SaibaWorld

From Banks to Crypto Exchanges, What Happens to Your Money?

2023-04-08T16:17:00.027+01:00

From banks to crypto exchanges, there's lots that can happen when you transfer money to a custodian. But if you think the job of a bank is to store your cash, you might be in for a surprise. In simple terms, here's our explainer about what happens to your money when you transfer it to a bank or to a (good!) crypto exchange.

In this article:
What happens when you transfer money to a bank
What happens when you move money to a (good!) crypto exchange?
Putting your crypto to work, in your own terms

So, what happens to your money when you move it either to a bank or a cryptocurrency exchange, such as OKX?

What happens when you transfer money to a bank

Deposits are not always what they seem

To keep things super simple, a bank's primary role is to act as an intermediary between depositors and borrowers. It does that by pooling funds from individuals or entities that deposit money and then lending these funds to entities who need loans.

The amount banks pay for deposits and the income they receive on their loans are both called interest. The interest they charge their borrowers on loans is normally higher than the interest they pay back to depositors. The difference between the two, known as the Net Interest Margin, is meant to be positive and generate a net profit for the bank.

So, when you deposit money into a bank account, you basically become that bank's creditor. And just like any other borrower, banks expect to repay their loans over time, but typically not all at once. This means that when there's a crisis of confidence, when the depositors are afraid the bank might not be able to repay in time what they owe them, a sudden, unexpected spike in withdrawals can happen. That's called a 'bank run'.

To prevent bank runs and the effect they might have on the economy at large, a set amount of everyone's deposits is now usually insured by local financial authorities. Due to the recent banking crisis in the U.S., the question of when this insurance gets triggered, what amount it covers, and what its long term effects on banks' incentives are has become a matter of intense controversy.

How bank loans work

When you apply for a loan at a bank, you're asking to borrow money. Therefore, the bank will review your creditworthiness and loan repayment ability. If you're approved, the bank will lend you the money with an agreement to pay it back with interest. This interest is the bank's profit from providing the loan.

Loans can come in many forms, such as personal loans, mortgages, or business loans, and each has its terms and conditions. The bank typically requires collateral or a credit check to secure the loan and reduce risk. Repayment schedules and interest rates can vary depending on the type of loan and the borrower's creditworthiness. When it comes to borrowing, you should consider the terms of a loan and ensure that you can afford to make the payments before agreeing to borrow money from a bank.

See the parallel now? Depending on how much your deposit is insured, it can more or less resemble a loan – except you're the loaner! In cases like this, it can make sense to think like banks do when they evaluate their customers' creditworthiness and evaluate how much risk the deposit might come with.

What happens when you move money to a (good!) crypto exchange?

Trading is the main activity people use exchanges for, but it's not the only choice you have. When moving money to a crypto exchange, you can decide between at least three other options:

Keeping it on the exchange (third-party custody)
Storing it yourself (self-custody)
Putting it to work (staking)

What's the difference between third-party custody and self-custody?

In crypto people sometimes speak of custodial versus non-custodial wallets but that's misleading. "Custody" really means storage, so all crypto wallets are custodial. The question is: Who does the custody/storage of the wallet's private keys?

So it's better, instead, to distinguish between third-party custody and self-custody:

Third-party custody means delegating custody of one's funds to someone else
Self-custody means managing the custody oneself

Each of these two options comes with different benefits and tradeoffs.

Third-party custody
When you let tokens sit on an exchange, you task the exchange with running a wallet to hold and manage your crypto on your behalf. In this case, you don't have control over that wallet's private keys – and the exchange is responsible for securing your assets. This means your funds might be exposed to counterparty risks, such as hacks, bugs, or other incidents putting your assets in jeopardy.

Self-custody
With a self-custody wallet, on the other hand, you have sole ownership of your private keys, giving you full control over your assets. Self-custody wallets also usually require little to no personal information, which better protects your financial privacy. With great power, however, comes great responsibility: If you lose your private keys and seedphrase, it might be very difficult to recover access to your funds.

How much of one's crypto stash to put into third-party custody or into self-custody will therefore heavily depend on everyone's specific circumstances – there's no one-size-fits-all solution!

Putting your crypto to work, in your own terms

Contrary to banks, (good!) crypto exchanges will offer you the option to simply store your funds, without investing or loaning them. They should only put your assets to work if you explicitly ask them to.

Image credit: CER

Oftentimes, the option they will offer will revolve around staking. In very simple terms, staking means holding a certain amount of tokens in order to participate in its blockchain's consensus mechanism. By holding tokens, stakers help secure the network and can earn additional tokens as a reward. Staking is often seen as a more affordable way to participate in protocols than mining, which requires expensive hardware and high electricity costs.

Staking, however, like other ways to put money to work, comes with risks: The protocol might face a technical issue, the price of the token might dip, and more. So the decision of staking or not must be made with the knowledge of the risk profile of the asset, its blockchain, etc. In turn, whether to stake and how much should also hinge on all the other relevant specifics of your situation, such as how much of your portfolio is in crypto, what amount of risk you want to take, etc.

In short: Putting money to work always involves some degree of risk and crypto's great innovation is to allow you to clearly decide how much risk you want to take. This is why crypto exchanges like OKX and Binance are doubling down their efforts to bring financial education to everyone, so the customers they serve can choose the options that best fit their needs – and only take the risks they're comfortable taking.

Risk Reminder: Trading stocks, derivatives, cryptocurrency, foreign exchange and/or contracts for differences on margin, or other negotiable securities carry some level of risk and may not be suitable for all investors. The possibility exists that you could sustain a loss in excess of your deposited funds. Before deciding to trade the products discussed on this page, you should carefully consider your objectives, financial situation, needs and level of experience. You should be aware of all the risks associated with trading and investing. SaibaWorld provides general advice that does not consider your objectives, financial situation or needs. The content of this Website must not be construed as personal advice or financial advise. If you have no or low appetite for risk, SaibaWorld recommends you seek advice from a financial advisor. See site disclaimer.

The above article is reproduced from an original on OKX.

HODLing in Cryptocurrency and Stocks: What Investors Need to Know

2022-01-31T08:25:00.016+01:00

HODL is a term commonly used by cryptocurrency investors who refuse to sell their cryptocurrency regardless of the price increasing or decreasing. It is more frequently used during a bear market when people refuse to sell their coins despite the price drop.

HODL was derived from a misspelling of "hold," in the context of buying and holding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. HODL was later retrofitted to be an acronym (backronym) for “Hold On for Dear Life” and refers to not selling, even during strong market volatility and poor market performance.

In this article:
Origin of HODL
HODL as an Investment Strategy and Philosophy
Can You HODL Stocks?
HODL Frequently Asked Questions
Key Takeaways and Learning

Origin of HODL

The term HODL (or hodl) originated as a spelling mistake in 2013 with a post to the Bitcointalk forum. The price of Bitcoin in 2013 was volatile, surging to over $1,100 at the beginning of December, 2013, up from just over $100 in April of the same year.

In the original BitcoinTalk thread at 10:03 a.m. UTC on Dec. 18, Bitcointalk forum user GameKyuubi posted "I AM HODLING"—a drunk, semi-coherent, typo-laden rant about his poor trading skills and determination to simply hold his Bitcoin from that point on. GameKyuubi wrote:

"I type d that tyitle twice because I knew it was wrong the first time. Still wrong. w/e. GF's out at a lesbian bar, BTC crashing WHY AM I HOLDING? I'LL TELL YOU WHY. It's because I'm a bad trader and I KNOW I'M A BAD TRADER. Yeah you good traders can spot the highs and the lows pit pat piffy wing wong wang just like that and make a millino bucks sure no problem bro."

GameKyuubi had concluded that the best course was to hold, since:

"You only sell in a bear market if you are a good day trader or an illusioned noob. The people inbetween hold. In a zero-sum game such as this, traders can only take your money if you sell."

He then confessed he'd had some whiskey and briefly mused about the spelling of whisk(e)y.

Within an hour, "HODL" had become a meme, and there are now countless HODL memes floating around the internet. HODL has since become a strategy used by people who admit they do not have the skills to do short-term trades - such as scalping, day trading, or swing trading. The term HODL has also inspired the creation of a similar term often, BUIDL, which is commonly used by the cryptocurrency community to refer to the many kinds of applications that are being built within the blockchain industry.

HODL as an Investment Strategy and Philosophy

HODL, as an acronym for "hold on for dear life," has become a mantra among crypto enthusiasts denoting a long-term approach to cryptocurrency investing. This approach mirrors GameKyuubi's rationale in the original post that novice traders are likely to botch their attempts to time the market, and should simply hold their coin.

For cryptocurrency maximalists, HODL represents more than a strategy for reigning in FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), and other profit-eroding emotions. Long-term crypto HODLers stay invested because they believe that cryptocurrencies will eventually replace government-issued fiat currencies as the basis of all economic structures. Should that occur, then the exchange rates between cryptocurrencies and fiat money would become irrelevant to crypto holders.

Predictably, a meme best captures this HODL maximalist philosophy. Neo from The Matrix asks Morpheus, "What are you trying to tell me, that I can trade my Bitcoin for millions someday?" Morpheus responds, "No Neo, I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready … you won't have to."

Can You HODL Stocks?

While HODLing is generally associated with cryptocurrency investors, the buy-and-hold investing strategy that it represents is not limited to crypto investing.

Many stock investors "HODL" their investments for long periods of time, although stock prices are almost always less volatile than the prices of crypto assets. Investors in stocks who buy and hold can benefit from long-term price appreciation while experiencing much less price volatility than is associated with cryptocurrencies.

HODL Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean to HODL?

"HODL" originated as a misspelling of "HOLD" (written in all caps), in an online post by an early Bitcoin investor. But "HODL", as it has gained popularity among crypto enthusiasts, has come to mean "hold on for dear life". Crypto HODLers, like buy-and-hold stock investors, pride themselves on "holding on" by not selling their cryptocurrency, no matter what happens in the crypto markets.

What is the HODL coin?

HODL ($HODL) is a cryptocurrency that was named based on the popularity of "HODL" as an expression in the crypto community. The HODL token operates using the Binance Smart Chain, and HODL token owners can earn Binance Coin rewards.

Who said HODL?

The true identity is unknown of the person who inadvertently coined the term "HODL". The original misspelling of the word occurred in a post by the user "GameKyuubi" on the Bitcointalk.org online forum, at 10:03 a.m. UTC on Dec. 18, 2013.

Key Takeaways and Learning

Key Takeaways:

HODL originated in 2013 as a spelling mistake of the word "hold" after GameKyuub, an unknown user on the Bitcointalk forum, had had some whiskey.
The prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are notoriously volatile, but HODLers disregard even large price swings. They simply HODL.
The HODLing investment strategy is not limited to crypto alone, investors in stocks also buy and hold their stock assets for long periods of time for price appreciation.

Currency Pairs in Forex Trading

2022-01-27T08:39:00.120+01:00

Currency quotations use abbreviations for currencies that are prescribed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in standard ISO 4217. The major currencies and their designation in the foreign exchange market are the US dollar (USD), Euro (EUR), Japanese yen (JPY), British pound (GBP), Australian dollar (AUD), Canadian dollar (CAD), and the Swiss franc (CHF).

The quotation EUR/USD 1.2500 (or EURUSD 1.2500) means that one euro is exchanged for 1.2500 US dollars. If the quote changes from EUR/USD 1.2500 (or EURUSD 1.2500) to 1.2510, the euro has increased in relative value by 10 pips (Percentage in point) , because either the dollar buying strength has weakened or the euro has strengthened, or both. On the other hand, if the EUR/USD (or EURUSD) quote changes from 1.2500 to 1.2490 the euro has become relatively weaker than the dollar.

In this article:
What Is a Currency Pair?
Understanding Currency Pairs
Major Currency Pairs
Minors and Exotic Pairs
Key Learning and Takeaway

What Is a Currency Pair?

A currency pair is the quotation of two different currencies, with the value of one currency being quoted against the other. The first listed currency of a currency pair is called the base currency, and the second currency is called the quote currency.

Currency pairs compare the value of one currency to another—the base currency (or the first one) versus the second or the quote currency. It indicates how much of the quote currency is needed to purchase one unit of the base currency. Currencies are identified by an ISO currency code, or the three-letter alphabetic code they are associated with on the international market. So, for the U.S. dollar, the ISO code would be USD.

Understanding Currency Pairs

Trading currency pairs is conducted in the foreign exchange market, also known as the forex market. It is the largest and most liquid market in the financial world. This market allows for the buying, selling, exchanging, and speculation of currencies. It also enables the conversion of currencies for international trade and investment. The forex market is open 24 hours a day, five days a week (including most holidays), and sees a huge amount of trading volume.

All forex trades involve the simultaneous purchase of one currency and sale of another, but the currency pair itself can be thought of as a single unit—an instrument that is bought or sold. When you buy a currency pair from a forex broker, you buy the base currency and sell the quote currency. Conversely, when you sell the currency pair, you sell the base currency and receive the quote currency.

Currency pairs are quoted based on their bid (buy) and ask (sell) prices. The bid price is the price that the forex broker will buy the base currency from you in exchange for the quote or counter currency. The ask—also called the offer—is the price that the broker will sell you the base currency in exchange for the quote or counter currency.

When trading currencies, you're selling one currency to buy another. Conversely, when trading commodities or stocks, you're using cash to buy a unit of that commodity or a number of shares of a particular stock. Economic data relating to currency pairs, such as interest rates and economic growth or gross domestic product (GDP), affect the prices of a trading pair.

Major Currency Pairs

A widely traded currency pair is the euro against the U.S. dollar or shown as EUR/USD. In fact, it is the most liquid currency pair in the world because it is the most heavily traded. The quotation EUR/USD = 1.2500 means that one euro is exchanged for 1.2500 U.S. dollars. In this case, EUR is the base currency and USD is the quote currency (counter currency). This means that 1 euro can be exchanged for 1.25 U.S. dollars. Another way of looking at this is that it will cost you $125 to buy 100 euros.

There are as many currency pairs as there are currencies in the world. The total number of currency pairs that exist changes as currencies come and go. All currency pairs are categorized according to the volume that is traded on a daily basis for a pair.

The currencies that trade the most volume against the U.S. dollar are referred to as the major currencies, which include:

EUR/USD or the Euro vs. the U.S. dollar
USD/JPY or dollar vs. the Japenese yen
GBP/USD or the British pound vs. the dollar
USD/CHF or the Swiss franc vs. the dollar
AUD/USD or the Australian dollar vs. the U.S. dollar
USD/CAD or the Canadian dollar vs. the U.S. dollar

The final two currency pairs are known as commodity currencies because both Canada and Australia are rich in commodities and both countries are affected by their prices. The major currency pairs tend to have the most liquid markets and trade 24 hours a day Monday through Thursday. The currency markets open on Sunday night and close on Friday at 5 p.m. U.S. Eastern time.

Minors and Exotic Pairs

Currency pairs that are not associated with the U.S. dollar are referred to as minor currencies or crosses. These pairs have slightly wider spreads and are not as liquid as the majors, but they are sufficiently liquid markets nonetheless. The crosses that trade the most volume are among the currency pairs in which the individual currencies are also majors. Some examples of crosses include the EUR/GBP, GBP/JPY, and EUR/CHF.

Exotic currency pairs include currencies of emerging markets. These pairs are not as liquid, and the spreads are much wider. An example of an exotic currency pair is the USD/SGD (U.S. dollar/Singapore dollar) ot the USD/NGN (U.S. dollar/Nigerian Naira).

Key Learning and Takeaway

Key take aways:

A currency pair is a price quote of the exchange rate for two different currencies traded in FX markets.
When an order is placed for a currency pair, the first listed currency or base currency is bought while the second listed currency in a currency pair or quote currency is sold.
The EUR/USD currency pair is considered the most liquid currency pair in the world. The USD/JPY is the second most popular currency pair in the world.

In a previous article we discussed the topic, 'How International Exchange Rates Are Set' (see link below). The next topic will discuss the concept of 'Percentage In Point (PIP)'.

