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Daniel Kertcher – Market Update February 2014

Hi, Daniel Kertcher, CEO and Founder of Trading Pursuits and welcome to the monthly market review for February 2014.

Now before I get started with this presentation, let me just quickly take you through a couple of disclaimer points, number one, what you are hearing from this presentation is what we call, General Advice, not individual specific advice, further more we have taken consideration your personal financial objectives, trading involves risk, past results means returns does not mean you will get the same in the future. And finally, our company, Trading Pursuits with holds an Australian Financial Services License.

Aright, we’ve had a very interesting month, the SP500 after reaching as its all-time high about 1845 points last month, has pulled back at about 6% this current month. Now what’s interesting about that is the biggest five day drop we have seen, in the last 2-3 years, now the market pulled back by about 6% due to the lower than expected ISM Manufacturing data that came out a few weeks ago. Now what does ISM mean? Well, ISM manufacturing data basically is demonstrating the expansion or contraction of factories. Now given the fact we have had just one of the worst coldest winters in US recorded history, there are parts of Canada and United States that were minus 30 Celsius and tons of snow.

So you can imagine snow situations that factories are closed, transport is very difficult, heating cost is very high and as a consequence the manufacturing output in distribution is lower than expected. In fact, the expectation was that the figures are going to come in by about 56.5 but in fact they came in way down at 51.3 well below the expected amount. So here you can see the graph of ISM manufacturing, the red line there as you can see is the expectations were for the ISM manufacturing to come in, in fact they came in below that than 51.3 so up on 56.5 could have been one of the highest levels we’ve seen for the last five years. Well in fact we’ve got one of the lowest levels we’ve seen for the last five years.

Now is this really a bad thing? Not really because again given the fact that we had a terrible winter which now is basically over or coming to an end in America plus the fact if you look back over the last fourteen years back in year 2000 you can see how the current value of ISM at 51.3 means that companies and factories are in fact fill in an expansion phase. And it is nowhere near the lows that we’ve seen in previous years, so yes it is lower than expected and it took the market by a bit of surprise but over all this is not a turning point in the market, we are not entering into a crashing stock market period. On the positive side, US unemployment has continued to fall; unemployment in America is now below 7% about 6.97%, and the lowest level we’ve seen in the last five years.

So despite the fact that we have this low ISM data, the reality is the market appreciated and understood the fact that it is due to the terrible winter and so in the last 5-6 days the market has completely rebounded back-up again and in fact the SMP500 is back trading near 1845 points, near it’s all time record high. So it is quite a volume amount but it has rebounded back up. One of the reasons why market has rebounded so strongly, it has been an incredibly strong earnings that have been coming in American companies.

Here we are looking at the earnings result, for the SMP500, top 500 companies in America, and we can see that by looking at top 500 or in this case 421 out of the top 500 companies have made their earnings or profit and loss of statement announcement, we can see that on average 1.06% of all companies have reported they have all performed their sales expectations their revenue, on over 1% better than what analysts expected, that is pretty fantastic. More importantly though the earnings you can see overall, they’ve beate[...]

When you are renovating, you’ve got to make some choices.

Do I sell this property? Or do I rent it at the end of my renovation? You’ve always got to keep in mind the goal & key to strategy is to make money, right?

Here are some key tips to decide which direction is for you, do you sell? Or do you rent?

The first strategy is called, the Buy, Renovate & Sell Strategy. Quite often, this is referred to as flipping. Flipping or selling is a great strategy if you don’t have much money behind you and in fact, what I say is that if you have just started out your property journey and you are starting to build your equity, you don’t have much behind you and by that I mean, if you have less than two or three hundred thousand equity behind you then you really should be a buy, renovate & sell renovator for your first couple of projects. What I did on my first few projects, I had to sell. I made a profit margin on my very first renovation, I did not spend one dollar of it, I tipped all of that money back to project number two so it became easier to finance the next deal. I got it renovated, again I sold that property, made a lump sum profit, I tipped that onto the next deal.

