The problem? I think it is because I hold more than one stock. Back when I only held and traded one stock at a time I was able to keep a close eye on performance and develop a deep understanding of how the stock traded on a daily basis. I could develop almost a 6th sense of when the stock was going to break-out to the upside, or continue a slow steady decline. Once you start creating a “long-term diversified” portfolio, you lose your advantage. It takes too much time to monitor each stock and trade commissions start to eat into your profits.

The point of this blog post? I need to sell all my stocks and go back to trading one stock with a disciplined trading strategy - take small profits, don’t be greedy, and don’t force trades. That is what made me successful in the past. Why I strayed away from this strategy is beyond me…

Darren Rowse declares “I want you to use your personal blog as a launch pad for your dream career. The personal blog is the new resume of the revolutionary.” When I read this, I couldn’t agree more.

He goes on to write, “The revolution is new, but the revolution is real. I invite you to leave the confines of the box everyone lives in and be a revolutionary.”

Please stay tuned to my blog, I have some exciting stuff planned in this area. It is my goal to revolutionize the way students and graduates think about finding jobs and defining their careers.

So, what is next for Facebook? My prediction, and as a developer I can’t wait for this to come, is that Facebook will roll-out its equivalent to Google Adsense, except it won’t really be like Adsense. Imaging this… You have a website built on the Facebook Graph API where users login with their Facebook account. Now imagine that all you need to do in order to get extremely targeted ads on your website is to add a snippet of code. Facebook will then serve up revenue shared ads on your website that are targeted to 1.) everything Facebook knows about the user from their activities on Facebook, 2.) content on your website, and 3.) information that the user has volunteered on your website that you pass on to Facebook’s ad algorithm. Now how is that for convenience and effectiveness as a publisher?

I would image that this is probably coming pretty soon and probably would have been here one or two years ago if Facebook Connect hadn’t been such a flop. Now that Facebook has their new Graph API and 500+ million users, we are going to be seeing a lot more websites allowing users to login with Facebook. I would expect that Facebook will roll out this type of advertising relatively shortly. My time horizon for this feature is 6 - 12 months, and when it gets here - watch out! It’ll certainly be fun to play with as a publisher/developer and will escalate Facebook to a whole new level in terms of online dominance, competing with Google, and revenue figures.

Graham Summers wrote a nice piece on gold-eagle.com titled Will Gold Miners Act Like Stocks or Gold During the Crash? Summers writes that “Since 2000, the HUI Index has rallied more than 500% compared to 340% for Gold bullion over the same time period.” During this same period the S&P 500 has fallen 27%. Looking at this 10 year period it makes sense that gold stocks would outperform the price of gold as the cost to get an ounce of gold out of the ground did not rise as fast as the price of gold.

The story is a little different when you look at the crash of 2008. Summers writes, “In 2008, stocks fell 37%, Gold miners fell 30%, and Gold actually ROSE 5% (despite an extremely volatile year).” It is this type of crash that worries me as an investor in gold miners. In 2008, gold stocks did not perform well because investors on margin were being forced to sell everything to raise capital. Typically when this happens you tend to sell your most profitable investments first, which for these investors were their gold holdings.

Flash Crash vs Slow Gradual Decline

I think that if we experience a quick, sharp decline like we did in 2008 then gold mining stocks will get killed. While they will probably still outperform the S&P 500, they will still get killed nonetheless. However, if we have a slow, gradual decline then it is very likely that gold miners will perform extremely well. Personally, I hate to be right about an economic trend, but fail to properly play my cards correctly. Here is how I would play this going forward.

How to hedge gold mining stocks for the coming collapse

The best way to hedge this is going to be to short the stock market. Personally, I think the best way to do this is to take a position in FAZ. FAZ is a financial bear ETF that is leveraged 3 times, so if financial stocks drop 2% in a day, FAZ will theoretically be up 6% on the day. The reason I think that shorting the financials is the right way to play this is because I think financials are currently the most overvalued industry and will be the sector hit the hardest in the event of another economic collapse.

Here is my strategy with different scenarios…

Scenario: Stock market slowly climbs higher

If this happens, the price of gold will continue to do well and gold mining stocks will outperform. FAZ will fall, but your losses in your small hedge position in FAZ will be offset by outstanding performance in the gold miners.