« International rates PIPs »

Risk Reminder: Trading foreign exchange and/or contracts for differences on margin carries a high level of risk and may not be suitable for all investors. The possibility exists that you could sustain a loss in excess of your deposited funds. Before deciding to trade the products discussed on this page, you should carefully consider your objectives, financial situation, needs and level of experience. You should be aware of all the risks associated with trading on margin. SaibaWorld provides general advice that does not consider your objectives, financial situation or needs. The content of this Website must not be construed as personal advice. If you have no or low appetite for high risk, SaibaWorld recommends you seek advice from a financial advisor. See site disclaimer.

Source:
The above article is reproduced from an original on Investopedia.

Forex: How International Exchange Rates Are Set

2022-01-25T19:08:00.038+01:00

International currency exchange rates display how much one unit of a currency can be exchanged for another currency. Currency exchange rates can be floating, in which case they change continually based on a multitude of factors, or they can be pegged (or fixed) to another currency, in which case they still float, but they move in tandem with the currency to which they are pegged.

Knowing the value of a home currency in relation to different foreign currencies helps investors to analyze assets priced in foreign dollars. For example, for a U.S. investor, knowing the dollar to euro exchange rate is valuable when selecting European investments. A declining U.S. dollar could increase the value of foreign investments just as an increasing U.S. dollar value could hurt the value of his/her foreign investments.

In this article:
Floating vs. Fixed Exchange Rates
Factors That Influence Exchange Rates
Macro Factors
Forex and Commodities
Maintaining Rates
Key Learning and Takeaways

Floating vs. Fixed Exchange Rates

Currency prices can be determined in two main ways: a floating rate or a fixed rate. A floating rate is determined by the open market through supply and demand on global currency markets. Therefore, if the demand for the currency is high, the value will increase. If demand is low, this will drive that currency price lower. Of course, several technical and fundamental factors will determine what people perceive is a fair exchange rate and alter their supply and demand accordingly.

The currencies of most of the world's major economies were allowed to float freely following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system between 1968 and 1973. Therefore, most exchange rates are not set but are determined by on-going trading activity in the world's currency markets.

Factors That Influence Exchange Rates

Floating rates are determined by the market forces of supply and demand. How much demand there is in relation to supply of a currency will determine that currency's value in relation to another currency. For example, if the demand for U.S. dollars by Europeans increases, the supply-demand relationship will cause an increase in the price of the U.S. dollar in relation to the euro. There are countless geopolitical and economic announcements that affect the exchange rates between two countries, but a few of the most common include interest rate changes, unemployment rates, inflation reports, gross domestic product numbers, manufacturing data, and commodities.

A fixed or pegged rate is determined by the government through its central bank. The rate is set against another major world currency (such as the U.S. dollar, euro, or yen). To maintain its exchange rate, the government will buy and sell its own currency against the currency to which it is pegged. Some countries that choose to peg their currencies to the U.S. dollar include China and Saudi Arabia.

Short-term moves in a floating exchange rate currency reflect speculation, rumors, disasters, and everyday supply and demand for the currency. If supply outstrips demand that currency will fall, and if demand outstrips supply that currency will rise. Extreme short-term moves can result in intervention by central banks, even in a floating rate environment. Because of this, while most major global currencies are considered floating, central banks and governments may step in if a nation's currency becomes too high or too low.

A currency that is too high or too low could affect the nation's economy negatively, affecting trade and the ability to pay debts. The government or central bank will attempt to implement measures to move their currency to a more favorable price.

Macro Factors

More macro factors also affect exchange rates. The 'Law of One Price' dictates that in a world of international trade, the price of a good in one country should equal the price in another. This is called purchasing price parity (PPP). If prices get out of whack, the interest rates in a country will shift—or else the exchange rate will between currencies. Of course, reality doesn't always follow economic theory, and due to several mitigating factors, the law of one price does not often hold in practice. Still, interest rates and relative prices will influence exchange rates.

Another macro factor is the geopolitical risk and the stability of a country's government. If the government is not stable, the currency in that country is likely to fall in value relative to more developed, stable nations.

Forex and Commodities

Generally, the more dependent a country is on a primary domestic industry, the stronger the correlation between the national currency and the industry's commodity prices.

There is no uniform rule for determining what commodities a given currency will be correlated with and how strong that correlation will be. However, some currencies provide good examples of commodity-forex relationships.

Consider that the Canadian dollar is positively correlated to the price of oil. Therefore, as the price of oil goes up, the Canadian dollar tends to appreciate against other major currencies. This is because Canada is a net oil exporter; when oil prices are high, Canada tends to reap greater revenues from its oil exports giving the Canadian dollar a boost on the foreign exchange market.

Another good example is the Australian dollar, which is positively correlated with gold. Because Australia is one of the world's biggest gold producers, its dollar tends to move in unison with price changes in gold bullion. Thus, when gold prices rise significantly, the Australian dollar will also be expected to appreciate against other major currencies.

Maintaining Rates

Some countries may decide to use a pegged exchange rate that is set and maintained artificially by the government. This rate will not fluctuate intraday and may be reset on particular dates known as revaluation dates. Governments of emerging market countries often do this to create stability in the value of their currencies. To keep the pegged foreign exchange rate stable, the government of the country must hold large reserves of the currency to which its currency is pegged to control changes in supply and demand.

Key Learning and Takeaway

Key Takesaways:

Fixed exchange rate regimes are set to a pre-established peg with another currency or basket of currencies.
A floating exchange rate is one that is determined by supply and demand on the open market as well as macro factors.
A floating exchange rate doesn't mean countries don't try to intervene and manipulate their currency's price, since governments and central banks regularly attempt to keep their currency price favorable for international trade.
Floating exchange rates are the most common and became popular after the failure of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods agreement.

In a previous article we discussed the topic, 'The Basics of Currency Trading' (see link below). The next topic will discuss 'Currency Pairing'.

« Currency Basics Currency Pair »

How to Register and Verify a Binance Account to Buy, Sell, Earn and Grow Cryptocurrency

2022-01-20T17:30:00.078+01:00

If you are an investor or if you are interested in cryptocurrencies, you will need to register a Binance account. Binance is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world with the lowest trading fee today. To register a Binance account is a very easy and streamlined process.

In this article, SaibaWorld discusses how to register a Binance account. After registration, you will need to secure your Binance account and verify KYC for safety and to meet regulatory requirements. Follow steps 1-10 below to register and verify your new Binance account.

For more on the Binance exchange, see Binance: Buy, Earn and Grow Crypto on the World's Largest Crypto Exchange Platform.

1. Begin to register a new Binance Account

First, to begin to register a new Binance account: Click here to Register Binance Account. On the page that appears, click [Register Now] - just like in image below (or click on [Create Personal Account], if that shows up instead).

Click on [Register Now] or on [Create Personal Account], whichever shows up

2. Input your email address and password to create Binance Account

Please follow the on-screen instructions and insert the email address and password that you’ll use for your account. Then, click on [Create account] or on [Next], whichever shows up.

Note: The password must be a combination of numbers and letters which contain at least 8 characters, one UPPER CASE letter, and one number.

Click on [Create Account] or on [Next}, whichever shows up

3. Security Verification

Drag the arrow to the right into the space for it for security verification to validate you're a human, and not a robot.

Drag the arrow into the space for it

4. Input activation code

After that, the system will send a verification code to your email that will be valid for 30 minutes. Please login to your email inbox to check and enter the verification code in time (if you do not see it in inbox, check your spam folder).

Confirm your registration

5. Complete Intermediate Verification

After entering the verification code, the following page will appear to show that you have successfully registered. At this step, Binance informs you that you are required to complete Intermediate Verification to access Binance services. Plus, verify now and get a 500 BUSD Savings Trial Fund Voucher.

Complete Intermediate Verification and get 500 BUSD

6. Select your country at the next screen and start to verify

Personal verification creating new Binance account

After completing personal verification, you will get:

A 500 BUSD Savings Trial Fund Voucher
Fiat Deposit & Withdrawal Limits: $50,000 Daily
Crypto Deposit Limit: Unlimited
Crypto Withdrawal Limit: 100 BTC Daily
P2P Transaction Limits: Unlimited
Other Features: LPD/OTC/Binance card

7. Input personal information

Input Personal Information

Input your address

8. Upload the front page and back page of your ID card to complete Identity Verification

Choose any acceptable government-issued ID document to upload. Binance will give you options of acceptable ID documents.

9. Facial Recognition

Upload your photo

10. Do facial recognition with your smartphone

You now need to install the Binance app into your smartphone: Install Binance App here! After installing Binance App, open the app and scan the QR code that is displayed when you click the [Continue] button at step 9 above. Click on [Start Verification] on your phone and scan your face with your phone.

And then Binance will inform you that your registration is under review and you will receive an email once verification is complete.

Congratulations! You have now completed the process of registering a Binance Account and verifying it!

After creating your new account, you may want to use the Binance app you downloaded on your phone for trading activities on Binance Exchange. Alternatively, you may prefer to use your laptop if you feel more comfortable with that. Both options are good.

Your Binance Account registration is now complete; but you need to patiently wait for Binance to send you an email to confirm your account has been successfully verified so you can start trading on the Binance Exchange!

If you encounter any problems, do not hesitate to write in the 'Comments' section below, so we can help!

Binance: Buy, Sell, Earn and Grow Crypto on the World's Largest Crypto Exchange Platform

2022-01-05T20:06:00.106+01:00

Binance is a cryptocurrency exchange platform, and currently the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies. It was founded in 2017 and registered in the Cayman Islands.

The name "Binance" is a combination of the words "bitcoin" and "finance." It claims high standards of safety and security, with multi-tier and multi-clustered architecture, and delivers high processing throughput—it claims it has the capacity to process around 1.4 million orders per second. Binance supports trading in more than 750 coins, including bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, and its own native BNB tokens.

In this article:
What Is Binance Exchange?
What Is Binance Coin?
How To Register an Account on Binance
Trading on Binance
Other Crypto Services on Binance
A brief history
Key Takeaways

What Is Binance Exchange?

The Binance Exchange is a leading cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2017 in Hong Kong. Binance offers crypto-to-crypto trading in more than 750 cryptocurrencies and virtual tokens, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Dogecoin (DOGE), and its own native token Binance Coin (BNB). In 2018, it moved its company headquarters to Malta, EU, in response to China's strict regulations on crypto exchange businesses.

Primarily known for crypto-to-crypto trading—trading between two cryptocurrency pairs —the Binance exchange has among the lowest transaction fees for cryptocurrency exchanges. It has high liquidity and offers discounts to users who pay in the native BNB cryptocurrency tokens.

What Is Binance Coin?

Binance Coin (BNB) is the platform's internal token (i.e. native token). It is used to facilitate crypto trading on the Binance exchange. The coin was launched during an initial coin offering (ICO) in July 2017. Binance offered 20 million BNB tokens to angel investors, 80 million tokens to the founding team, and the remaining 100 million tokens to the various participants through the ICO process.

Almost half the funds raised during the ICO process were intended to be used for Binance branding and marketing, while around one-third were used to build the Binance platform and perform necessary upgrades to the Binance ecosystem.

Binance Coin runs on the Ethereum blockchain with the ERC 20 standard, and has a cap of 200 million BNB tokens. As of Q1 (early January) 2022, one BNB is worth around $530. It is the third most valuable blockchain-based token by market cap, at roughly $88.7 billion

Registration and Verification on Binance

If you are an investor or if you are interested in cryptocurrencies, you will need to register a Binance account. Binance is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges with the lowest trading fee today. To register a Binance account is a very easy and streamlined process. After registration, you will need to secure your Binance account and verify KYC for convenience and safety when trading.

To register a Binance account now, . For more detailed information regarding how to register and verify an account on Binance, click here.

Trading on Binance

Like other crypto exchanges, Binance offers services around the trading, listing, fundraising, and de-listing or withdrawal of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts willing to launch their own tokens can use Binance for raising funds through initial coin offerings (ICOs). Binance is used by a large number of traders and participants for exchanging and investing in various cryptocurrencies.

To start trading, users have to complete the necessary KYC requirements. Upon successful trading account creation, users can add cryptocurrency funds to their public wallet address, provided by Binance, to start trading, buying and selling, in the markets on Binance - Spot market and Futures market. You can also engage in Margin trading on Binance.

The Binance exchange supports four types of trade orders: limit, market, stop-limit and OCO orders. Limit orders are executed only at the limit price set by the trader. Market orders are executed immediately at the best available market price. Stop limit orders become valid orders only when the price reaches a specified level. OCO (one-cancels-the-other) orders contain a limit order and a stop-limit order. When either of the orders is triggered, the other order is cancelled.

Binance offers an additional five types of orders for crypto derivatives, specifically futures contracts. These trade orders include:

Limit order
Market order
Stop limit order
Stop market order
Trailing stop order
Post only order
Limit TP/SL order

There is no fee charged for cryptocurrency or fund deposits. However, withdrawals do come with a transaction fee that varies depending upon the cryptocurrency and amount.

Other Crypto Services on Binance

In addition to exchange-specific services, Binance also offers other tools, platforms, and services. Some of them are as follows:

Binance Earn is a platform for staking or earning interest by depositing crypto coins with the exchange. Depending on the coin and the tenure, the exchange offers investors multiple options and interest rates for these coins.

Binance Visa Card is a credit card that allows users to convert their cryptocurrency into fiat current and spend it on products and services. While the conversion does not incur adminstrative fees, third-party fees, in the form of payment network fees, apply.

Binance smart pool enables miners to switch between different cryptocurrencies for mining to optimize and multiply their income.

Binance has a blockchain technology incubator called Binance Labs, which focuses on nurturing promising pre-ICO stage projects. It helps deserving cryptocurrency project teams by providing necessary funding for development, advisory resources, and a launchpad for any necessary listing and fundraising exercises.

Binance also offers a site called LaunchPad for hosting new and emerging blockchain projects and API interfaces. As of January 2022, 60 projects have been launched.

It launched its own Binance Coin (BNB) cryptocurrency through an ICO in July 2017. BNB has a market cap of around $88.7 billion, as of January 2022. It is set to become the native currency of the decentralized Binance exchange.

A brief history

Binance was founded in China but moved its servers and headquarters out of China into Japan in advance of the Chinese government ban on cryptocurrency trading in September 2017.

In January 2018 it was the largest cryptocurrency exchange with a market capitalization of $1.3 billion, a title it has retained till date as of January 2022, despite competition from Coinbase, among others.

In January 2019, Binance announced that it had partnered with Israel-based payment processor Simplex to enable cryptocurrency purchases with debit and credit cards, including Visa and Mastercard. The purchases are subject to Simplex’s local bank policies and are limited to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple’s XRP.

Throughout its history, the company has launched two cryptocurrencies which it developed itself: Binance Coin (BNB), launched June 2017, and Binance Smart Chain, launched September 2020. Binance Smart Chain operates using "Proof of Staked Authority", a combination of proof of stake and proof of authority. It currently has 21 approved validators. As of early 2022, Binance Coin is the cryptocurrency with the third highest market capitalization. Binance allows its users to pay fees on its exchange with Binance Coin.

Key Takeaways

Key takeaways are:

Binance is an online exchange where users can trade cryptocurrencies. It supports most commonly traded cryptocurrencies.
Binance provides a crypto wallet for traders to store their electronic funds.
The exchange also has supporting services for users to earn interest or transact using cryptocurrencies. It also offers programs for miners and to help traders make investment decisions.
Binance has its own blockchain-based token, Binance Coin (BNB).
Anyone can register an account on Binance to trade (buy or sell), earn, or grow cryptocurrencies.

The Basics of Currency Trading

2021-12-25T22:19:00.014+01:00

Trading in any investment market is very difficult as evidenced by the fact that most beginning traders lose money. However, success can be found with enough of the right education, practice, and experience. So, what is currency trading and is it right for you?

The currency market, or forex (FX), is the largest investment market in the world and continues to grow annually. On April 2010, the forex market reached $4 trillion in daily average turnover, an increase of 20% since 2007.

In comparison, there is only $25 billion of daily volume on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The market may be large, but until recently the volume came from professional traders, but as currency trading platforms have improved more retail traders have found forex to be suitable for their investment goals.

In this article:
How Does it Work?
Pairs and Pips
Far Fewer Products
What Moves Currencies?
The Bottom Line
Key Learning and Take Aways

How Does it Work?

Currency trading is a 24-hour market that is only closed from Friday evening to Sunday evening, but the 24-hour trading sessions are misleading. There are three sessions that include the European, Asian and United States trading sessions.