And that is a great way to build your wealth if you are particularly starting out on a property ladder. The next strategy is the Buy, Renovate & Rent Strategy. Now let me tell you, this is the most lucrative strategy of all. Think about it, when you buy renovate & rent there are no agents commission, there are no selling or marketing cost, there are no capital gains tax until you sell down the property way down the track, we are also a nation that has massive rental shortages, so when you rent your property you have a queue of people waiting to rent that property form you.

You’ll also get, typically a rental premium because tenants want a nice clean property to live in. But you can only be a buy renovate and rent renovator once you build up enough equity behind you. So my advice is, if it is your first starting out on your property journey, sell the first few properties that you need to do then actually get good equity cash flow behind you, so be sensible about what money you spend and what you don’t and as soon as you’ve got good cash flow behind you, switch strategies and move straight to the buy renovate and rent strategy.

If you can do this, it will be a great way for you to build wealth.

I’m Cherie, see you next time.

Happy New Year, 2014, it is going to be a big one, what’s it got in store?

Well, I don’t have my crystal ball but what I’ve done this year is I’ve come to America because that is where stuff is going down and that’s where things are going to happen.

Unfortunately guys it is not going to be business as usual, I’ve had a funny nagging feeling for a long time we had the GFC and nothing changed. If nothing changes, nothing changes, and the fundamental sickness that causes the global financial crisis has not been cured. Countries are still suffering, nothing has changed in Europe, in fact things have gotten worse, disease has spread similarly in America, the debt is so huge it’s like cancer and yet life goes on. It is seemingly deceptive to the masses, to the huge middle class and lower class, unfortunately the one percent of the truly wealthy know what’s going down and they are bracing for impact.

I came to check out America, because reality television shows go on, papers still drive around in their cars, people still smile, life seems normal. And it’s just like this big fake Hollywood movie set. Here where I am now in America, people are hurting, people are suffering. There is no property magazines, there is no property shows on television, property is a dirty word over here. People are working on two or three jobs those who are lucky enough to have jobs; unemployment is at close to 20%, one in five people. This massive population is unemployed. And it’s a bit like a game of monopoly, what’s happened is that the really, really wealthy have controlled the whole monopoly board and till all the other players have run out of money. They are going around the board and they land in on the expensive railway stations, and hotels and they don’t have money to play.

Unfortunately, when the players run out of money, even the truly wealthy have to go down with the ship. And this sickness in Europe & America is going to cause a great crash ahead; there are books on it if you really take the time to research it. And I am going to talk about it a lot this year because there are things that can be done but we have to be a bit contrarium.

Here’s a book by Thom Hartman, The Crash of 2016. He’s predicting it and he tells us why, it’s all set out in great reasoning and historical accuracy but the truly wealthy, the Billionaires, the big corporate entities are doing things differently. They are holding their money, they are putting it elsewhere, they are putting it offshore and they are investing differently. They are playing on the sidelines, and we too can run in their slip streams if we play our cards right.

So what the future holds in store this year may not be doing what everybody else is doing. It is doing things differently, it is preparing truly wealthy because those who embrace change, those who ride the wave of change are going to come out on top and unfortunately, if everybody else is going to go down with the ship. So be prepared, get ready for 2014 and do your homework, go where the smart money is going. Don’t go with the masses.

Happy investing and let’s talk more in 2014.

Hi I’m Cherie from Renovating for Profit.

Did you know that there are sixty things that you should research on a property before you buy? Yes you heard right, sixty things. Today I’m going to give you one of the research tasks that you want to do before you actually sign any contract of sale.