Scenario: Stock market moves sideways with volatile swings

In this case, gold miners will likely still outperform the S&P 500. You will want to be trading FAZ as it will have the ability to move 5-10% in a single day. Anytime FAZ drops more than 5% in a day, you should buy a small position. If it goes up more than 5%, take your profit and wait for the next 5% drop. The idea here is to not hold FAZ long term in a sideways market, but to use the volatile swings to trade. You also should only start to take small positions, don’t go “all in” on a single 5% drop as this is a way to get burned very quickly. If FAZ continues to drop, it means the stock market is going up, so hopefully your gold miners are also doing well. In a large stock market rally, you should consider taking some of your gold profits and add to FAZ at depressed prices.

Scenario: Stock market crashes in a sharp decline

If the stock markets crashes, you will profit handsomely with your FAZ position. However, in a sharp decline in the stock market it is likely that your gold mining stocks will probably drop as well. DO NOT SELL THESE STOCKS AT A LOSS. Instead you will want to slowly sell your FAZ position at a 50-100% profit and buy more of your gold miners at depressed prices. In 2008, gold stocks rebounded extremely fast after the initial collapse.

Scenario: Stock market slowly declines overtime

A slow, steady stock market decline is probably unlikely in this economic environment, but if this were to occur it is my opinion that gold mining stocks will still perform well an increase in price and FAZ will also do well.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this strategy - comments welcome…

Use Ctrl + Page Down to go to the next tab in Firefox. Use Ctrl + Page Up to go to the previous tab in Firefox.

Also, another neat trick is that if you know the position of the tab in Firefox that you want to switch to you can use Ctrl + Tab Number. For example Ctrl + 3, which will bring you to the third tab in your Firefox window.

Yes, it is that easy and hopefully this tip will allow you to work a little faster and more efficiently. After all, ever second you save when you are working can be used to relax.

You are probably thinking that in your day-to-day activities that you don’t have many repetitive tasks, and I thought the same thing when I first discovered iMacros. But after learning different ways to use the iMacros plugin and being a little creative, I have been able to discover several tasks that I can save several hours each day with iMacros. iMacros has a great wiki and by spending a little time learning and experimenting I have been able to learn how to run loops from Microsoft Excel files and also to execute copy and pastes by saving what I copy as a variable and then using the variable later in the iMacro script. When you start to get your feet wet with iMacros you really start to see how powerful this plugin really is.

Your probably thinking that from my enthusiasm for iMacros that I am going to insert an affiliate link at the end of this blog post, but it is completely free and I have nothing to gain. I just think that iMacros should be part of everyone’s arsenal of tools when working online.

Instead of just linking to your Twitter profile and asking people to come follow you, I suggest that you use a more direct approach. Use a link that looks like this:

http://twitter.com/home?status=@andrewnadeau

But of course replace “andrewnadeau” with your own Twitter ID. This link is going to link directly to that person’s “What are you doing?” box, and already have @andrewnadeau filled in. It will look like this…

You will want to say something like “Send me a message on Twitter” rather than just “Follow me on Twitter” when using this type of link. This makes your message much more personal and encourages your visitor to take the initiative to make contact with you. It will then be up to you to make a personalized response to their initial contact. Once you have exchanged messages you now have a more personal connection with this person and they are more likely to engage in your Twitter posts later on. This is a much better result then just having someone passively follow you and never really build a personal relationship.

So lets give this a try…

Send me a message on Twitter!

I promise to send you a message back on Twitter.

#1 Way to SEO Your WordPress Blog

By default WordPress does not optimize your URLs for the search engines. Look at the URL of one of your blog posts. It might look like http://www.andrewnadeau.com/?p=329. The problem with this URL is the ?p=329 part. Google gives extra weight to pages that have the main keywords in the URL, so as a blogger you are missing out on huge brownie points from Google by not optimizing your URLs. For example, the URL for this blog post is http://andrewnadeau.com/1-way-to-seo-a-wordpress-blog. Google will give extra weight, and therefore rank my page higher in their results, for anyone searching “SEO a WordPress Blog” or a combination of those keywords.

How to SEO Your WordPress Blog’s URLs

In your WordPress Admin Panel click on “Settings”, “Permalinks”, and then click the “Custom Structure” radio button. In the “Custom Structure” you will want to type /%postname%/ and you are done. It is really that easy to do. WordPress will now automatically convert your blog post URLs to URLs that are optimized for the search engines.

Pretty cool, huh? A very useful feature of Dropbox is that it allows you to share a folder with another user and your folder and files will automatically update in their Dropbox folder. This is extremely useful if you are working on a collaborative project with someone else. It makes file sharing very easy and efficient, so you don’t have to send files back and forth through email. Dropbox even saves previous revisions online. If you need a quick and easy file sharing and backup method then I highly suggest you check out Dropbox.