Although there is some overlap in the sessions, the main currencies in each market are traded mostly during those market hours. This means that certain currency pairs will have more volume during certain sessions. Traders who stay with pairs based on the dollar will find the most volume in the U.S. trading session.

Pairs and Pips

All currency trading is done in pairs. Unlike the stock market, where you can buy or sell a single stock, you have to buy one currency and sell another currency in the forex market. Next, nearly all currencies are priced out to the fourth decimal point. A pip or percentage in point is the smallest increment of trade. One pip typically equals 1/100 of 1%.

Currency is traded in various sized lots. The micro-lot is 1,000 units of a currency. If your account is funded in U.S. dollars, a micro lot represents $1,000 of your base currency, the dollar. A mini lot is 10,000 units of your base currency and a standard lot is 100,000 units.

A pip (percentage in point) is the smallest increment of trade. One pip typically equals 1/100 of 1%, or the number in the fourth decimal point. Most currencies are priced out to the fourth or fifth decimal point. Exceptions to this rule are currency pairs that include the Japanese Yen (JPY) as the quote currency. These pairs typically price out to two or three decimal places, with a pip being represented by the second decimal place.

Retail or beginning traders often trade currency in micro lots, because one pip in a micro lot represents only a 10-cent move in the price. This makes losses easier to manage if a trade doesn't produce the intended results. In a mini lot, one pip equals $1 and that same one pip in a standard lot equals $10. Some currencies move as much as 100 pips or more in a single trading session making the potential losses to the small investor much more manageable by trading in micro or mini lots.

Far Fewer Products

The majority of the volume in currency trading is confined to only 18 currency pairs compared to the thousands of stocks that are available in the global equity markets. Although there are other traded pairs outside of the 18, the eight currencies most often traded are the U.S. dollar (USD), Canadian dollar (CAD), euro (EUR), British pound (GBP), Swiss franc (CHF), New Zealand dollar (NZD), Australian dollar (AUD) and the Japanese yen (JPY). Although nobody would say that currency trading is easy, having far fewer trading options makes trade and portfolio management an easier task.

What Moves Currencies?

An increasing amount of stock traders are taking interest in the currency markets because many of the forces that move the stock market also move the currency market. One of the largest is supply and demand. When the world needs more dollars, the value of the dollar increases and when there are too many circulating, the price drops.

Other factors like interest rates, new economic data from the largest countries and geopolitical tensions, are just a few of the events that may affect currency prices.

The Bottom Line

Much like anything in the investing market, learning about currency trading is easy but finding the winning trading strategies takes a lot of practice. Most forex brokers will allow you to open a free virtual account that allows you to trade with virtual money until you find strategies that will help you become a successful forex trader. See Basic Strategies of Technical and Fundamental Analysis; and also Finding Your Trading Strategy.

Key Learning and Take Aways

Key Takeaways:

Forex exchanges allow for 24/7 trading in currency pairs, making it the world's largest and most liquid asset market.
While it is the largest market in the world, a relatively small number (~20) of currency pairs are responsible for the majority of volume and activity.
Currencies are traded against one another as pairs (e.g., EUR/USD) and each pair is typically quoted in pips (percentage in points) out to four decimal places.
Currency prices fluctuate based on the economic situation of the countries involved, geopolitical risk and instability, and trade & financial flows, among other factors.

In the previous article we discussed the topic, 'Getting Started in Forex' (see link below). The next topic will discuss 'How International Exchange Rates Are Set'.

« Getting Started Setting International Rates »

How To Download YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Metacafe and Other Videos for Offline Viewing

2021-12-25T13:37:00.011+01:00

Have you ever wished you could download that interesting YouTube video but cannot? Or realize you have to close that Vimeo video because you did not have enough 'Internet Data' muscle to stay on as you would have wanted? This article will teach you how to download YouTube and other videos for offline viewing at your convenience.

IMPORTANT: Before proceeding, it is important to note that while downloading YouTube and other videos from the internet for personal use is NOT illegal, it may in certain circumstances violate Terms of service of that particular brand. It is your responsibility to ensure that the YouTube videos, or other branded videos, you download do NOT violate the TOS of any brand, eg Google's TOS.

In this article:
Using IXConverter on a Computer or Phone
Using VLC Player on a Computer
Using 4K Video Downloader on a Computer
Using KeepVid on an iPhone or iPad
Using other Converters out there

Using IXConverter on a Computer or Phone

ixconverter allows the free or paid conversion of videos into audio (.aac, .m4a, .mp3) or video (.mp4, .webm, .flv) formats for download into your computer or mobile device.

STEP 1.
Go to the site hosting the video you want to download. Popular video sites include YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, and Dailymotion.

Other sites to download from include 1up.com, AddAnime, archive.org, Break, canalplus.fr, CNN, DepositFiles, Facebook, Flickr, france2.fr, etc.

STEP 2.
Navigate to the page containing the video you want to download. Then, copy the URL of the page where the video is located.

STEP 3.
Go to ixconverter.com and paste the URL which you copied in step 2 above into the conversion box located on ixconverter. Choose the file type you want to convert the video into from the drop-down menu, and click on .

STEP 4.
Allow the site to process the URL. Wait while the site displays the sign: Please wait while we prepare your download. Give sufficient time for the process to complete.

STEP 5.
Download the completely processed audio or video file format. When the conversion is complete (processed up to 100%), click on the Download your file link to download the fully processed file into your computer or mobile device.

Alternatively, click on the Convert another file link to select a different video to process and download.

Using VLC Player on a Computer

STEP 1.
Go to https://www.youtube.com on your computer. If you have VLC Media Player on your computer, you may be able to use it to download videos from YouTube. Start by navigating to YouTube in your browser.

If you don't have VLC Player on your computer, you can download it from https://www.videolan.org or use another method.
This method should work for most videos, but sometimes may display a "Your input can't be opened" error during the download.
If it refuses to play the video, that is because Youtube restricts the location of the video on the web if it contains copyrighted content. The only way to get around this is to use a download website not subject to this, such as mpgun.com, or use a computer program.

STEP 2.
Go to the video you want to download. You can search for the video using the "Search" bar at the top of the screen. Once you select the video, it should begin playing right away.

STEP 3.
Copy the video's URL. You can do this by highlighting the URL in the address bar at the top of the browser and pressing Ctrl+C (PC) or ⌘ Command+C (Mac).

STEP 4.
Open VLC Player. It should be in the Start menu on Windows and in the Applications folder on macOS. It's the icon of an orange traffic cone.

If you don't have it already, you can download VLC for free at https://www.videolan.org. VLC is an open-source video player with a lot of beneficial features for playing all kinds of files.

STEP 5.
Open a new network stream. Network streams allow you to play content from your web browser in VLC. The steps are a little different for Windows and macOS:

Windows: Click Media, then click Open Network Stream....
macOS: Click File and then Open Network.

STEP 6.
Paste the YouTube video's URL into the field. Click the "Please enter a network URL" text box, then press Ctrl+V (PC) or ⌘ Command+V (Mac).

STEP 7.
Click (PC) or (Mac). This will open the YouTube video in VLC.

If you are unable to play any YouTube videos, update to the latest version of VLC and try again.
If you are still unable to play any YouTube videos, copy the text on this web page and paste it into a new Notepad or TextEdit file. Save the file as "youtube.lua". On Windows, navigate to "C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\playlist" in file explorer. On Mac, right-click on VLC.app in Applications and click Show Contents. Then navigate to "/MacOS/share/lua/playlist". Delete the "youtube.luac" file and replace it with the "youtube.lua" file you saved.

STEP 8.
View the video's codec information. To do so:

Windows: Click Tools, then click Codec Information.
Mac: Click Window, then click Media Information.

STEP 9.
Copy the "Location" field. At the bottom of the window, you'll see a long address that you'll need to copy. Highlight the entire address and then follow these steps to copy it:

Windows: Right-click the highlighted link and click Copy.
Mac: Right-click the text field and click Open URL.

STEP 10.
Paste the copied URL into your web browser and press . You can skip this step if you're using a Mac as the video should already appear in a browser. If you're using Windows, open a new browser tab, right-click the address bar, and then click Paste.

STEP 11.
Right-click the video and select . This should open your computer's "Save" dialog.

STEP 12.
Download the video. Right-click the video in your browser, then click Save video as in the resulting drop-down menu. The video will begin downloading onto your computer as an MP4 file with the name "videoplayback".

STEP 13 Select a location and click . This downloads the video to your computer. Once the file is downloaded, you can view it by double-clicking the file.

Using 4K Video Downloader on a Computer

STEP 1.
Download the 4K Video Downloader setup file. Go to https://www.4kdownload.com/products/product-videodownloader in your computer's web browser, then click Get 4K Video Downloader on the left side of the page. The 4K Video Downloader setup file will download onto your computer.

NOTE: 4K Video Downloader is available on both Windows and Mac computers.

STEP 2.
Install 4K Video Downloader. Once the 4K Video Downloader setup file finishes downloading, you can install it by doing the following:

Windows: Double-click the setup file, click Yes when prompted, and follow the on-screen setup instructions.
Mac: Double-click the setup file, verify the installation if necessary, click and drag the 4K Video Downloader app icon onto the "Applications" folder, and follow any on-screen instructions.

STEP 3.
Go to https://www.youtube.com in a web browser.

STEP 4.
Go to the video you want to download. The video should begin playing.

STEP 5.
Copy the video's address. Click the video's address in the bar at the top of your browser's window, then press Ctrl+A (Windows) or ⌘ Command+A (Mac) to fully select it and press Ctrl+C or ⌘ Command+C to copy it.

STEP 6.
Open 4K Video Downloader. If 4K Video Downloader didn't automatically open upon finishing its installation, click its link in the Windows Start menu or your Mac's Applications folder.

STEP 7.
Click . It's in the top-left corner of the 4K Video Downloader window. Doing so will cause the 4K Video Downloader to extract the address you copied.

STEP 8.
Select a video format from the "Format" menu. If you don't see "4K" listed in the quality options for a video which you know supports 4K, changing the video format from MP4 to MKV will usually prompt the 4K option to appear.

STEP 9.
Select a quality. By default, the highest possible quality will be selected, but you can check the box next to a different quality (e.g., 1080p) if your computer doesn't support the highest quality. For example, many laptop screens don't support 4K video, meaning that downloading a video in 4K is pointless.

STEP 10.
Click . It's at the bottom of the window. Your video will begin downloading onto your computer.

STEP 11.
Open your video's location. Once your video finishes downloading, right-click it and then click Show in Folder in the resulting drop-down menu. This will cause a File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac) window with your downloaded video to open, at which point you can double-click the video to play it in your computer's default video player.

On a Mac, you can hold down Ctrl while clicking the video to prompt the right-click menu to appear.

Using KeepVid on an iPhone or iPad

STEP 1.
Install Documents by Readdle on your iPhone or iPad. Apple makes it sort of difficult to download files to your iPhone or iPad, so you'll use an app called Readdle. Here's how to get it:

Open the App Store.
Tap Search at the bottom-right corner.
Type readdle into the search bar at the top of the screen and tap .
Tap GET or the cloud icon next to "Documents by Readdle." It's the gray "D" icon with yellow and green accents.
Follow the on-screen instructions.

STEP 2.
Open YouTube on your iPhone or iPad. It's the white icon with a red rectangle and white triangle inside.

STEP 3.
Go to the video you want to download. Tap the magnifying glass at the top of the screen to search, or tap Library at the bottom-right corner to browse videos you've saved. Once you get to the video, it will start playing immediately.

STEP 4.
Tap . It's the icon with an arrow below the video's title. Several sharing icons will appear.

STEP 5.
Tap . It's the gray icon with two overlapping rectangles in the bottom row of icons. This copies the video's link to your clipboard.

STEP 6.
Open the Documents app. It's the gray "D" icon with yellow and green accents. It should now occupy the last icon position on your home screen.

Since it's your first time using the app, tap Continue when prompted, and then proceed through the screens until you reach the screen that says "Documents" at the top.

STEP 7.
Tap the blue compass icon. It's at the bottom-right corner of the "Documents" screen. This opens a web browser.

STEP 8.
Go to https://keepvid.pro in the browser. You can do this by typing the URL into the "Go to this address" bar at the top of the screen and then tapping .

STEP 9.
Tap the "Enter Link" field. This springs open your keyboard.

STEP 10.
Tap and hold the "Enter Link" field. After a second or so, the "Select All" and "Paste" options will appear.

STEP 11.
Tap . The YouTube video link you copied will appear in the blank.

STEP 12.
Tap the blue button. Keepvid will locate the video and provide some download options below.

STEP 13.
Scroll down and tap . It's the blue button below the video's duration. The "Save File" screen will appear.

NOTE: If you want a smaller file, you can tap the Download Other Formats button below instead and choose something else.

STEP 14.
Rename the file (optional) and tap . This downloads the video to your iPhone or iPad. Once the video is downloaded, you'll be returned to the main Documents by Readdle screen.

STEP 15.
Add the Readdle folder to the Files app. If you add Readdle to your Files app it'll be easy for you to access your downloaded videos. Here's how:

Open the Files app (the blue folder) on your home screen. It may be buried in a folder.
Tap Browse at the bottom.
Tap Edit at the top-right corner.
Slide the "Documents" switch to the On (green) position.
Tap Done at the top-right corner.
You can now use the Files app to access the videos you download with Documents by Readdle.

STEP 16.
Watch the downloaded video. When you're ready to watch your video(s), follow these steps:

Open Files.
Tap Browse.
Tap Documents.
Tap Downloads.
Tap the video to watch it.

Other Converters Out There

Many reputable sites recommended Keep Tube (available as both a Firefox extension and a browser bookmarklet, the latter compatible with Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc) and KeepVid.

Google Chrome malware warning

The advantage of Keep Tube is its extension and bookmarklet that allows when you see a video you like, you just click the Keep Tube icon (in Firefox) or bookmarklet to initiate the convert and download process; however, my experience with these two recommendations were not palatable at all (see the malware warning above). So personally, i would not recommend them, but you could still try them out if you want.

Editor's note:
For YouTube (and many other video) downloads, I advise you choose MP4 whenever possible, and always at the highest available resolution. YouTube's native FLV format requires a special player, whereas MP4 works in Divx, QuickTime, and other more-common players.

Also, MP4 files usually play nicely on smartphones, so you can take your saved videos with you on the go.

Written April 2014; Updated December 2021.

Getting Started in Forex

2021-12-23T23:40:00.021+01:00

The forex (FX) market has many similarities to the equity markets; however, there are some key differences. This article will show you those differences and help you get started in forex trading.

If you've decided to take a stab at forex trading, access to currency markets has never been easier with a wide range of online brokerage platforms offering everything from spot trading to futures and CFDs.

In this article:
Choosing a Forex Broker
Broker Actions to Avoid
Defining Basic Strategies
Finding Your Trading Strategy
Considerations to Remember
The Bottom Line
Key Learning and Take Away

Choosing a Forex Broker

There are many forex brokers to choose from, just as in any other market. Here are some things to look for:

Lower spreads save you money!
Low Spreads. The spread, calculated in "pips," is the difference between the price at which a currency can be purchased and the price at which it can be sold at any given point in time. Forex brokers don't charge a commission, so this difference is how they make money. In comparing brokers, you will find that the difference in spreads in forex is as great as the difference in commissions in the stock arena.

Make sure your broker is backed by regulatory agencies and a reliable institution!
Quality Institution. Unlike equity brokers, forex brokers are usually tied to large banks or lending institutions because of the large amounts of capital required (leverage they need to provide). Also, forex brokers in the USA should be registered as a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) and regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). You can find this and other financial information and statistics about a forex brokerage on its website, the website of its parent company, or through the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's BrokerCheck website. For forex brokers in Canada, they are regulated by the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) and you may find other financial and statistic information on their website, or through the Canadian Securities Administrators National Registration Search webpage, or the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC). UK brokers are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

Get the tools you need to succeed!
Extensive Tools and Research. Forex brokers offer many different trading platforms for their clients—just like brokers in other markets. These trading platforms often feature real-time charts, technical analysis tools, real-time news and data and even support for trading systems. Before committing to any broker, be sure to request free trials to test different trading platforms. Brokers usually also provide technical and fundamental information, economic calendars and other research.