Now that one thing that I’m going to show with you today is called, a council search. You can do a council search either on the phone or going to council and just walk to the customer service counter and it takes about five minutes and asks this key questions. The first one is, “What is the zoning of this property?”. And ideally most of you are buying what’s called residential zoning. Can you tell me; Is the property in a heritage and conservation suburb? These are suburbs where that council has stricter development controls, so it is good to know this before you start any renovation project. Can you tell me, Is this property heritage listed? Not all heritage listed properties made their bad deals, I’ve certainly bought a heritage listed property in the past and made fantastic money in renovating. Can you tell me, Is this property in a flood prone zone? Don’t think that old bad properties are that incur flooding are on terrible sites. Okay, now the key question, Can you tell me, is this property in a bush fire prone zone?

You can have a little reserve at the back of your property, a little creek and that can dim your property to be a bush fire prone zone that instantly wipes out any development potential and this is really important if you are doing structure renovation. Another question, Can you tell me, Is there any known land contamination in this area? Councils can piece together sometimes have this information systems of where sites are contaminated, this is really important if you doing a structure renovation for mediation cost can be quite expensive. Can you tell me, have there been any development applications or building permits lodge on this property from the past? Do you think people un sell their property when they cannot get what they want to do totheir property approved by council? We want to make sure we are never buying lemons. And probably the most important I want to ask you is, can you tell me, have any of the neighboring properties been approved for development. Again, a lot of people, if they know there is something bad is going to be built close to their property they will quickly put that property on the market and hope to sell it.

So these are the key questions you want to ask, if you can do this you have a much better chance of weeding out the lemons, the good deals from the bad.

I’m Cherie from Renovating for profit, see you again soon.

Hi, Daniel Kertcher, CEO and Founder of Trading Pursuits, and welcome to the monthly market review for January 2014.

Now before I get started there are just a couple of quick little points I need to share with you. Number 1, what you hear in this presentation is what we call General Advice; it is not individual specific advice. Furthermore, we have taken consideration your personal financial objectives. Trading involves risk, past returns does not mean you will get the same in the future. And finally, our company, Trading Pursuits with holds an Australian Financial Services License.

Okay, we’ve had some interesting news over the past month or so, first thing is that you see the SP 500 the big top 500 in America they’ve recently hit their All-time Record high of just shy of 850 points. Now this is come on the back of the announcement by the Federal Reserve. Now, Ben Bernanke at his last speech as the Chairman of Federal Reserve before he stands down this coming month. And now said, they are actually going to reduce their bond buying program. For the last two years David was called two in three or quantity of easing three. And that is where they spend 85 Billion dollars per month of new money they create in order to buy mortgage back securities and US government bonds. They actually announce that they are going to; actually it has already started to reduce their 85 Billion dollar bond buying program back down to 75 Billion dollars per month. Now, they importantly stressed though that they’d see no end to stimulus any time soon. In other words, they plan to continue printing more money and continue to buying mortgage back bonds and government bonds in order to help stimulate he overall economy. The initial goal is to keep doing this until unemployment got down to 6.5 percent but they now stated that they will continue the stimulus program even once unemployment  gets down to 6.5 percent or less so long as inflation remains below 2 percent. The Federal Reserve is quite concerned about a low inflation environment as the inflation beefed up to over 2 percent. Not now more than 3 or 4 percent so they wanted to keep it in that happy range between 2 to 3 percent and now keeps stimulating and printing money until it actually happens.

Now, we can see here that US unemployment has high surge, the unemployment rate has now dropped down to 7%the lowest level we’ve seen in over the past five years. So, good news for the US employment market. We can also see that ISM manufacturing this is the index of manufacturing in America now up at 57. This is one of the highest levels we’ve seen in the past five years and what it represents is that manufacturing in America is expanding. So a very strong bullish sign for the US economy.

If we look at the Baltic Dry Shipping Index is an index of the cost of shipping raw materials across various oceans. You see though it has surged just recently, in fact up to the highest levels it’s been in the past five years. So this means that the cost of shipping particularly across the pacific is much higher than they’ve been many years now. And this gives us an indication that the amount that is being shipped internationally is growing, hence again another bullish sign for the overall economy.

