vineri, 20 martie 2015

Seth's Blog : How long is your long term?

How long is your long term?

A simple question with an answer that's difficult to embrace.

What are you willing to give up today in exchange for something better tomorrow? Next week? In ten years?

Your long term is not the sum of your short terms.

       

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joi, 19 martie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Philly Fed Growth Trends Lower 4th Month: Prices, Shipments, Workweek Negative

Posted: 19 Mar 2015 10:18 AM PDT

As has been the case with nearly every economic report for months on end, the Philly Fed Consensus Estimate disappointed to the downside.
Slow growth with weakness in orders is the common thread for both the Empire State report, released earlier this week, and now the Philly Fed where the general conditions index held little changed at 5.0 in March vs 5.2 in February. New orders, at 3.9, are not much above zero while unfilled orders are suddenly well below zero, at minus 13.8 in a sharp decline from February's plus 7.3.

Weakness in orders points to softness in shipments, which are already below zero at minus 7.8, as well as softness in employment which is struggling to stay above zero at 3.5. Price data show contraction for both inputs, at minus 3.0, and finished goods, at minus 6.4.

The early indications on March are not that positive in what would extend a series of weak months for the manufacturing sector, a sector that the FOMC noted yesterday is being hurt by weak exports tied to weak foreign demand and complicated by the strong dollar.
Philly Fed Components

Let's dive into the Philly Fed Report for some charts and tables.



Shipments, unfilled orders, delivery times, inventories, prices paid, prices received, and average workweek are all negative.

Prices Paid, Prices Received



The Fed will be watching prices and will not like what they see.

Bear in mind the Philly Fed is a diffusion index. Size of the company reporting does not matter, nor do amounts. For example, a small company reporting a small decline in prices counts as much as a large company reporting a big increase in price.

That said, over time these things average out, and the collapse of all the subcomponents certainly looks ominous.

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

Cash Dinosaur: France Limits Cash Transactions to €1,000, Puts Restrictions on Gold; Bitcoin End Coming?

Posted: 19 Mar 2015 12:23 AM PDT

A few days ago I asked How Long Before Cash is Banned?

My question was in reference to reader CNA (Cards Not Appreciated) who commented ...
Hi Mish

I've been in Italy for a month. It's quite amazing how many places ask you to pay cash. Even at hotels, they would like you to pay your €1000+ bills in cash. And people 'wonder' why these countries always get into trouble.

CNA
Cash Dinosaur

My belief is that cash is going the way of the dinosaur. Just today we see another step in that direction.

France to Limit Cash Transactions

Via translation from El Economista, please consider France Limits Cash Payments to 1,000 Euros
The French Government will limit cash payments to 1,000 euros, compared to 3,000 euros today, a move that will come into force in September to combat terrorist financing and money laundering, in an announcement from Finance Minister Michel Sapin.

For non-residents (mainly tourists) the limit will drop from 15,000 to 10,000 euros.

Also, starting next year, banks will have to notify authorities of any income or withdrawals of more than 10,000 euros per month.

Restrictions apply to suitcases with money or goods of value like gold.
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Yesterday the French cash limit was 3,000 euros. Today the cash limit is 1,000 euros. Tomorrow (not in the literal sense as timing is uncertain), cash transactions will be restricted to 100 euros, then banned altogether.

The same applies everywhere, including the US.

Candy

Want to buy a candy bar? The government will want to know where the purchase was made, how much you paid, and where you got the money to buy the candy bar.

Bitcoin End Coming?


Digital currencies will soon be mandatory.

I believe the only reason bitcoin has survived is the Fed wants to study digital currencies. When the Fed decides to go 100% digital (I have no timeframe in mind) bitcoin may very well go back to its initial roots: worthless.

The primary user of bitcoin right now is Chinese money laundering.

Disagree? Then please explain why 80% of Bitcoin Transaction Volume is Chinese.

How long can that really last?

Digital currencies are coming. Is bitcoin the answer?

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

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


The Best Gift You Can Send To Someone You Hate

Posted: 19 Mar 2015 03:48 PM PDT

If you want to show someone that you really don't like them, this is the way to do it.

A strange package containing...



an even stranger set of contents: No name, no return address...



and these. Not sure if I have a friend or an enemy.

Vehicle Theft Protection: What Consumers Should Know [Infographic]

Posted: 19 Mar 2015 03:00 PM PDT

In the United States a motor vehicle is stolen every 33 seconds. This infographic provides this and other statistical information about car theft, so that people can make better decisions about keeping their cars safe.

Click on Image to Enlarge.