Leverage your bets!
Wide Range of Leverage Options. Leverage is necessary in forex because the price deviations (the sources of profit) are merely fractions of a cent. Leverage, expressed as a ratio between total capital available to actual capital, is the amount of money a broker will lend you for trading. For example, a ratio of 100:1 means your broker would lend you $100 for every $1 of actual capital. Many brokerages offer as much as 250:1. Remember, lower leverage means lower risk of a margin call, but also lower bang for your buck (and vice-versa).

If you have limited capital, make sure your broker offers high leverage through a margin account. If capital is not a problem, any broker with a wide variety of leverage options should do. A variety of options lets you vary the amount of risk you are willing to take. For example, less leverage (and therefore less risk) may be preferable for highly volatile (exotic) currency pairs.

Make sure your broker uses the proper leverage, tools, and services relative to your amount of capital.
Account Types. Many brokers offer two or more types of accounts. The smallest account is known as a mini account and requires you to trade with a minimum of, say, $250, offering a high amount of leverage (which you need in order to make money with this size of initial capital). The standard account lets you trade at a variety of different leverages, but it requires a minimum of $2,000. Finally, premium accounts, which often require significantly higher amounts of capital, let you use different amounts of leverage and often offer additional tools and services.

Broker Actions to Avoid

Sniping or Hunting. Sniping and hunting—defined as prematurely buying or selling near preset points—are inappropriate acts committed by brokers to increase profits. Unfortunately, the only way to determine the brokers that do this and those that do not is to talk to fellow traders. There is no blacklist or organization that reports such activity.
Strict Margin Rules. When you are trading with borrowed money, your broker has a say in how much risk you take. As such, your broker can buy or sell at their discretion, which can be a bad thing for you. Let's say you have a margin account, and your position takes a dive before rebounding to all-time highs. Even if you have enough cash to cover, some brokers will liquidate your position on a margin call at that low. This action on their part can cost you a significant amount of capital.

Be sure to conduct thorough due diligence prior to selecting a broker. Once you've decided, signing up for a forex account is similar to getting an equity account. The only major difference is that for forex accounts, you are required to sign a margin agreement. This agreement states that you are trading with borrowed money and, as such, the brokerage has the right to intervene in your trades to protect its interests. That said, once you sign up and fund your account, you'll be ready to trade.

Defining Basic Strategies

Technical analysis and fundamental analysis are two of the oft-used strategies in the forex market. Technical analysis is by far the most common strategy used by individual forex traders, which we'll explain in further detail below.

Fundamental Analysis

If you think it's difficult to value one company, try valuing a whole country! Fundamental analysis in the forex market is very complex, and is often used only to predict long-term trends. However, some traders do trade short term strictly on news releases. There are many fundamental indicators of currency values released at many different times such as:

Non-farm Payrolls. Nonfarm payrolls is the measure of the number of workers in the U.S. excluding farm workers and workers in a handful of other job classifications.
Purchasing Managers Index (PMI). This is an index of the prevailing direction of economic trends in the manufacturing and service sectors. It consists of a diffusion index that summarizes whether market conditions, as viewed by purchasing managers, are expanding, staying the same, or contracting.
Consumer Price Index (CPI). This is a measure that examines the weighted average of prices of a basket of consumer goods and services, such as transportation, food, and medical care. Changes in the CPI are used to assess price changes associated with the cost of living.
Retail Sales. This is an economic indicator that tracks the month-to-month increase or decrease in consumer spending in most retail categories.
Durable Good. Durables, also known as durable goods or consumer durables, are a category of consumer goods that do not wear out quickly, and therefore do not have to be purchased frequently.

These reports are not the only fundamental factors to watch. There are also several meetings where quotes and commentary can affect markets just as much as any report. These meetings are often called to discuss interest rates, inflation, and other issues that affect currency valuations. Even changes in wording when addressing certain issues—the Federal Reserve chairman's comments on interest rates, for example—can cause market volatility. Therefore, two important meetings for forex traders to watch are the Federal Open Market Committee and Humphrey Hawkins Hearings.

Simply reading the reports and examining the commentary can help forex fundamental analysts gain a better understanding of long-term market trends and allow short-term traders to profit from extraordinary events. If you choose to follow a fundamental strategy, be sure to keep an economic calendar handy at all times so you know when these reports are released. Your broker may also provide real-time access to this type of information.

Technical Analysis

Technical analysts of the forex analyze price trends, similar to their counterparts in the equity markets. The only key difference between technical analysis in forex and technical analysis in equities is the timeframe, as forex markets are open 24 hours a day. As a result, some forms of technical analysis that factor in time must be modified to factor in the 24-hour forex market. These are some of the most common forms of technical analysis used in forex:

The Elliott Waves. This is a theory in technical analysis used to describe price movements in the financial market. It identifies recurrent long-term price wave patterns related to persistent changes in investor sentiment and psychology.
Fibonacci Studies. Fibonacci numbers are used to create technical indicators using a mathematical sequence developed by the Italian mathematician, commonly referred to as "Fibonacci," in the 13th century. Common Fibonacci numbers in financial markets are 0.236, 0.382, 0.618, 1.618, 2.618, 4.236. These ratios or percentages can be found by dividing certain numbers in the sequence by other numbers. While not officially Fibonacci numbers, many traders also use 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0. The numbers reflect how far the price could go following another price move. For example, if a stock moves from $1 to $2, Fibonacci numbers can be applied to that. A drop to $1.76 is a 23.6% retracement of the $1 price move (rounded). Two common Fibonacci tools are retracements and extensions. Fibonacci retracements measure how far a pullback could go. Fibonacci extensions measure how far an impulse wave could go.
Parabolic SAR. This is used by traders to determine trend direction and potential reversals in price. The indicator uses a trailing stop and reverse method called "SAR," or stop and reverse, to identify suitable exit and entry points. Traders also refer to the indicator as the parabolic stop and reverse, parabolic SAR, or PSAR.
Pivot points. This determine the overall trend of the market over different time frames. The pivot point itself is simply the average of the intraday high and low, and the closing price from the previous trading day. On the subsequent day, trading above the pivot point is thought to indicate ongoing bullish sentiment, while trading below the pivot point indicates bearish sentiment.

Many technical analysts combine these studies to make more accurate predictions (i.e., the common practice of combining the Fibonacci studies with Elliott Waves). Others create trading systems to repeatedly locate similar buying and selling conditions.

Finding Your Trading Strategy

Most successful traders develop a strategy and perfect it over time. Some focus on one particular study or calculation, while others use broad spectrum analysis to determine their trades.

Most experts suggest trying a combination of both fundamental and technical analysis in order to make long-term projections and determine entry and exit points. That said, it is the individual trader who needs to decide what works best for him or her (most often through trial and error) in the end.

Forex Trading Considerations to Remember

Open a demo account and paper trade until you can make a consistent profit. Many people jump into the forex market and quickly lose a lot of money due to taking on too much leverage. It is important to take your time and learn to trade properly before committing capital.

Trade without emotion. Don't keep "mental" stop-loss points if you don't have the ability to execute them on time. Always set your stop-loss and take-profit points to execute automatically, and don't change them unless absolutely necessary.

The trend can be your friend. If you go against the trend, make sure you have a good reason. That's because you have a higher chance of success in trading with the trend because the forex market tends to move in that direction than the other.

The Bottom Line

The forex market is the largest market in the world with a daily volume of $6.6 trillion. Individuals are becoming increasingly interested in plying their trade in FX. However, there are multiple considerations to take into account before you begin trading, such as being sure your broker meets certain criteria and understanding a trading strategy that works best for you. One way to learn to trade forex is to open up a demo account and try it out.

Key Learning and Take Away

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Before you settle on a forex broker, carry out your due diligence and make sure you are choosing the best option for yourself.
Look for low spreads and fees from a provider in a well-regulated jurisdiction that offers a suite of tools and access to leverage, among other factors.
Once you've chosen your broker, study up on basic forex strategies and how to properly analyze currency markets.
You may want to start with a demo account to try your strategy out and backtest before risking real money in the market.

In a previous article we discussed the topic, 'Forex Trading: A Beginner’s Guide' (see link below). The next topic is 'The Basics of Currency Trading' (see link below).

« Beginner's Guide Currency Basics »

Forex Trading: A Beginner’s Guide

2021-12-18T11:29:00.406+01:00

Forex is a portmanteau of foreign currency and exchange. Foreign exchange is the process of changing one currency into another for a variety of reasons, usually for commerce, trading, or tourism. According to a 2019 triennial report from the Bank for International Settlements (a global bank for national central banks), the daily trading volume for forex reached $6.6 trillion in April 2019.

In a previous article, we defined foreign exchange by discussing the topic, "What is Forex?". In this beginner's guide article, we go a bit further to dig deeper and learn terminologies and also how a beginner should start and go about trading forex.

In this article:
What Is the Forex Market?
A Brief History of Forex
An Overview of Forex Markets
Uses of the Forex Markets
Forex Trading: A Beginner’s Guide
How to Start Trading Forex
Forex Terminology
Basic Forex Trading Strategies
Charts Used in Forex Trading
Pros and Cons of Trading Forex
What is forex?
Where is forex traded?
Why do people trade currencies?
Are forex markets volatile?
Are forex markets regulated?
Which currencies can I trade in?
How to get started with forex trading
The Bottom Line
Key Learning and Take Away

What Is the Forex Market?

The foreign exchange market is where currencies are traded. Currencies are important because they allow us to purchase goods and services locally and across borders. International currencies need to be exchanged to conduct foreign trade and business.

If you are living in the United States and want to buy cheese from France, then either you or the company from which you buy the cheese has to pay the French for the cheese in euros (EUR). This means that the U.S. importer would have to exchange the equivalent value of U.S. dollars (USD) into euros.

The same goes for traveling. A French tourist in Egypt can’t pay in euros to see the pyramids because it’s not the locally accepted currency. The tourist has to exchange the euros for the local currency, in this case the Egyptian pound, at the current exchange rate.

One unique aspect of this international market is that there is no central marketplace for foreign exchange. Rather, currency trading is conducted electronically over the counter (OTC), which means that all transactions occur via computer networks among traders around the world, rather than on one centralized exchange. The market is open 24 hours a day, five and a half days a week, and currencies are traded worldwide in the major financial centers of Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Zurich—across almost every time zone. This means that when the U.S. trading day ends, the forex market begins anew in Tokyo and Hong Kong. As such, the forex market can be extremely active any time of day, with price quotes changing constantly.

A Brief History of Forex

In its most basic sense, the forex market has been around for centuries. People have always exchanged or bartered goods and currencies to purchase goods and services. However, the forex market, as we understand it today, is a relatively modern invention.

After the Bretton Woods accord began to collapse in 1971, more currencies were allowed to float freely against one another. The values of individual currencies vary based on demand and circulation and are monitored by foreign exchange trading services.

Commercial and investment banks conduct most of the trading in forex markets on behalf of their clients, but there are also speculative opportunities for trading one currency against another for professional and individual investors.

There are two distinct features to currencies as an asset class:

You can earn the interest rate differential between two currencies.
You can profit from changes in the exchange rate.

An investor can profit from the difference between two interest rates in two different economies by buying the currency with the higher interest rate and shorting the currency with the lower interest rate. Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, it was very common to short the Japanese yen (JPY) and buy British pounds (GBP) because the interest rate differential was very large. This strategy is sometimes referred to as a “carry trade.”

Currency trading was very difficult for individual investors prior to the Internet. Most currency traders were large multinational corporations, hedge funds, or high-net-worth individuals because forex trading required a lot of capital. With help from the Internet, a retail market aimed at individual traders has emerged, providing easy access to the foreign exchange markets through either the banks themselves or brokers making a secondary market. Most online brokers or dealers offer very high leverage to individual traders who can control a large trade with a small account balance.

An Overview of Forex Markets

The FX market is where currencies are traded. It is the only truly continuous and nonstop trading market in the world. In the past, the forex market was dominated by institutional firms and large banks, which acted on behalf of clients. But it has become more retail-oriented in recent years, and traders and investors of many holding sizes have begun participating in it.

An interesting aspect of world forex markets is that there are no physical buildings that function as trading venues for the markets. Instead, it is a series of connections made through trading terminals and computer networks. Participants in this market are institutions, investment banks, commercial banks, and retail investors.

The foreign exchange market is considered more opaque than other financial markets. Currencies are traded in OTC markets, where disclosures are not mandatory. Large liquidity pools from institutional firms are a prevalent feature of the market. One would presume that a country’s economic parameters should be the most important criterion to determine its price. But that’s not the case. A 2019 survey found that the motives of large financial institutions played the most important role in determining currency prices.

When people refer to the forex market, they usually are referring to the spot market. The forwards and futures markets tend to be more popular with companies that need to hedge their foreign exchange risks out to a specific date in the future.

Spot Market

Forex trading in the spot market has always been the largest because it trades in the biggest “underlying” real asset for the forwards and futures markets. Previously, volumes in the forwards and futures markets surpassed those of the spot markets. However, the trading volumes for forex spot markets received a boost with the advent of electronic trading and the proliferation of forex brokers.

The spot market is where currencies are bought and sold based on their trading price. That price is determined by supply and demand and is calculated based on several factors, including current interest rates, economic performance, sentiment toward ongoing political situations (both locally and internationally), and the perception of the future performance of one currency against another. A finalized deal is known as a “spot deal.” It is a bilateral transaction in which one party delivers an agreed-upon currency amount to the counterparty and receives a specified amount of another currency at the agreed-upon exchange rate value. After a position is closed, the settlement is in cash. Although the spot market is commonly known as one that deals with transactions in the present (rather than in the future), these trades actually take two days for settlement.

Forwards and Futures Markets

A forward contract is a private agreement between two parties to buy a currency at a future date and at a predetermined price in the over-the-counter (OTC) markets. A futures contract is a standardized agreement between two parties to take delivery of a currency at a future date and at a predetermined price. Futures trade on exchanges and not OTC.

IMPORTANT: Unlike the spot market, the forwards and futures markets do not trade actual currencies. Instead, they deal in contracts that represent claims to a certain currency type, a specific price per unit, and a future date for settlement.

In the forwards market, contracts are bought and sold OTC between two parties, who determine the terms of the agreement between themselves. In the futures market, futures contracts are bought and sold based upon a standard size and settlement date on public commodities markets, such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).

In the U.S., the National Futures Association regulates the futures market. Futures contracts have specific details, including the number of units being traded, delivery and settlement dates, and minimum price increments that cannot be customized. The exchange acts as a counterparty to the trader, providing clearance and settlement services.

Both types of contracts are binding and are typically settled for cash at the exchange in question upon expiry, although contracts can also be bought and sold before they expire. The currency forwards and futures markets can offer protection against risk when trading currencies. Usually, big international corporations use these markets to hedge against future exchange rate fluctuations, but speculators take part in these markets as well.

Uses of the Forex Markets

Forex for Hedging

Companies doing business in foreign countries are at risk due to fluctuations in currency values when they buy or sell goods and services outside of their domestic market. Foreign exchange markets provide a way to hedge currency risk by fixing a rate at which the transaction will be completed.

To accomplish this, a trader can buy or sell currencies in the forward or swap markets in advance, which locks in an exchange rate. For example, imagine that a company plans to sell U.S.-made blenders in Europe when the exchange rate between the euro and the dollar (EUR/USD) is €1 to $1 at parity.

The blender costs $100 to manufacture, and the U.S. firm plans to sell it for €150—which is competitive with other blenders that were made in Europe. If this plan is successful, then the company will make $50 in profit per sale because the EUR/USD exchange rate is even. Unfortunately, the U.S. dollar begins to rise in value versus the euro until the EUR/USD exchange rate is 0.80, which means it now costs $0.80 to buy €1.00.

The problem facing the company is that while it still costs $100 to make the blender, the company can only sell the product at the competitive price of €150—which, when translated back into dollars, is only $120 (€150 × 0.80 = $120). A stronger dollar resulted in a much smaller profit than expected.

The blender company could have reduced this risk by short selling the euro and buying the U.S. dollar when they were at parity. That way, if the U.S. dollar rose in value, then the profits from the trade would offset the reduced profit from the sale of blenders. If the U.S. dollar fell in value, then the more favorable exchange rate would increase the profit from the sale of blenders, which offsets the losses in the trade.