With the strong economic data it’s no surprise though that Gold has been falling down and has been languishing down pretty much a production cost for the past few months. In fact around 1240 dollars an ounce. Typically an average where it cost most go producers go today to produce Gold so there is not much profit in it for Gold miners these days. Again, there’s a strong economic data coming in the United States coming has been flowing on ti the US property market and we can see that new home sales in America had been raising. Now there are still nowhere near the highs back in the previous years but however they are raising which again a bullish sign for the overall[...]

Hi I’m Cherie Barber from Renovating for Profit. Now as an experienced renovator, one of the most common questions I’m asked by people new to the renovating game is: “How do you find good trades people?” Now, what I can tell you is that ninety five percent of Tradies out there are great, honest, genuine blokes, who generally want to do the right thing by you when they’re doing works for you. But no doubt, there are definitely some cowboys out there. So here are a couple of my top tips from weeding out the good from the bad: first of all, always make sure you speak to personal friends, families, get personal recommendations for trades people. So, ask around. Have you used a tradesperson? How were they? Did they finish on time? Did they finish on budget? Did they charge you any variations? This is one way to find definite good trades people by people you’d know and trust. Second thing is that if you do have to find the tradesperson, cold-calling so to speak, from the newspaper, the internet, then there’s a couple to things that you want to do. First of all, you wanna make sure that you check their license online. There is a website called www.licenserecognition.gov.au and you can go online and actually find out a lot about trades people in that regard. What you want to do is, a lot of trades people will supply (if you ask) three references. Now I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to go and see three references. The most important question is (asking the tradesperson): “Can I go and see the job that you are currently working on right now? If they have no job to show you, alarm bells would start ringing for me. So go and see their current work, on the current job they are working on, and go and speak to the owners. And just say, the owners you know, quiet word, how did you find the tradie, are they good, did they have done what they say they would? It’s just one way to weed out the good from the bad.

Now, always when you’re sourcing trades people, make sure you get three quotes. This is really important if you don’t know what the cost of the work should be as well. If you get one quote, what have you got to benchmark it against? So as a general rule of thumb, get a minimum of three. And for big ticket items, like windows and doors, you can even get up to ten quotes. The more, the better. And, this is one way to avoid you, being ripped off.

Now, potentially you’ve got a couple of tradies you’re thinking about hiring. Couple of key steps you can take to weed out the good from the bad: the first question you wanna to say is, “Are you licensed?” Each trades person in Australia needs to have an appropriate license for their work. And of course, tradies are gonna say “Yes, I’m licensed.” Don’t trust that. Go one step further and say, “Can I physically cite your license in person?” So when they hand that license to you, make sure that the person on that license is actually the same person standing in front of you. Check their name, to the name that they actually got. I have been caught up on this in the past where people have actually given me the licenses of other people. So don’t always trust what people say to you.

The second key thing you want to check is their insurance. Each tradesperson needs to have what’s called a Public Liability Insurance, to safeguard them against any accidents that happen on site. Now what I can tell you is that a lot of trades people like any occupation, live day-to-day, week-to-week. And these insurance policies can be thousands upon thousands of dollars. So of course a tradesperson is going to say to you, “Yes, I’m insured.” Again, you want to go one step further and actually cite a copy of their insurance policy. What I can tell you is that I’ve asked this question over the years and many times and said to trades people, “Are you insured?” And they say, yes, yes, yes. And then when you actually go and ask them to cite a copy, they all suddenly can’t find their insurance policy or they come to you an[...]

Daniel Kertcher – Stock Market Update November 2013

Hi! Daniel Kertcher, CEO and Founder of Trading Pursuits, and welcome to the monthly market review for November 2013. Now before I get started, there’s just a couple of quick points I need to share with you. Number one, what you are hearing in this presentation is what we call General Advice. It’s not individual, specific advice. Furthermore, we haven’t taken into consideration your own personal financial objectives. Trading involves risk. Past returns do not mean we’ll get the same in the future. And finally, my company- Trading Pursuits, we hold an Australian financial services license.