Via: SchoolMatters San Diego

Get Me Out of Debt! [Infographic]

Posted: 19 Mar 2015 02:52 PM PDT

Get Me Out of Debt! Take a look at this infographic put together by NJ Bankruptcy Lawyer Ralph Ferro explaining the evolution of debt programs.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

How to Stop Spam Bots from Ruining Your Analytics Referral Data - Moz Blog


How to Stop Spam Bots from Ruining Your Analytics Referral Data

Posted on: Wednesday 18 March 2015 — 23:12

Posted by jaredgardner

A few months back, my agency started seeing a referral traffic spike in our Google Analytics account. At first, I got excited. Someone is linking to us and people are clicking. Hooray!

Wrong! How very, very wrong. As I dug deeper, I saw that most of this referral traffic was sent from spammers, and mostly from one spammer named Vitaly Popov (or, as I like to call him, "the most recent pain in my ass"). 

The domains he owns have been giving our company's site and most of our clients' sites a few hundred sessions per month, enough to throw off the analytics data in many cases.

His sites aren't the only ones I'll cover in this how-to, but his spam network has been the biggest nuisance lately. If you're getting spam referrers in your analytics, you should be able to follow the same steps to stop these data-skewing nimcompoops from spoiling your data, too.

Why do I need to worry about blocking and filtering these sites?

There are two main reasons I'm motivated to block these on all sites that I work with. First: corrupt analytics data. A few hundred hits a month on a site like Moz.com isn't going to move the needle when compared to the sheer volume of sessions they have daily. However, on a small site for a local plumber, 30 sessions per day is likely going to be 70% spam referral traffic, suffocating the remaining legitimate traffic and making marketing analysis a frustrating endeavor.

Second: server load and security. I didn't ask them to crawl or visit my site. Their visits are using my server resources for something that I don't want or need. An overloaded server means slower load times, which translate to higher bounce rates and lower rankings. On top of that, who knows what else they're doing on my site while they're there. They could easily be looking for WordPress, plugin and server vulnerabilities.

Popular referral spam domains

Using  WHOIS.net, I found that Mr. Popov's spam network includes these domains:

  • darodar.com (and various subdomains)
  • econom.co
  • ilovevitaly.co (and other TLD variations)

Other spammers plaguing the web include:

  • semalt.com (and various subdomains)
  • buttons-for-website.com
  • see-your-website-here.com

Many other sites have come and gone. These are just the sites that have been active lately.

Why are they hitting my site?

Why are people going through so much effort to crawl the web without blocking themselves from analytics? Spam! So much spam, it still blows me away. I looked into a few of the sites listed above. Three of the most prolific ones are doing it for very different reasons. 

See-your-website-here.com

Screen-Shot-2015-01-21-at-2.30.22-PM.png

This site takes the cake for being the most frustrating. This site is using referrer spam as a form of lead generation. What is their product you ask? Web spam. You can pay see-your-website-here.com to perform web spam for your company as a form of lead generation. The owner of this domain was kind enough to make his WHOIS information public. His name is Ben Sykes and he's from London.

Semalt.com

Screen-Shot-2015-01-21-at-2.44.09-PM.png

Semalt.com and I have had a tumultuous relationship at best. Semalt is an SEO product that's designed to give on- and off-page analysis such as keyword usage and link metrics. Their products seem to be somewhat legit. However, their business practices are not. Semalt uses a bot to crawl the web and index webpage data, but they don't disable analytics tracking like most respectable bots do. They have a form to remove your site from being crawled at http://semalt.com/project_crawler.php, which is ever so nice of them. Of course, I tried this months ago and they still crawled our site. I ended up talking with a representative from Semalt.com via Twitter after I wrote this article: How to Stop Semalt.com from Plaguing Your Google Analytics Data. I've documented our interactions and the outcome of that project in the article. 

Darodar.com, econom.co, and ilovevitaly.com

Screen-Shot-2015-01-21-at-4.03.48-PM.png

This network appears to exist for the purpose of directing affiliate traffic to shopping sites such as AliExpress.com and eBay.com. I am guessing that the site won't pay out to the affiliate unless the traffic results in a purchase, which seems unlikely. The sub-domain shopping.ilovevitaly.com used to redirect to aliexpress.com directly, but now it goes to a landing page that links to a variety of online retailers.

How to stop spam bots

Block via .htaccess

The best way to block referrers from accessing your site at all is to block them in your .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain. You can copy and paste the following code into your .htaccess file, assuming you're on an Apache server. I like this method better than just blocking the domain in analytics because it prevents spam bots from hitting your server altogether. If you want to get creative, you can redirect the traffic back to their site.