Hedging of this kind can be done in the currency futures market. The advantage for the trader is that futures contracts are standardized and cleared by a central authority. However, currency futures may be less liquid than the forwards markets, which are decentralized and exist within the interbank system throughout the world.

Forex for Speculation

Factors like interest rates, trade flows, tourism, economic strength, and geopolitical risk affect supply and demand for currencies, creating daily volatility in the forex markets. An opportunity exists to profit from changes that may increase or reduce one currency’s value compared to another. A forecast that one currency will weaken is essentially the same as assuming that the other currency in the pair will strengthen because currencies are traded as pairs.

Imagine a trader who expects interest rates to rise in the U.S. compared to Australia while the exchange rate between the two currencies (AUD/USD) is 0.71 (it takes $0.71 USD to buy $1.00 AUD). The trader believes higher interest rates in the U.S. will increase demand for USD, and therefore the AUD/USD exchange rate will fall because it will require fewer, stronger USDs to buy an AUD.

Assume that the trader is correct and interest rates rise, which decreases the AUD/USD exchange rate to 0.50. This means that it requires $0.50 USD to buy $1.00 AUD. If the investor had shorted the AUD and went long on the USD, then they would have profited from the change in value.

Forex Trading: A Beginner’s Guide

Trading currencies can be risky and complex. The interbank market has varying degrees of regulation, and forex instruments are not standardized. In some parts of the world, forex trading is almost completely unregulated.

The interbank market is made up of banks trading with each other around the world. The banks themselves have to determine and accept sovereign risk and credit risk, and they have established internal processes to keep themselves as safe as possible. Regulations like this are industry-imposed for the protection of each participating bank.

Since the market is made by each of the participating banks providing offers and bids for a particular currency, the market pricing mechanism is based on supply and demand. Because there are such large trade flows within the system, it is difficult for rogue traders to influence the price of a currency. This system helps create transparency in the market for investors with access to interbank dealing.

Most small retail traders trade with relatively small and semi-unregulated forex brokers/dealers, which can (and sometimes do) re-quote prices and even trade against their own customers. Depending on where the dealer exists, there may be some government and industry regulation, but those safeguards are inconsistent around the globe.

Most retail investors should spend time investigating a forex dealer to find out whether it is regulated in the U.S. or the U.K. (dealers in the U.S. and the U.K. have more oversight) or in a country with lax rules and oversight. It is also a good idea to find out what kind of account protections are available in case of a market crisis, or if a dealer becomes insolvent.

How to Start Trading Forex

Trading forex is similar to equity trading. Here are some steps to get yourself started on the forex trading journey.

1. Learn about forex: While it is not complicated, forex trading is a project of its own and requires specialized knowledge. For example, the leverage ratio for forex trades is higher than for equities, and the drivers for currency price movement are different from those for equity markets. There are several online courses available for beginners that teach the ins and outs of forex trading.

2. Set up a brokerage account: You will need a forex trading account at a brokerage to get started with forex trading. Forex brokers do not charge commissions. Instead, they make money through spreads (also known as pips) between the buying and selling prices.

For beginner traders, it is a good idea to set up a micro forex trading account with low capital requirements. Such accounts have variable trading limits and allow brokers to limit their trades to amounts as low as 1,000 units of a currency. For context, a standard account lot is equal to 100,000 currency units. A micro forex account will help you become more comfortable with forex trading and determine your trading style.

3. Develop a trading strategy: While it is not always possible to predict and time market movement, having a trading strategy will help you set broad guidelines and a roadmap for trading. A good trading strategy is based on the reality of your situation and finances. It takes into account the amount of cash that you are willing to put up for trading and, correspondingly, the amount of risk that you can tolerate without getting burned out of your position. Remember, forex trading is mostly a high-leverage environment. But it also offers more rewards to those who are willing to take the risk.

4. Always be on top of your numbers: Once you begin trading, always check your positions at the end of the day. Most trading software already provides a daily accounting of trades. Make sure that you do not have any pending positions to be filled out and that you have sufficient cash in your account to make future trades.

5. Cultivate emotional equilibrium: Beginner forex trading is fraught with emotional roller coasters and unanswered questions. Should you have held onto your position a bit longer for more profits? How did you miss that report about low gross domestic product numbers that led to a decline in overall value for your portfolio? Obsessing over such unanswered questions can lead you down a path of confusion. That is why it is important to not get carried away by your trading positions and cultivate emotional equilibrium across profits and losses. Be disciplined about closing out your positions when necessary.

Forex Terminology

The best way to get started on the forex journey is to learn its language. Here are a few terms to get you started:

Forex account: A forex account is used to make currency trades. Depending on the lot size, there can be three types of forex accounts:

Micro forex accounts: Accounts that allow you to trade up to $1,000 worth of currencies in one lot.
Mini forex accounts: Accounts that allow you to trade up to $10,000 worth of currencies in one lot.
Standard forex accounts: Accounts that allow you to trade up to $100,000 worth of currencies in one lot.

IMPORTANT: Remember that the trading limit for each lot includes margin money used for leverage. This means that the broker can provide you with capital in a predetermined ratio. For example, they may put up $100 for every $1 that you put up for trading, meaning that you will only need to use $10 from your own funds to trade currencies worth $1,000.

Ask: An ask (or offer) is the lowest price at which you are willing to buy a currency. For example, if you place an ask price of $1.3891 for GBP, then the figure mentioned is the lowest that you are willing to pay for a pound in USD. The ask price is generally greater than the bid price.
Bid: A bid is the price at which you are willing to sell a currency. A market maker in a given currency is responsible for continuously putting out bids in response to buyer queries. While they are generally lower than ask prices, in instances when demand is great, bid prices can be higher than ask prices.
Bear market: A bear market is one in which prices decline among currencies. Bear markets signify a market downtrend and are the result of depressing economic fundamentals or catastrophic events, such as a financial crisis or a natural disaster.
Bull market: A bull market is one in which prices increase for all currencies. Bull markets signify a market uptrend and are the result of optimistic news about the global economy.
Contract for difference: A contract for difference (CFD) is a derivative that enables traders to speculate on price movements for currencies without actually owning the underlying asset. A trader betting that the price of a currency pair will increase will buy CFDs for that pair, while those who believe its price will decline will sell CFDs relating to that currency pair. The use of leverage in forex trading means that a CFD trade gone awry can lead to heavy losses.
Leverage: Leverage is the use of borrowed capital to multiply returns. The forex market is characterized by high leverages, and traders often use these leverages to boost their positions.

For example: a trader might put up just $1,000 of their own capital and borrow $9,000 from their broker to bet against the euro (EUR) in a trade against the Japanese yen (JPY). Since they have used very little of their own capital, the trader stands to make significant profits if the trade goes in the correct direction. The flipside to a high-leverage environment is that downside risks are enhanced and can result in significant losses. In the example above, the trader’s losses will multiply if the trade goes in the opposite direction.
Lot size: Currencies are traded in standard sizes known as lots. There are four common lot sizes: standard, mini, micro, and nano. Standard lot sizes consist of 100,000 units of the currency. Mini lot sizes consist of 10,000 units, and micro lot sizes consist of 1,000 units of the currency. Some brokers also offer nano lot sizes of currencies, worth 100 units of the currency, to traders. The choice of a lot size has a significant effect on the overall trade’s profits or losses. The bigger the lot size, the higher the profits (or losses), and vice versa.
Margin: Margin is the money set aside in an account for a currency trade. Margin money helps assure the broker that the trader will remain solvent and be able to meet monetary obligations, even if the trade does not go their way. The amount of margin depends on the trader and customer balance over a period of time. Margin is used in tandem with leverage (defined above) for trades in forex markets.
Pip: A pip is a “percentage in point” or “price interest in point.” It is the minimum price move, equal to four decimal points, made in currency markets. One pip is equal to 0.0001. One hundred pips are equal to 1 cent, and 10,000 pips are equal to $1. The pip value can change depending on the standard lot size offered by a broker. In a standard lot of $100,000, each pip will have a value of $10. Because currency markets use significant leverage for trades, small price moves, defined in pips, can have an outsized effect on the trade.
Spread: A spread is the difference between the bid (sell) price and ask (buy) price for a currency. Forex traders do not charge commissions; they make money through spreads. The size of the spread is influenced by many factors. Some of them are the size of your trade, demand for the currency, and its volatility.
Sniping and hunting: Sniping and hunting is purchase and sale of currencies near predetermined points to maximize profits. Brokers indulge in this practice, and the only way to catch them is to network with fellow traders and observe for patterns of such activity.

Basic Forex Trading Strategies

The most basic forms of forex trades are a long trade and a short trade. In a long trade, the trader is betting that the currency price will increase in the future and they can profit from it. A short trade consists of a bet that the currency pair’s price will decrease in the future. Traders can also use trading strategies based on technical analysis, such as breakout and moving average, to fine-tune their approach to trading.

Depending on the duration and numbers for trading, trading strategies can be categorized into four further types:

A scalp trade consists of positions held for seconds or minutes at most, and the profit amounts are restricted in terms of the number of pips. Such trades are supposed to be cumulative, meaning that small profits made in each individual trade add up to a tidy amount at the end of a day or time period. They rely on the predictability of price swings and cannot handle much volatility. Therefore, traders tend to restrict such trades to the most liquid pairs and at the busiest times of trading during the day.
Day trades are short-term trades in which positions are held and liquidated in the same day. The duration of a day trade can be hours or minutes. Day traders require technical analysis skills and knowledge of important technical indicators to maximize their profit gains. Just like scalp trades, day trades rely on incremental gains throughout the day for trading.
In a swing trade, the trader holds the position for a period longer than a day; i.e., they may hold the position for days or weeks. Swing trades can be useful during major announcements by governments or times of economic tumult. Since they have a longer timeline, swing trades do not require constant monitoring of the markets throughout the day. In addition to technical analysis, swing traders should be able to gauge economic and political developments and their impact on currency movement.
In a position trade, the trader holds the currency for a long period of time, lasting for as long as months or even years. This type of trade requires more fundamental analysis skills because it provides a reasoned basis for the trade.

Charts Used in Forex Trading

Three types of charts are used in forex trading. They are:

Line Charts

Line charts are used to identify big-picture trends for a currency. They are the most basic and common type of chart used by forex traders. They display the closing trading price for the currency for the time periods specified by the user. The trend lines identified in a line chart can be used to devise trading strategies. For example, you can use the information contained in a trend line to identify breakouts or a change in trend for rising or declining prices.

While it can be useful, a line chart is generally used as a starting point for further trading analysis.

Bar Charts

Much like other instances in which they are used, bar charts are used to represent specific time periods for trading. They provide more price information than line charts. Each bar chart represents one day of trading and contains the opening price, highest price, lowest price, and closing price (OHLC) for a trade. A dash on the left is the day’s opening price, and a similar dash on the right represents the closing price. Colors are sometimes used to indicate price movement, with green or white used for periods of rising prices and red or black for a period during which prices declined.

Bar charts for currency trading help traders identify whether it is a buyer’s market or a seller’s market.

Candlestick Charts

Candlestick charts were first used by Japanese rice traders in the 18th century. They are visually more appealing and easier to read than the chart types described above. The upper portion of a candle is used for the opening price and highest price point used by a currency, and the lower portion of a candle is used to indicate the closing price and lowest price point. A down candle represents a period of declining prices and is shaded red or black, while an up candle is a period of increasing prices and is shaded green or white.

The formations and shapes in candlestick charts are used to identify market direction and movement. Some of the more common formations for candlestick charts are hanging man and shooting star.

Pros and Cons of Trading Forex

Pros	Cons
Forex markets are the largest in terms of daily trading volume in the world and therefore offer the most liquidity. This makes it easy to enter and exit a position in any of the major currencies within a fraction of a second for a small spread in most market conditions. The forex market is traded 24 hours a day, five and a half days a week—starting each day in Australia and ending in New York. The broad time horizon and coverage offer traders several opportunities to make profits or cover losses. The major forex market centers are Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Zurich. The extensive use of leverage in forex trading means that you can start with little capital and multiply your profits. Automation of forex markets lends itself well to rapid execution of trading strategies, Forex trading generally follows the same rules as regular trading and requires much less initial capital; therefore, it is easier to start trading forex compared to stocks. The forex market is more decentralized than traditional stock or bond markets. There is no centralized exchange that dominates currency trade operations, and the potential for manipulation, through insider information about a company or stock, is lower.	Even though they are the most liquid markets in the world, forex trades are much more volatile than regular markets. Extreme amounts of leverage have led to many dealers becoming insolvent unexpectedly. Banks, brokers, and dealers in the forex markets allow a high amount of leverage, which means that traders can control large positions with relatively little money of their own. Leverage in the range of 100:1 is not uncommon in forex. A trader must understand the use of leverage and the risks that leverage introduces in an account. Trading currencies productively requires an understanding of economic fundamentals and indicators. A currency trader needs to have a big-picture understanding of the economies of the various countries and their interconnectedness to grasp the fundamentals that drive currency values. The decentralized nature of forex markets means that it is less accountable to regulation than other financial markets. The extent and nature of regulation in forex markets depend on the jurisdiction of trading. Forex markets lack instruments that provide regular income, such as regular dividend payments, that might make them attractive to investors who are not interested in exponential returns.

Pros

Cons

Forex markets are the largest in terms of daily trading volume in the world and therefore offer the most liquidity. This makes it easy to enter and exit a position in any of the major currencies within a fraction of a second for a small spread in most market conditions.

The forex market is traded 24 hours a day, five and a half days a week—starting each day in Australia and ending in New York. The broad time horizon and coverage offer traders several opportunities to make profits or cover losses. The major forex market centers are Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Zurich.

The extensive use of leverage in forex trading means that you can start with little capital and multiply your profits.

Automation of forex markets lends itself well to rapid execution of trading strategies,

Forex trading generally follows the same rules as regular trading and requires much less initial capital; therefore, it is easier to start trading forex compared to stocks.

The forex market is more decentralized than traditional stock or bond markets. There is no centralized exchange that dominates currency trade operations, and the potential for manipulation, through insider information about a company or stock, is lower.

Even though they are the most liquid markets in the world, forex trades are much more volatile than regular markets.

Extreme amounts of leverage have led to many dealers becoming insolvent unexpectedly.

Banks, brokers, and dealers in the forex markets allow a high amount of leverage, which means that traders can control large positions with relatively little money of their own. Leverage in the range of 100:1 is not uncommon in forex. A trader must understand the use of leverage and the risks that leverage introduces in an account.

Trading currencies productively requires an understanding of economic fundamentals and indicators. A currency trader needs to have a big-picture understanding of the economies of the various countries and their interconnectedness to grasp the fundamentals that drive currency values.

The decentralized nature of forex markets means that it is less accountable to regulation than other financial markets. The extent and nature of regulation in forex markets depend on the jurisdiction of trading.

Forex markets lack instruments that provide regular income, such as regular dividend payments, that might make them attractive to investors who are not interested in exponential returns.

What is forex?

Forex, short for foreign exchange, refers to the trading of one currency for another. It is also known as FX.

Where is forex traded?

Forex is traded primarily via three venues: spot markets, forwards markets, and futures markets. The spot market is the largest of all three markets because it is the “underlying” asset on which forwards and futures markets are based.

Why do people trade currencies?

Companies and traders use forex for two main reasons: speculation and hedging. The former is used by traders to make money off the rise and fall of currency prices, while the latter is used to lock in prices for manufacturing and sales in overseas markets.

Are forex markets volatile?

Forex markets are among the most liquid markets in the world. Hence, they tend to be less volatile than other markets like real estate. The volatility of a particular currency is a function of multiple factors, such as the politics and economics of its country. Therefore, events like economic instability in the form of a payment default or imbalance in trading relationships with another currency can result in significant volatility.

Are forex markets regulated?

Forex trade regulation depends on the jurisdiction. Countries like the United States have sophisticated infrastructure and markets to conduct forex trades. Hence, forex trades are tightly regulated there by the National Futures Association (NFA) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). However, due to the heavy use of leverage in forex trades, developing countries like India and China have restrictions on the firms and capital to be used in forex trading. Europe is the largest market for forex trades. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is responsible for monitoring and regulating forex trades in the United Kingdom.