Okay. Now this particular month has been quite exciting. As you can see from this graph of the S&P 500, this of course is the top 500 companies in America. You can see how it’s reaching all-new high of 1,790 points. It smashed right through 750 points from last month and has rallied up, getting very close to 1,800.

Now, what’s been fuelling this big growth? Well, number one just like I’ve been saying in the past couple of months if you’ve watched the previous videos, is that Janet Yellen, who is now looking (set to be) the next chairperson of the Federal Reserve, she has publicly come out in the last few days and she has been supporting and defending the Quantitative Easing Program, or the money printing program that America has been doing. And I’ve been saying this for months now that she has a history of supporting that practice and so we’re expecting that practice of money printing to continue for quite some time now. There was some thought and there was certainly market expectation that the Federal Reserve would start to slow down the money printing, by September this year but that now seems to have been completely thrown out the door. And it looks pretty set that Janet Yellen will continue to taper well into 2014. In fact, you can see here that article I downloaded today from the Sydney Morning Herald, talking about there is now no timing to slow down the Quantitative Easing Program. So, Janet Yellen has said in this article and publicly that they will continue, the Federal Reserve will continue to stimulate the economy until they feel that the economic signs are there, the economy can maintain its own momentum. Now, that’s a very vague statement given the fact that the market all the wise, is really performing well.

Here we can see the earnings for the profit and loss statements for the top S&P 500 companies. And this again in one of the most outstandingly profitable quarters for the S&P 500 ever. Here we can see we’re looking at all securities that make up the S&P 500 versus all companies have almost now reported in this past quarter. And you can see here the Sales Surprises; they are reasonably in line with market expectations, about half a percent higher. So that is the number of sales that companies have been making. But more importantly is the earnings- and this is the profit that the companies have been making. And you can see overall, companies have made (the top S&P 500 companies) have made more than four percent more profit than the analysts expected. And, analysts have been consistently under estimating the amount of profit that the companies will be making, quarter after quarter after quarter for the last four and a half – five years. But this particular month, if you have a look down at the earnings schedule there, you’ll see every single sector has outperformed market analyst expectations. So the companies are booming at the moment. They’re making absolutely record profits. And yet despite this, the Federal Reserve seems to be very committed to continue the money printing program.

If you have a look at the bottom graph, you can see the big blue bars, that is the amount of earnings. And you can see this past month has been a very, very strong earnings month.

Now some other things which have helped prompt and drive this[...]

Dominique Grubisa – Possibly The Easiest Strategy Ever

Woody Allen was once asked, the secret of success, and his answer was, “Just turning up” And it’s true, 10 out 10 times for me and what I say for my students in the real estate business. All you guys need to do is turn up.

Many people get stuck behind computers doing online research, talking to agents or people, reading news papers’ stories and saying, markets too hard, market’s too scary. I’ll never get a deal in this market. And suddenly it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whereas, if you just turn up things happen. As If by magic. I have seen people do fantastic deals just by being amongst it. You can never predict the path that it will take, you can never set out in stone and say I’m going to follow steps, 1 2 3 4 5. And this is where it will lead to.

What you can do it take step 1 and step 2. and let things flow from there. Martin Luther King said, you didn’t need to see the staircase only the first step. And all you have to do guys is just turn up.

I’ve had people do deals from turning up early for another inspection saying I’ve got 15 minutes to kill, seeing a sign and going and having a look at that property. Had another guy who went to take his car to a repair and there’s an auction going on, went across and started bidding. And got the deal of the decade.

As I say to everyone in real estate, the deal of the decade comes along once a week. In any market, good times, bad times, any time.

And to jump on the deal of the decade be the early bird that gets the worm or all you have to do, Just turn up.