# Block Russian Referrer Spam RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly\.com/ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly.\.ru/ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly\.org/ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly\.info/ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*iloveitaly\.ru/ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*econom\.co/ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*savetubevideo\.com/ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*kambasoft\.com/ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*buttons\-for\-website\.com/ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*semalt\.com/ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*darodar\.com/ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F,L] 

Warning: .htaccess is a very powerful file that dictates how your server behaves. If you upload an .htaccess file with one character out of place, you will likely take down the whole site. Before you make any changes to the file, I would suggest making a backup. If you don't feel comfortable making these edits, see the WordPress plug-in option below.

Analytics filters

By itself, .htaccess won't solve all of your problems. It will only protect you from future sessions, and it won't affect the sessions that have already happened. I like to set up filters by country in analytics to remove the historical data, as well as to help filter out any other bots we might find from select countries in the future. Of course this wouldn't be a good idea if you expect to get legitimate traffic from countries like Russia, Brazil, or Indonesia, but many U.S.-based companies can safely block these countries without losing potential customers. Follow the steps below to set up the filters.

First, click on the "Admin" tab at the top of the page. On the view column you will want to create a "new" view so that you still have an unadulterated report of all traffic in Google Analytics. I named my mine "Filter Bots." After you have your new view selected, click in to the "Filters" section then select the "+New Filter Button."

View_filter_fianl.png

Setting up filters is pretty simple if you know what setting to use. I like to filter out all traffic from Russia, Brazil, and Indonesia. These are just the countries that have been giving us issues lately. You can add more filters as you need them.

The filter name is just an arbitrary label. I usually just type "block [insert country here]." Next, choose the filter type "custom." Choose "country" from the "Filter Field" drop down. The "Filter Pattern Field" is where you actually define what countries you are filtering, so make sure you spell them correctly. You can double check your filters by using the "Verify This Filter" button. A graph will pop-up and show you how many sessions will be removed from the last seven days.

Filter_settings_final.jpg

I would recommend selecting the "Bot Filtering" check box that is found in "View Settings" within the "Admin" tab. I haven't seen a change in my data using this feature yet, but it doesn't hurt to set it up since it's really easy and maybe Google will decide to block some of these spammers.

Viewsettings_bot_button_final.jpg

Using WordPress? Don't want to edit your .htaccess file?

I've used the plugin Wp-Ban before, and it makes it easy to block unwanted visitors. Wp-ban gives you the ability to ban users by IP, IP range, host name, user agent and referrer URL from visiting your WordPress blog all from within the WordPress admin panel. This a great option for people who don't want to edit their .htaccess file or don't feel comfortable doing so.

Additional resources

There are a few other great posts you can refer to if you're looking for more info on dealing with referrer spam:

  1. http://www.optimizesmart.com/geek-guide-removing-referrer-spam-google-analytics/
  2. https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam
  3. http://blog.raventools.com/stop-referrer-spam/
  4. http://www.analyticsedge.com/2014/12/removing-referral-spam-google-analytics/

Conclusion

I hope this helps you block all the pesky spammers out there. There are definitely different ways you can solve this problem, and these are just the ones that have helped me protect analytics data. I'd love to hear how you have dealt with spam bots. Share your stories with me on Twitter or in the comments below.


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Seth's Blog : The difference between commitment and technique

The difference between commitment and technique

We spend way too much time teaching people technique. Teaching people to be good at flute, or C++ or soccer. 

It's a waste because the fact is, most people can learn to be good at something, if they only choose to be, if they choose to make the leap and put in the effort and deal with the failure and the frustration and the grind.

But most people don't want to commit until after they've discovered that they can be good at something. So they say, "teach me, while I stand here on one foot, teach me while I gossip with my friends via text, teach me while I wander off to other things. And, sure, if the teaching sticks, then I'll commit."

We'd be a lot more successful if organized schooling was all about creating an atmosphere where we can sell commitment (and where people will buy it). A committed student with access to resources is almost unstoppable.

Great teachers teach commitment.

       

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miercuri, 18 martie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


China's Deflationary Bust and Beyond: Anne Stevenson-Yang Presentation

Posted: 18 Mar 2015 01:59 PM PDT

Anne Stevenson-Yang graciously made her presentation on China 2015 Risks - Deflationary Bust and Beyond publicly available.

I wanted to embed the document but it got distorted a bit, so please click on the above link to download the document.

I reviewed her presentation about a week ago in Reality Check: How Fast is China Growing? Global Recession at Hand. The following snip is a recap of what her presentation is about.
How Fast is China Growing?

Analyst estimates of Chinese growth keep getting lower and lower. Yet, those declining estimates have all been from a lofty level: From 10% to 9%, to 8% to 7.5%.