Which currencies can I trade in?

Currencies with high liquidity have a ready market and, therefore, exhibit smooth and predictable price action in response to external events. The U.S. dollar is the most traded currency in the world. It features in six of the seven currency pairs with the most liquidity in the markets. Currencies with low liquidity, however, cannot be traded in large lot sizes without significant market movement being associated with the price. Such currencies generally belong to developing countries. When they are paired with the currency of a developed country, an exotic pair is formed. For example, a pairing of the U.S. dollar with India’s rupee (USD/INR) is considered an exotic pair.

How to get started with forex trading

The first step to forex trading is to educate yourself about the market’s operations and terminology. Next, you need to develop a trading strategy based on your finances and risk tolerance. Finally, you should open a brokerage account. Today, it is easier than ever to open and fund a forex account online and begin trading currencies.

Personally, I find it easier to trade forex with an intelligent robot. If you are interested in this type of trading, click here to register. Note that registering through this link makes you my downline, and there is a 50% Xmas promo on the robot price which ends on 24 December 2021. If you have any questions, just ask in the comments section below. I will write an article on using intelligent robots to trade forex in the near future.

The Bottom Line

For traders—especially those with limited funds—day trading or swing trading in small amounts is easier in the forex market than in other markets. For those with longer-term horizons and larger funds, long-term fundamentals-based trading or a carry trade can be profitable. A focus on understanding the macroeconomic fundamentals that drive currency values, as well as experience with technical analysis, may help new forex traders to become more profitable.

Key Learning and Take Away

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The terms FX, forex, foreign exchange market, and currency market are synonymous and all refer to the forex market.
The foreign exchange (also known as FX or forex) market is a global marketplace for exchanging national currencies.
Because of the worldwide reach of trade, commerce, and finance, forex markets tend to be the largest and most liquid asset markets in the world.
Currencies trade against each other as exchange rate pairs. For example, EUR/USD is a currency pair for trading the euro against the U.S. dollar.
Forex markets exist as spot (cash) markets as well as derivatives markets, offering forwards, futures, options, and currency swaps.
Market participants use forex to hedge against international currency and interest rate risk, to speculate on geopolitical events, and to diversify portfolios, among other reasons.

In a previous article we discussed the topic, 'What is Forex?' (see link below). The next topic discusses 'Getting Started in Forex' (link below).

« What Is Forex?Getting Started »

What Is Foreign Exchange (Forex)?

2021-12-18T09:47:00.020+01:00

The foreign exchange market (Forex, FX, or currency market) is a global decentralized or over-the-counter (OTC) market for trading of currencies. It determines foreign exchange rates for every currency, and includes all aspects of buying, selling and exchanging currencies at current or determined prices.

However, many neither understand it nor know how to make money from it, while others have demonized it as an easy way to lose your money. In this article, we discuss the basic fundamentals of forex for beginners and advanced users who want to refresh.

In this article:
What Is Foreign Exchange (Forex)?
How Does the Forex Work?
Trading in the Forex Market
Differences in the Forex Markets
The Spot Market
The Forward Market
The Futures Market
Example of Foreign Exchange
How Big Is the Foreign Exchange Market?
What Is Foreign Exchange Trading?
How Does Foreign Exchange Differ from Other Markets?
Key Learning and Take Away

What Is Foreign Exchange (Forex)?

Foreign Exchange (forex or FX) is the trading of one currency for another. For example, one can swap the U.S. dollar for the euro. Foreign exchange transactions can take place on the foreign exchange market, also known as the forex market.

The forex market is the largest, most liquid market in the world, with trillions of dollars changing hands every day. There is no centralized location. Rather, the forex market is an electronic network of banks, brokers, institutions, and individual traders (mostly trading through brokers or banks).

How Does the Forex Work?

The market determines the value, also known as an exchange rate, of the majority of currencies. Foreign exchange can be as simple as walking into your local bank and changing one currency for another. It can also involve trading currency on the foreign exchange market. For example, a trader is betting a central bank will ease or tighten monetary policy and that one currency will strengthen versus the other.

When trading currencies, they are listed in pairs, such as USD/CAD, EUR/USD, or USD/JPY. These represent the U.S. dollar (USD) versus the Canadian dollar (CAD), the euro (EUR) versus the USD, and the USD versus the Japanese yen (JPY).

There will also be a price associated with each pair, such as 1.2569. If this price was associated with the USD/CAD pair, it means that it costs 1.2569 CAD to buy one USD. If the price increases to 1.3336, then it now costs 1.3336 CAD to buy one USD. The USD has increased in value (CAD decrease) because it now costs more CAD to buy one USD.

In the forex market, currencies trade in lots, called micro, mini, and standard lots. A micro lot is 1,000 worth of a given currency, a mini lot is 10,000, and a standard lot is 100,000. This is different than when you go to a bank and want $450 exchanged for your trip. When trading in the electronic forex market, trades take place in set blocks of currency, but you can trade as many blocks as you like. For example, you can trade seven micro lots (7,000), three mini lots (30,000), or 75 standard lots (7,500,000).

The foreign exchange market is unique for several reasons, mainly because of its size. Trading volume in the forex market is generally very large. As an example, trading in foreign exchange markets averaged $6.6 trillion per day in April 2019, according to the Bank for International Settlements, which is owned by 63 central banks and is used to work in monetary and financial responsibility. The largest trading centers are London, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

Trading in the Forex Market

The market is open 24 hours a day, five days a week across major financial centers across the globe. This means that you can buy or sell currencies at any time during the day or night.

The foreign exchange market isn't exactly a one-stop shop. There are a whole variety of different avenues that an investor can go through in order to execute forex trades. You can go through different dealers or through different financial centers which use a host of electronic networks.

From a historical standpoint, foreign exchange was once a concept for governments, large companies, and hedge funds. But in today's world, trading currencies is as easy as a click of a mouse—accessibility is no longer an issue, which means anyone can do it. Many investment companies offer the chance for individuals to open accounts and trade currencies however and whenever they choose.

When you're making trades in the forex market, you're basically buying or selling the currency of a particular country. But there's no physical exchange of money from one hand to another. That's contrary to what happens at a foreign exchange kiosk—think of a tourist visiting Times Square in New York City from Japan. They may be converting their (physical) yen to actual U.S. dollar cash (and may be charged a commission fee to do so) so they can spend their money while they're traveling.

But in the world of electronic markets, traders are usually taking a position in a specific currency, with the hope that there will be some upward movement and strength in the currency that they're buying (or weakness if they're selling) so they can make a profit.

Differences in the Forex Markets

There are some fundamental differences between foreign exchange and other markets. First of all, there are fewer rules, which means investors aren't held to as strict standards or regulations as those in the stock, futures, or options markets. That means there are no clearing houses and no central bodies that oversee the forex market.

Second, since trades don't take place on a traditional exchange, you won't find the same fees or commissions that you would on another market. Next, there's no cutoff as to when you can and cannot trade. Because the market is open 24 hours a day, you can trade at any time of day. Finally, because it's such a liquid market, you can get in and out whenever you want and you can buy as much currency as you can afford.

The Spot Market

Spot for most currencies is two business days; the major exception is the U.S. dollar versus the Canadian dollar, which settles on the next business day. Other pairs settle in two business days. During periods that have multiple holidays, such as Easter or Christmas, spot transactions can take as long as six days to settle. The price is established on the trade date, but money is exchanged on the value date.

The U.S. dollar is the most actively traded currency. The most common pairs are the USD versus the euro, Japanese yen, British pound, and Australian dollar (see here, pages 10 and 5 respectively). Trading pairs that do not include the dollar are referred to as crosses. The most common crosses are the euro versus the pound and yen.

The spot market can be very volatile. Movement in the short term is dominated by technical trading, which focuses on direction and speed of movement. People who focus on technicals are often referred to as chartists. Long-term currency moves are driven by fundamental factors such as relative interest rates and economic growth.

The Forward Market

A forward trade is any trade that settles further in the future than spot. The forward price is a combination of the spot rate plus or minus forward points that represent the interest rate differential between the two currencies. Most have a maturity of less than a year in the future but longer is possible. Like with a spot, the price is set on the transaction date, but money is exchanged on the maturity date.

A forward contract is tailor-made to the requirements of the counterparties. They can be for any amount and settle on any date that is not a weekend or holiday in one of the countries.

The Futures Market

A futures transaction is similar to a forward in that it settles later than a spot deal, but is for standard size and settlement date and is traded on a commodities market. The exchange acts as the counterparty.

Example of Foreign Exchange

A trader thinks that the European Central Bank (ECB) will be easing its monetary policy in the coming months as the Eurozone’s economy slows. As a result, the trader bets that the euro will fall against the U.S. dollar and sells short €100,000 at an exchange rate of 1.15. Over the next several weeks the ECB signals that it may indeed ease its monetary policy. That causes the exchange rate for the euro to fall to 1.10 versus the dollar. It creates a profit for the trader of $5,000.

By shorting €100,000, the trader took in $115,000 for the short sale. When the euro fell, and the trader covered their short, it cost the trader only $110,000 to repurchase the currency. The difference between the money received on the short-sale and the buy to cover it is the profit. Had the euro strengthened versus the dollar, it would have resulted in a loss.

How Big Is the Foreign Exchange Market?

The foreign exchange market is extremely liquid and dwarfs, by a huge amount, the daily trading volume of the stock and bond markets. According to the latest triennial survey conducted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), trading in foreign exchange markets averaged $6.6 trillion per day in 2019. By contrast, the total notional value of U.S. equity markets on Oct. 7, 2021, was approximately $501 billion. The largest forex trading centers are London, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

What Is Foreign Exchange Trading?

When you're making trades in the forex market, you're basically buying the currency of a particular country and simultaneously selling the currency of another country. But there's no physical exchange of money from one hand to another. Traders are usually taking a position in a specific currency, with the hope that there will be some strength in the currency, relative to the other currency, that they're buying (or weakness if they're selling) so they can make a profit. In today's world of electronic markets, trading currencies is as easy as a click of a mouse.

How Does Foreign Exchange Differ from Other Markets?

There are some fundamental differences between foreign exchange and other markets. There are no clearing houses and no central bodies to oversee the forex market which means investors aren't held to the strict standards or regulations as those in the stock, futures, or options markets. Second, there aren't the fees or commissions that exist for other markets that have traditional exchanges. There is no cutoff time for trading, aside from the weekend, so one can trade at any time of day. Finally, its liquidity lends to its ease of trading access.

Key Learning and Take Away?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Foreign Exchange (forex, FX or or currency market) is a global market for exchanging national currencies with one another.
Foreign exchange venues comprise the largest securities market in the world by nominal value, with trillions of dollars changing hands each day.
Foreign exchange trading utilizes currency pairs, priced in terms of one versus the other.
Forwards and futures are another way to participate in the forex market.

Our next topic is a guide for beginners on how to start forex trading, and entitled, 'Forex Trading: A beginner's guide' (see link below).

Forex Trading: A Beginner’s Guide »

Thinking About Investing in Bitcoin? Here Are Facts Before You Start

2021-10-26T23:54:00.044+01:00

Should you invest in Bitcoin? Or other cryptocurrencies for that matter? You should get the facts about trading Bitcoin before you start; and also decide on an appropriate investment strategy, conduct your own crypto market research, and have an objective source of crypto news and updates.

A cryptocurrency (or crypto, for short) is a type of digital or virtual currency that doesn’t need to exist in a physical form to have value. These days cryptocurrencies have become extremely popular due to their decentralized exchange system between peers, making it one of the most sought-after asset class. But should you really invest in them, or in Bitcoin for that matter? This article looks at things to consider.

In this article:
Investing in Bitcoin: What to consider before you buy Bitcoin
Who should include Bitcoin in their portfolios?
How should you invest in Bitcoin?
Getting objective news and doing your research
What drives Bitcoin’s price?
Bitcoin: Miners and Forks
History of Bitcoin
Conclusion: Can Bitcoin remain the king of cryptos?

Investing in Bitcoin: What to consider before you buy Bitcoin

Bitcoin (BTC) is the first cryptocurrency in the world, launched in 2009. It is also the first wide-scale, real-world application of blockchain technology. Bitcoin is a decentralised network which uses a public ledger to approve transactions, eliminating the need for third party approval (such as a bank). It also operates free of a governing body, such as a central bank, and all changes in the network require consensus from its members. While initially BTC value was extremely low, priced at fractions of cents, it picked up steam over the years, reaching price levels in the thousands of dollars for a single Bitcoin token and a market cap in the hundreds of billions.

The Bitcoin chart often displays extreme volatility, having short-term price spikes and tumbles. Sometimes, when the Bitcoin price is on the rise, more people are inclined to buy Bitcoin, fueling its positive run further. On the other hand, when the Bitcoin value is on the decline, it can prompt existing investors to sell off their Bitcoin and push prices down. Moreover, Bitcoin is considered the bellwether of the cryptocurrency space, so it can often generate industry-wide trends.

Who should include Bitcoin in their portfolios?

Those with an interest in Bitcoin cut across several spectrum. Do you fall into one of them?

Cryptocurrency traders: Bitcoin is the most well-known cryptocurrency, and therefore, many crypto traders buy it as part of their cryptocurrency portfolio. To trade, you will need to have an account with a cryptocurrency exchange, such as Binance. See the separate article: Binance: Buy, Sell, Earn and Grow Crypto on the World's Largest Crypto Exchange Platform.

Long-term investors: While still considered an extremely volatile and risky market, Bitcoin has shown tremendous price increases over time. Therefore, those who believe the overall trend will continue to be positive could consider a Bitcoin investment.

Day traders: BTC prices can often have significant price swings over the course of a few hours. Traders can try to take advantage of these movements in an attempt to generate short-term profits.

Blockchain enthusiasts: Since Bitcoin is the first major application of blockchain technology, those who have faith in the technology and its potential impact on the tech and financial industries, could consider buying Bitcoin.

How should you invest in Bitcoin?

Bitcoin prices depend mostly on speculation about its adoption and use. While the increase in institutional adoption has helped drive Bitcoin’s price higher, it still lacks the traditional economic rationale that allows investors to expect Bitcoin to continue to generate positive real returns over time.

Perhaps that will change over time. Or, perhaps you don’t care. But then, there is nothing traditional about Bitcoin. And many will argue it is the asset of the future.

If you are a traditional investor and really want to add Bitcoin to your portfolio, consider the relative market weight of that asset class compared to the relative weights of your other portfolio assets, that is if you have other portfolio assets.

For example, the global stock and bond markets have market capitalizations of roughly $70 trillion and $130 trillion, respectively. As of right now, Bitcoin’s market value is just over $1 trillion. An asset allocator’s starting point might be giving about 0.5% of their portfolio to Bitcoin ($1 trillion divided by $201 trillion).

If you are not a traditional investor, this probably does not apply to you.

There are other reasons to keep your exposure relatively small, at least for now. For starters, 20% or larger price swings are not uncommon. Two years ago, Bitcoin lost half its value in two days and months later, fell by 20% in a day. Bitcoin has also had several, much more significant crashes, losing up to 85% of its value in hours or days.

On the flip side however, just last week, Bitcoin surged to more than $66,000 in a matter of hours, giving its investors huge profits to take home.

And of course, there is also the non-zero probability that Bitcoin’s value falls to zero, even though this is far-fetched. Bitcoin is still a relatively new asset that may be at risk of future regulation or restrictions by governments.

If you have a thoughtfully-crafted financial plan, it’s unlikely you will require an asset to go absolutely bonkers in order to meet your goals. The most strategic plans focus on minimizing investment mistakes instead of earning outsized returns, so speculative investments such as Bitcoin should be allocated accordingly.

Having said the above, I personally have used strategies to minimise this risk to a bare minimum. I find that using a trading bot like Royal Q on any of the world's large crypto trading platforms like Binance or Huobi, helps me maximize returns no matter how low Bitcoin or other cryptos crash down to. This is because these platforms allow APIs which this bot can plug into for quantitative crypto trading. Thus, it buys at that low price to get an average price and monitors the market continuously to sell off immediately there is a rise. Quantitative trading is a mathematical process and a bit more complex, but so far, the bot has handled it well and it has worked even when there have been significant crashes.

