biasing to have those words in the description of the product itself, the formal product description.

For an About page, you might think about the formal bio for a person or a company, including those kinds of words, so that as you're getting cited around the web or on your book cover jacket or in the presentation that you give at a conference, those words are included. They don't necessarily have to be links. This is a potentially powerful thing to say a lot of people who mention Super Mario Brothers tend to point to this page Nintendo8.com, which I think actually you can play the original "Super Mario Brothers" live on the web. It's kind of fun. Sorry to waste your afternoon with that.

Of course, these can also be additional keywords that you might consider targeting. This can be part of your keyword research in addition to your on-page and link building optimization.

What's unfortunate is right now there are not a lot of tools out there to help you with this process. There is a tool from Virante. Russ Jones, I think did some funding internally to put this together, and it's quite cool. It's  nTopic.org. Hopefully, this Whiteboard Friday won't bring that tool to its knees by sending tons of traffic over there. But if it does, maybe give it a few days and come back. It gives you a broad score with a little more data if you register and log in. It's got a plugin for Chrome and for WordPress. It's fairly simplistic right now, but it might help you say, "Is this page on the topic of the term or phrase that I'm targeting?"

There are many, many downloadable tools and libraries. In fact, Code.google.com has an LDA topic modeling tool specifically, and that might have been something that Google used back in the day. We don't know.

If you do a search for topic modeling tools, you can find these. Unfortunately, almost all of them are going to require some web development background at the very least. Many of them rely on a Python library or an API. Almost all of them also require a training corpus in order to model things on. So you can think about, "Well, maybe I can download Wikipedia's content and use that as a training model or use the top 10 search results from Google as some sort of training model."

This is tough stuff. This is one of the reasons why at Moz I'm particularly passionate about trying to make this something that we can help with in our on-page optimization and keyword difficulty tools, because I think this can be very powerful stuff.

What is true is that you can spot check this yourself right now. It is very possible to go look at things like related searches, look at the keyword terms and phrases that also appear on the pages that are ranking in the top 10 and extract these things out and use your own mental intelligence to say, "Are these terms and phrases relevant? Should they be included? Are these things that people would be looking for? Are they topically relevant?" Consider including them and using them for all of these things. Hopefully, over time, we'll get more sophisticated in the SEO world with tools that can help with this.

All right, everyone, hope you've enjoyed this addition of Whiteboard Friday. Look forward to some great comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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