China's growth target for 2015 is 7.0%.

Many question those growth estimates. I certainly do. Chinese growth is not consistent with energy demand, raw materials, or personal consumption. Worse yet, growth does not factor in pollution or malinvestments in vacant housing, vacant malls, vacant airports, etc.

Malinvestments, pollution, and State-Owned-Enterprise (SOE) boondoggles (fraud is actually a better word) should all subtract from current GDP. Instead, fraud, pollution, and malinvestments have been buried and will remain buried until it's impossible to hide them.

I assumed China was growing slowly. After all, 7% is one hell of a lie. However, I now wonder if China is growing at all.

What caused my double take was a fascinating presentation by Anne Stevenson-Yang, Co-Founder of JCap and author of China Alone: The Emergence from, and Potential Return to Isolation.
Video Download

You can download or play her video presentation here: Is China Already in a Hard Landing?

Lacy Hunt on Anne Stevenson-Yang


Lacy Hunt at Hoisington Investment Management had this comment.
Mish,

Congratulations on this piece. When Anne Stevenson-Yang speaks, I listen. She may be the best source on what is actually happening in the Chinese economy. Your comments were excellent. I hope this article gets the recognition it deserves.

Lacy
Liquidity vs. Injections

I did catch one error in the presentation. If you have ever made presentations, it's quite easy to do.

On one slide, Stevenson-Yang spoke of "daily injections" of 1.5 trillion yuan.

Instead, 1.5 trillion is the average daily interbank turnover including interbank lending and repos. It is a proxy for short-term liquidity needs for Chinese financial institutions.

Here are a couple of corrected slides showing updated numbers:

Daily Liquidity



Monthly Injections



Thanks again to Anne Stevenson-Yang for making her presentation available. The link at the top will let you download all 44 slides of her presentation.

China bulls who think China will grow 6-7% a year are in for a rude awakening.

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

Fed Drops Word "Patient"; Door Open, But For What?

Posted: 18 Mar 2015 11:42 AM PDT

As expected, the Fed Drops 'Patient' Stance. Bloomberg says this "Opens Door to June Rate Increase".
The Federal Reserve dropped an assurance it will be "patient" in raising interest rates, ending an era in its communications policy and opening the door for higher borrowing costs as early as June.

"An increase in the target range for the federal funds rate remains unlikely at the April" meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement Wednesday in Washington. The panel said it will be appropriate to tighten "when it has seen further improvement in the labor market and is reasonably confident that inflation will move back to its 2 percent objective over the medium term."
Inflation in Eyes of Beholder

Inflation as measured by asset prices is rampant. Inflation as measured by the Fed is actually negative.



The experimental CPI, for those over 62 is in positive territory at 0.51%. See Experimental CPI Index; BLS Disclaimer vs. Mish Recommended Disclaimer

That leaves us wondering about the nebulous definition of "medium term". Others may be scratching their heads over "further improvement in the labor market".

How much more improvement does the Fed want? Or does the Fed not believe all these glowing labor reports either?

Door Open, But For What?

Given all the above mush, the door is open for the Fed to do whatever it wants. That's precisely as it has always been actually.

If you think anything meaningful really changed in the Fed's statement, you are mistaken. The Fed always does whatever it wants, making up excuses over time, to do just that.

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

Experimental CPI Index; BLS Disclaimer vs. Mish Recommended Disclaimer

Posted: 18 Mar 2015 01:03 AM PDT

Were you aware that in addition to the regular monthly CPI updates, the BLS also calculates an "Experimental CPI Index" for those age 62 and older?

Experimental CPI Index



The BLS overweights medical care and underweights other categories along with this disclaimer: "These analyses should be treated as tentative."

Mish Recommended Disclaimer

"Serious cases of nausea and shock have been reported by those reading CPI reports. Pregnant or nursing mothers, those over the age of 55, those with high blood pressure, and those prone to laughing attacks are advised to not read CPI reports of any kind, regular or experimental."

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

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


How to Say Hello around the World

Posted: 18 Mar 2015 01:33 PM PDT

These 15 different cultures all have their own way of greeting one another and it is advisable to know the right way to say hello if you are ever travelling.




















Rich People's 'First World Problems' Will Bring a Tears to Your Eyes

Posted: 18 Mar 2015 12:13 PM PDT
























The Funniest Jokes From The Roast Of Justin Bieber

Posted: 18 Mar 2015 11:14 AM PDT

Comedy Central's Justin Bieber roast doesn't premiere until March 30 but a lot of the jokes have already hit the Internet. Some of them are pretty brutal as the roasters held nothing back when they ripped on Justin Bieber.