On the other hand, you can also use such strategies manually without the need for a quantitative trading bot if you are registered to trade on a smaller trading platform, such as Luno or Blockchain Exchange platforms.

We all have different appetites for risk. So, if you are not a natural risk taker, but wish to invest in Bitcoin, then start small and gradually build up as you educate yourself further. I will soon be doing an article on The Best Strategy to Make Money Daily from Cryptocurrency: My Personal Experience.

Getting objective news and doing your own research

Coin Gecko and Coin Desk are probably the best sites to get objective crypto news and updates from. There may be other sites, but I find these two most useful for my research, news and updates on anything crypto, starting with Bitcoin down to the least known cryptocurrency.

CoinDesk is a US-based news site specializing in bitcoin and digital currencies news across the world, and began publishing in May 2013. Coin Gecko allows you to assess any crypto's price, charts, information, and many other useful stuff. It would be worth your while checking them out.

What drives Bitcoin’s price?

Bitcoin is a highly volatile instrument that has experienced tremendous price movements over the years, sometimes gaining hundreds of percentage points or crashing significantly over a relatively short period of time. While it is less affected by happenings in mainstream markets, it can be affected by a variety of factors relating to the crypto space, the blockchain industry and by regulatory issues. Here are a few examples:

General crypto trends: In late 2017, cryptocurrencies were heavily debated in the media. People, who previously hadn’t heard of the crypto, started asking how to buy Bitcoin. This sparked a massive crypto bull run, which peaked in December of 2017 when nearly all the major cryptos reached record highs.
Mainstream market volatility: Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto industry operate separately from other markets. Therefore, when mainstream markets are on the decline or become too volatile, some traders and investors turn to the crypto market as an alternative.
Traditional financial institutions: Over the years, there have been several attempts to introduce Bitcoin into mainstream markets in the form of ETFs, futures contracts and other financial instruments. Since many of these instruments require regulatory approval, traditional regulatory bodies, such as the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), could have a major impact on the market, whether they approve or deny such instruments. This is demonstrated recently when the US SEC approved Bitcoin Futures ETF, thus opening up Bitcoin, and potentially other cryptos, to a wider investor base, and resulting in a massive bull run that saw Bitcoin surge to over $66,000 per BTC coin.
The blockchain industry: Some experts believe that blockchain has the potential to revolutionise many areas of the technology and financial industries. Bitcoin is the first and one of the largest blockchain networks in the world, and as the technology becomes more widespread, more people might be inclined to buy BTC.

Bitcoin: Miners and Forks

The way Bitcoin works as a decentralised network relies on its members, some of which are miners. Miners allocate computing power to carry out transactions and are rewarded a small fee for each transaction. Since these processes require computing power and electricity, Bitcoin miners are usually those who invested significant sums of money to build mining computers. What is crypto mining?

However, miners have another key role. When the Bitcoin blockchain network needs to undergo a change or an upgrade, it needs the approval of its members, which can signal whether or not they approve the change. If the change is significant and makes the platform backward compatible, it is known as a hard fork. When not enough participants approve the change, a hard fork results in a parallel blockchain network being created.

Such was the case with the Bitcoin Cash hard fork in August 2017. With this hard fork, a group of developers intentionally rolled out a protocol they knew would be rejected by some members of the network, hence creating a hard fork and a new cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Cash became incredibly successful, reaching a market cap in the billions and becoming a top 5 crypto.

History of Bitcoin

Bitcoin was founded in 2008 and launched the next year by an unknown person or persons using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. While initially it was only adopted by blockchain enthusiasts, the fact that it enabled users to carry out transactions quickly and while maintaining their anonymity, made its popularity grow exponentially over time. The first purchase of physical goods using Bitcoin ever made was 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, in 2010. The same pizzas would be worth $190,000,000 in January 2018.

As Bitcoin became more popular, numerous other cryptocurrencies were created. Some were built on the same technology, while others created blockchain protocols of their own. However, despite growing competition in the crypto space, Bitcoin has maintained its place as the world’s largest crypto by market capitalization for many years. See this on Coin Gecko.

Conclusion: Can Bitcoin remain the king of cryptos?

Much has happened in the crypto industry since Bitcoin was the only cryptocurrency in the world. Growing rapidly in number, there are thousands of other cryptos today, many with significant market caps and trading volumes. However, Bitcoin remains at the forefront of the industry, if only due to its sheer, massive size. As the industry progresses and diversifies, there is a possibility Bitcoin may lose its place as the largest crypto. However, such a scenario seems very unlikely in the near future, and Bitcoin could very well maintain its spot as the world’s top crypto for years to come.

IMPORTANT NOTES:
*Cryptocurrencies can fluctuate widely in price and are therefore not appropriate for all investors. At the moment, trading cryptocurrencies is not supervised by any government regulatory framework.

*This content is for information and educational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or investment recommendation.

*Past performance is not an indication of future results. Investing in cryptocurrency can be very protitable, but also risky. Your capital could be at risk.

What are Mutual Funds? Are there pros and cons to be aware of?

2021-09-27T17:08:00.016+01:00

“What are mutual funds?” What are they made up of? How would I benefit the most from a mutual fund? Do they have any pros and cons, especially 'cons' to be aware of? And other similar questions!

These are the sort of questions that every shares & stock and/or mutual fund newbie investor asks. And there is nothing wrong with them questions.

In this article, I’ll explain what a mutual fund is using the Ice Cream to break down exactly what this concept means. And then we will look at its pros and cons.

Before we dive in though, please, do me a favour. After reading this article, kindly leave a comment to say whether you have understood mutual funds better or not. It’ll help me know that this was simple to digest. And if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments too.

So what are mutual funds?

Mutual funds are a type of investment that allows you to invest in different types of assets at once while allowing you to be as hands-off as possible with paperwork and other intricacies. It’s a basket of different investments put together to form one asset group. That asset group is called the mutual fund and the professionals who put the different investments together are fund managers.

Who are fund managers?

Fund managers are investment experts who work as professional asset managers to help meet specified investment goals on behalf of investors. They use their expertise and experience to determine what a mutual fund should comprise and how a fund should be invested profitably.

Back to mutual funds, let me break it down with ice cream.

The Ice Cream analogy

Instead of buying 4 cups of ice cream with just one flavour in each, many people prefer to buy a cup with different flavours and toppings in it. These lovers of ice cream never buy strawberry, vanilla, cheesecake or chocolate flavours in 4 different cups. Instead, they buy the biggest cup or cone and then put all their favorite flavours in it with any topping they're craving at the time.

Investing in a mutual fund is like that. It’s a simple way to diversify without the hassle of buying and managing the assets one after the other. A fund manager does the “hard work” of putting different assets together; you then buy shares from the “basket”. Simply put, a fund manager brings together cash from multiple investors, and uses the bulk amount to buy carefully selected assets.

With mutual funds, you’re diversifying in a quick way but only buying one thing.

You’re investing in bits of everything. Just like enjoying different ice cream flavours in one cone!

Understanding the different risk levels

Mutual funds are universally separated into three risk levels: low, medium and high risk. You’re advised to stick to certain types of mutual funds, depending on your risk profile as an investor.

When you invest in equity mutual funds (Aggressive Funds), what you’re investing in are company stocks. So you’re buying a piece of different companies like Google, Apple, Nestle, MTN, Total, etc.

While when you invest in conservative funds (low-risk funds), you’re investing in low-risk instruments like treasury bills, bank deposits, commercial papers, bonds, call cash.

When you then invest in balanced (medium-risk) funds, you’re investing in a mix of both high-risk funds and low-risk funds.

Back to the ice cream flavour analogy. Let’s say regular flavours like strawberry, vanilla and chocolate are conservative. They’re for people who don’t like to explore or try out “new things”. It means that their ice cream cone will only have these flavours that promise you a certain taste back.

But high-risk flavours are flavours like mint, buttered pecan, and cookie dough because they can taste great today and taste really bad tomorrow. So they’re for adventurous people.

Investing in medium risk assets is you then buying a mix of chocolate and buttered pecan in your cone. You’re in the middle, like the people who prefer a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Did someone say trust issues? Ok ok, moving on!

Can you explain the risk levels to me?

Of course!

Aggressive Funds:

They contain a higher mix of stocks and are usually called high-risk funds.

For example, the ARM Aggressive Growth Fund is made up of 79.59% equities and just 20.41% of fixed income instruments. If the percentages were vice versa, this would have been a low-risk fund because it’ll have a higher percentage of conservative instruments.

Anyway, when you go deeper into the assets under the ARM Aggressive Growth Fund, you find that it is spread into the Banking, Consumer Goods and Industrials industries. When you go even deeper again, you find that it has companies like MTNN, NESTLE and DANGCEM in its portfolio.

So when you invest in this specific ARM fund, you get shares in MTN and NESTLE without having filled long forms or stood on queues.

Balanced Funds:

These are usually referred to as medium risk funds and they contain a mix of stocks and low-risk instruments like bonds and money market.

Conservative Funds:

They’re usually called low-risk funds and contain assets like treasury bills, bank deposits, commercial papers, bonds, and money market instruments.

Who are mutual funds for?

Mutual funds are for investors who have money but don’t want to do the stressful work of investing in separate assets and managing the paperwork of buying each, one by one.

They’re great for first-time investors or people who just want a more seamless investing experience where the fund manager is in charge of managing the performance of the fund.

If you’re to create your own mutual fund, you’ll have to personally go buy Google stock, buy Apple stock, buy treasury bills, bonds, then manage the performance of the mix of all these yourself.

By investing in mutual funds, you give your money to a fund manager and ask them to invest it in various financial instruments for you.

What are the pros and cons of mutual funds?

Pros

Provides Options: In life, having options is crucial. Typical fund managers would usually have many types of mutual funds available for you to choose from. Each one has a different investment strategy and risk level and anyone can find one that meets their investment needs.
Professional Management: Fund managers are the professionals in this case and they know a lot about putting various assets together. You don’t need to worry about buying shares in the nick of time or watching closely on a daily basis to balance your portfolio out. That’s the job of the fund manager.
Inexpensive: One of the major goals of fund managers is to give retail investors access to profitable investment opportunities and mutual funds are the major way they get that done. Mutual funds allow you to start investing with what you can afford while you work to grow your assets. They’re one of the most inexpensive ways to invest in a diversified portfolio.
Diversification: As stated earlier, you’ll have to do a lot of work to build a diverse portfolio without mutual funds. By investing in one mutual fund, you can easily diversify your investment into different asset types.
Easy to convert to cash: If there’s a need for quick cash, you can easily sell your shares in mutual funds. They’re also very easy to buy.
Generally low risk: Investing in mutual funds generally comes with less risk of losing all your capital, compared to investing in stocks or cryptocurrency directly. The stock and crypto market is much more volatile, which is why you make much more profit from them if you plan well but can loose all if careless, and so are not really for the faint-hearted. This is unlike mutual funds which is non-volatile, but you make much less profit.

Cons

Fund manager fees: Fund managers in Nigeria usually charge between 1% to 2% to manage mutual fund investments and this can be a turn off to some investors. However, when comparing this to the work a new investor will have to do themselves, this is a little price to pay. The middlemen in any sector have to make some profit and it’s no different in investing.
Little Control Over Your Portfolio: With mutual funds, you have to rely on fund managers to create the mix that will make up your portfolio and you also rely on them to make informed decisions. You can’t decide to invest more in a particular asset except you buy mutual funds that have more of those kinds of assets.

Now that you have answers to the “What are mutual funds?” question. What should you do next?

I could end this with a lot of aspire to perspire but I’ll be straightforward and say – start investing in mutual funds now to diversify your portfolio.

When you start early, you learn much more than the person who’s sitting on the sidelines. There are insights about investing you can never learn until you actually take action. You can choose from the many options presented by many fund managers right now.

I love the stocks and crypto markets, but I also do some mutual fund investments as well, to diversify portfolio and spread risk. Start with one, and plan to jump into the others as well.

Cheers to your success! 🥂

Author
This article is adapted from, but complately rewritten, from an original by Cowrywise.

Pi Network: The First Digital Currency You Can Mine On Your Phone

2020-10-02T00:17:00.003+01:00

As the world becomes increasingly digital, cryptocurrency is a next natural step in the evolution of money. Pi is the first digital currency for everyday people, representing a major step forward in the adoption of cryptocurrency worldwide.

The Pi Network aims to build a cryptocurrency and smart contracts platform secured and operated by everyday people. It's vision is to build the world’s most inclusive peer-to-peer marketplace, fueled by Pi, the world’s most widely used cryptocurrency.

Why cryptocurrencies matter

Currently, our everyday financial transactions rely upon a trusted third party to maintain a record of transactions. For example, when you do a bank transaction, the banking system keeps a record and guarantees that the transaction is safe and reliable. Likewise, when Cindy transfers $5 to Steve using PayPal, PayPal maintains a central record of $5 dollars debited from Cindy’s account and $5 credited to Steve’s. Intermediaries like banks, PayPal, and other members of the current economic system play an important role in regulating the world’s financial transactions.

However, the role of these trusted intermediaries also has limitations:

Unfair value capture. These intermediaries amass billions of dollars in wealth creation (PayPal market cap is ~$130B), but pass virtually nothing onto their customers - the everyday people on the ground, whose money drives a meaningful proportion of the global economy. More and more people are falling behind.
Fees. Banks and companies charge large fees for facilitating transactions. These fees often disproportionately impact lower-income populations who have the fewest alternatives.
Censorship. If a particular trusted intermediary decides that you should not be able to move your money, it can place restrictions on the movement of your money.
Permissioned. The trusted intermediary serves as a gatekeeper who can arbitrarily prevent anybody from being part of the network.
Pseudonymous. At a time when the issue of privacy is gaining greater urgency, these powerful gatekeepers can accidentally disclose -- or force you to disclose -- more financial information about yourself than you may want.

Bitcoin’s “peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” launched in 2009 by an anonymous programmer (or group) Satoshi Nakamoto, was a watershed moment for the freedom of money. For the first time in history, people could securely exchange value, without requiring a third party or trusted intermediary. Paying in Bitcoin meant that people like Steve and Cindy could pay each other directly, bypassing institutional fees, obstructions and intrusions. Bitcoin was truly a currency without boundaries, powering and connecting a new global economy.

Introduction To Distributed Ledgers

Bitcoin achieved this historical feat by using a distributed record. While the current financial system relies on the traditional central record of truth, the Bitcoin record is maintained by a distributed community of “validators,” who access and update this public ledger. Imagine the Bitcoin protocol as a globally shared “Google Sheet” that contains a record of transactions, validated and maintained by this distributed community.

The breakthrough of Bitcoin (and general blockchain technology) is that, even though the record is maintained by a community, the technology enables them to always reach consensus on truthful transactions, insuring that cheaters cannot record false transactions or overtake the system. This technological advancement allows for the removal of the centralized intermediary, without compromising transactional financial security.

Benefits Of Distributed Ledgers

In addition to decentralization, bitcoin, or cryptocurrencies in general, share a few nice properties that make money smarter and safer, although different cryptocurrencies may be stronger in some properties and weaker in others, based on different implementations of their protocols. Cryptocurrencies are held in cryptographic wallets identified by a publicly accessible address, and is secured by a very strong privately held password, called the private key. This private key cryptographically signs transaction and is virtually impossible to create fraudulent signatures. This provides security and unseizability. Unlike traditional bank accounts that can be seized by government authorities, the cryptocurrency in your wallet can never be taken away by anyone without your private key. Cryptocurrencies are censorship resistant due to the decentralized nature because anyone can submit transactions to any computer in the network to get recorded and validated. Cryptocurrency transactions are immutable because each block of transactions represents a cryptographic proof (a hash) of all the previous blocks that existed before that. Once someone sends you money, they cannot steal back their payment to you (i.e., no bouncing checks in blockchain). Some of the cryptocurrencies can even support atomic transactions. “Smart contracts” built atop these cryptocurrencies do not merely rely on law for enforcement, but directly enforced through publicly auditable code, which make them trustless and can potentially get rid of middlemen in many businesses, e.g. Escrow for real estate.

Securing Distributed Ledgers (Mining)

One of challenges of maintaining a distributed record of transactions is security -- specifically, how to have an open and editable ledger while preventing fraudulent activity. To address this challenge, Bitcoin introduced a novel process called Mining (using the consensus algorithm “Proof of Work”) to determine who is “trusted” to make updates to the shared record of transactions.

You can think of mining as a type of economic game that forces “Validators” to prove their merit when trying to add transactions to the record. To qualify, Validators must solve a series of complex computational puzzles. The Validator who solves the puzzle first is rewarded by being allowed to post the latest block of transactions. Posting the latest block of transactions allows Validators to “mine” a Block Reward - currently 12.5 bitcoin (or ~$40,000 at the time of writing).

This process is very secure, but it demands enormous computing power and energy consumption as users essentially “burn money” to solve the computational puzzle that earns them more Bitcoin. The burn-to-reward ratio is so punitive that it is always in Validators’ self-interest to post honest transactions to the Bitcoin record.

Problem: Centralization of power and money put 1st Generation Cryptocurrencies out of reach

In the early days of Bitcoin, when only a few people were working to validate transactions and mining the first blocks, anyone could earn 50 BTC by simply running Bitcoin mining software on their personal computer. As the currency began to gain in popularity, clever miners realized that they could earn more if they had more than one computer working to mine.

As Bitcoin continued to increase in value, entire companies began to spring up to mine. These companies developed specialized chips (“ASICs”) and constructed huge farms of servers using these ASIC chips to mine Bitcoin. The emergence of these enormous mining corporations, known drove the Bitcoin Gold Rush, making it very difficult for everyday people to contribute to the network and get rewarded. Their efforts also began consuming increasingly large amounts of computing energy, contributing to mounting environmental issues around the world.

The ease of mining Bitcoin and the subsequent rise of Bitcoin mining farms quickly produced a massive centralization of production power and wealth in Bitcoin’s network. To provide some context, 87% of all Bitcoins are now owned by 1% of their network, many of these coins were mined virtually free in their early days. As another example, Bitmain, one of Bitcoin’s biggest mining operations has earned billions in revenue and profits.

The centralization of power in Bitcoin’s network makes it very difficult and expensive for the average person. If you want to acquire Bitcoin, your easiest options are to:

Mine It Yourself. Just hook up the specialized hardware (here’s a rig on Amazon, if you’re interested!) and go to town. Just know that since you’ll be competing against massive server farms from across the world, consuming as much energy as the country of Switzerland, you won’t be able to mine much
Buy Bitcoin on an exchange. Today, you can buy Bitcoin at a unit price of $3,500 / coin at the time of writing (note: you can buy fractional amount of Bitcoin!) Of course, you would also be taking on substantial risk in doing so as the price of Bitcoin is quite volatile.

Bitcoin was the first to show how cryptocurrency could disrupt the current financial model, giving people the ability to make transactions without having a third party in the way. The increase in freedom, flexibility, and privacy continues to drive the inevitable march toward digital currencies as a new norm. Despite its benefits, Bitcoin’s (likely unintended) concentration of money and power present a meaningful barrier to mainstream adoption. As Pi’s core team has conducted research to try to understand why people are reluctant to enter the cryptocurrency space. People consistently cited the risk of investing/mining as a key barrier to entry.

Solution: Pi - Enabling mining on mobile phones

After identifying these key barriers to adoption, the Pi Core Team set out to find a way that would allow everyday people to mine (or earn cryptocurrency rewards for validating transactions on a distributed record of transactions). As a refresher, one of the major challenges that arises with maintaining a distributed record of transactions is ensuring that updates to this open record are not fraudulent. While Bitcoin’s process for updating its record is proven (burning energy / money to prove trustworthiness), it is not very user (or planet!) friendly. For Pi, we introduced the additional design requirement of employing a consensus algorithm that would also be extremely user friendly and ideally enable mining on personal computers and mobile phones.

To learn more, read the official Frequently Asked Questions.

To claim your Pi, follow this link https://minepi.com/saibaworld and use my username (saibaworld) as your invitation code.

You can also download the Pi Network from Google Play or the App Store.

Author
This article is written by Saibaworld but adapted from an original by the Pi Network.

How to Avoid Mistakes We Make Online - By a A Financial Hacker

2020-06-22T01:01:00.001+01:00

With more of us having to do our banking and other financial transactions online during the coronavirus crisis we need to make sure we're doing all we can to prevent our personal information from being stolen.

A professional "ethical" hacker, whose job entails hacking into clients’ websites, networks, and phone applications to see where the weak points lie and recommending the best course of action to fix the holes recently gave his top tips to make sure you don't fall victim to theft. Click or scroll through to find out the mistakes you might be making and how to best protect yourself and your personal information.

Top tips to avoid common online pitfalls

1). Do not use the same password time after time
The most important advice is to never, ever use the same password twice. If one account is compromised, then all your accounts are compromised.

2). Do not allow your emotions get you into trouble
Most modern-day breaches contain an element of what’s known as social engineering. An attacker plays on human emotions to perform an act. For example, clicking on a malicious email because it sounds like someone is in need, or a colleague who asks for urgent help. It's the online equivalent to opening the door to a secure building for a pregnant lady. See What is a vishing scam?.

3). Some of us will believe any link in an email is genuine
Do not click on any links you cannot vouch for in any emails, and always visit a website by typing into the address bar yourself direct.

4). Being too truthful
“Where were you born?” or “what’s your mother’s maiden name?” are two of the most common questions on websites to ensure your account will be safe from intruders in the future. But sadly these answers aren’t going to be the walls that will keep out any online attackers. Why? Well, if you’ve already divulged this information online, anyone could do some digging and find the answers they need. Don't be afraid to make up some of your information if you can.

5). Sharing unnecessarily...
Don’t share personal information with any network or site unless they need to know for a very important reason. For example, if you’re signing up to a public Wi-Fi hotspot it will ask for your name, date of birth and address. There’s no legal requirement to be honest, so make it up – keep your real details safe.

6). ...especially on social media
The more personal information you share online the more your details are accessible to someone wanting to get their hands on it. Next time you’re on your social media account, make sure the information you share is minimal. Your family and friends will already know your phone number, birth date and email address, so there is no need to divulge this information. If your privacy is important to you, don’t give out your information freely. And most importantly, don't tell people when you go away as this could put your home at risk.

7). Our social media profiles are often open
On your Facebook account, head to the menu in the top right corner of the screen, click on Settings and on this new screen click on Privacy in the menu to the left. Here you will be able to manage your Facebook profile and select 'Friends' for the different questions such as 'Who can see your profile info?' and 'Who can see your future posts?'. This way only your Facebook friends should have access to the content you post. Similarly, with Twitter, go to the settings cog, then Settings. In this window, you’re able to change all kinds of privacy settings, including making tweets private so only people you allow to view your tweets can see them.

8). Giving away too much in exchange for ‘free’ apps
It can be possible for hackers to download spyware onto your device through apps. Before installing make sure to check the permissions on the apps to ensure they won’t store any unnecessary personal information. For example, an app for a game doesn’t need access to your network info or contacts list. It’s better to be safe than sorry, and regularly update apps because they will check for security problems.

9). We don't clear our browser history
This is quite an important tip to use if you’re going to be using the same device as someone else, for example your home computer or a friend’s iPad. Browsers such as Chrome and Firefox keep a record of what you’ve searched for online, and the sites you may have visited. This information could be kept for weeks, and so if you don't clear your browsing history it’s easier for anyone in contact with the device to steal your online activity record. Be safe, and clear it!

10). What you need to have installed
The most important anti-hacker products to use are anti-virus software, which scans regularly, and an ad blocker, as this stops unnecessary items making their way onto your desktop. Some of the best anti-virus software applications include Norton Security, McAfee Total Protection, Kaspersky Total Secure. It's worth having a shop around to see which software program will best suit your desktop.

11). Use a password manager...
By using a password manager, all you need to do is remember one password (alongside a personal hint) which will allow you to keep lots of more complex passwords in a safe environment. An expert in the field says it can take a hacker up to two years to crack a complex eight-character password that a password manager has created.

12). ...even for your fake information
Worried you can’t remember your fake answers? Don't worry. You can create ‘accounts’ in your password manager apps just for this.

13). Set up an extra layer of security #1
It’s wise to set up two factor authentication (or 2FA) on all your important accounts. This is an extra layer of security that requires not only a password and username, but something else – something that you, and only you, have. For example your phone is owned by you alone. An example of 2FA is a security code sent to your smart phone for you to use, in addition to your password and username, to log into your account.

14). Set up an extra layer of security #2
This second layer could be either a further piece of information only you know, a key chain or card reader, or biometrics security such as your fingerprint, voice or the iris of your eye. Using a username and password along with a piece of information only you know will make it harder for hackers to get access into your personal information and steal it. Your bank may provide this for your online account, through hardware tokens alongside your card and PIN.

15). Keep your security up to date
To ensure you keep your devices safe, it’s best to install an anti-virus software, but if you don't update the software when new updates come through your security will be compromised. Make sure you use the latest version of your web browser and install security patches and software updates as soon as they’re available to you. Technology moves forward quickly, so the more recent an update the better online protection you'll have.

16). Beware of using public Wi-Fi
You may have heard that you shouldn't do online banking or other sensitive activities on a public Wi-Fi network. But why? Well, there are a few issues that could surround a public Wi-Fi network. The openness of the network can allow intruders to get in, the network may have already been hit and be full of compromised machines, or the hotspot itself could be malicious.

17). Be sure to check your finances often
Take a look at your bank and credit card accounts frequently – daily is best – as this will ensure you keep on top of any unexpected transactions. You can sign up to alerts to be sent to your email or mobile phone for any unusual transactions.

18). See what your bank is doing to protect you
Make sure you familiarize yourself with your banks’ guarantee for fraud protection. Some large providers offer zero liability for credit and debit cards, while others offer free protection for online banking transactions. By checking with your bank before you use online banking, or before you even sign up with a bank, you’ll be covering all of your bases.

Cryptocurrency Basics, Types, Pros and Cons

2020-04-25T14:47:00.115+01:00

The world of cryptocurrencies have, over the past few years, overtaken the landscape of investing and income opportunity from the more traditional trading of stocks, shares and commodities. Since 2009, bitcoin has steadily risen in value form $0 clearly overtaking the traditional investment vehicles. As at today, 1 bitcoin (BTC) is about $7470-7580. This article explains cryptocurrency, the types, advantages and disadvantages.

What Is Cryptocurrency?

A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Many cryptocurrencies are decentralized networks based on blockchain technology—a distributed ledger enforced by a disparate network of computers. A defining feature of cryptocurrencies is that they are generally not issued by any central authority, rendering them theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A cryptocurrency is a form of digital asset based on a network that is distributed across a large number of computers. This decentralized structure allows them to exist outside the control of governments and central authorities.
The word “cryptocurrency” is derived from the encryption techniques which are used to secure the network.
Blockchains, which are organizational methods for ensuring the integrity of transactional data, are an essential component of many cryptocurrencies.
Many experts believe that blockchain and related technology will disrupt many industries, including finance and law.
Cryptocurrencies face criticism for a number of reasons, including their use for illegal activities, exchange rate volatility, and vulnerabilities of the infrastructure underlying them. However, they also have been praised for their portability, divisibility, inflation resistance, and transparency.

Understanding Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies are systems that allow for secure payments online which are denominated in terms of virtual "tokens," which are represented by ledger entries internal to the system. "Crypto" refers to the various encryption algorithms and cryptographic techniques that safeguard these entries, such as elliptical curve encryption, public-private key pairs, and hashing functions.

Types of Cryptocurrency

The first blockchain-based cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, which still remains the most popular and most valuable. Today, there are thousands of alternate cryptocurrencies with various functions and specifications. Some of these are clones or forks of Bitcoin, while others are new currencies that were built from scratch.

Bitcoin was launched in 2009 by an individual or group known by the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto." As of March 2021, there were over 18.6 million bitcoins in circulation with a total market cap of around $927 billion.

Some of the competing cryptocurrencies spawned by Bitcoin’s success, known as "altcoins," include Litecoin, Peercoin, and Namecoin, as well as Ethereum, Cardano, and EOS. Today, the aggregate value of all the cryptocurrencies in existence is around $1.5 trillion—Bitcoin currently represents more than 60% of the total value.

NOTE: Some of the cryptography used in cryptocurrency today was originally developed for military applications. At one point, the government wanted to put controls on cryptography similar to the legal restrictions on weapons, but the right for civilians to use cryptography was secured on grounds of freedom of speech.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Cryptocurrency

Advantages

Cryptocurrencies hold the promise of making it easier to transfer funds directly between two parties, without the need for a trusted third party like a bank or credit card company. These transfers are instead secured by the use of public keys and private keys and different forms of incentive systems, like Proof of Work or Proof of Stake.

In modern cryptocurrency systems, a user's "wallet," or account address, has a public key, while the private key is known only to the owner and is used to sign transactions. Fund transfers are completed with minimal processing fees, allowing users to avoid the steep fees charged by banks and financial institutions for wire transfers.

Disadvantages

The semi-anonymous nature of cryptocurrency transactions makes them well-suited for a host of illegal activities, such as money laundering and tax evasion. However, cryptocurrency advocates often highly value their anonymity, citing benefits of privacy like protection for whistleblowers or activists living under repressive governments. Some cryptocurrencies are more private than others.

Bitcoin, for instance, is a relatively poor choice for conducting illegal business online, since the forensic analysis of the Bitcoin blockchain has helped authorities arrest and prosecute criminals. More privacy-oriented coins do exist, however, such as Dash, Monero, or ZCash, which are far more difficult to trace.

Special Considerations

Central to the appeal and functionality of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is blockchain technology, which is used to keep an online ledger of all the transactions that have ever been conducted, thus providing a data structure for this ledger that is quite secure and is shared and agreed upon by the entire network of an individual node, or computer maintaining a copy of the ledger. Every new block generated must be verified by each node before being confirmed, making it almost impossible to forge transaction histories.

Many experts see blockchain technology as having serious potential for uses like online voting and crowdfunding, and major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase (JPM) see the potential to lower transaction costs by streamlining payment processing. However, because cryptocurrencies are virtual and are not stored on a central database, a digital cryptocurrency balance can be wiped out by the loss or destruction of a hard drive if a backup copy of the private key does not exist. At the same time, there is no central authority, government, or corporation that has access to your funds or your personal information.

Criticism of Cryptocurrency

Since market prices for cryptocurrencies are based on supply and demand, the rate at which a cryptocurrency can be exchanged for another currency can fluctuate widely, since the design of many cryptocurrencies ensures a high degree of scarcity.

Bitcoin has experienced some rapid surges and collapses in value, climbing as high as $19,000 per Bitcoin in Dec. of 2017 before dropping to around $7,000 in the following months. Cryptocurrencies are thus considered by some economists to be a short-lived fad or speculative bubble.

There is concern that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are not rooted in any material goods. Some research, however, has identified that the cost of producing a Bitcoin, which requires an increasingly large amount of energy, is directly related to its market price.

Cryptocurrency blockchains are highly secure, but other aspects of a cryptocurrency ecosystem, including exchanges and wallets, are not immune to the threat of hacking. In Bitcoin's 10-year history, several online exchanges have been the subject of hacking and theft, sometimes with millions of dollars worth of "coins" stolen.

Nonetheless, many observers see potential advantages in cryptocurrencies, like the possibility of preserving value against inflation and facilitating exchange while being easier to transport and divide than precious metals and existing outside the influence of central banks and governments.

What Is Cryptocurrency FAQs

What Is Cryptocurrency in Simple Words?
Cryptocurrencies are systems that allow for secure payments online which are denominated in terms of virtual "tokens."

How Do You Get Cryptocurrency?
Any investor can purchase cryptocurrency through crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Cash app, and more.

What Is the Point of Cryptocurrency?
Cryptocurrency Many experts see blockchain technology as having serious potential for uses like online voting and crowdfunding, and major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase (JPM) see the potential to lower transaction costs by streamlining payment processing.

How Does Cryptocurrency Make Money?
Cryptocurrencies allow for secure payments online which are denominated in terms of virtual "tokens," which are represented by ledger entries internal to the system. Investors can make money with cryptocurrency by mining Bitcoin, or simply selling their Bitcoin at a profit.

What Are the Most Popular Cryptocurrencies?
Bitcoin is by far the most popular cryptocurrency, followed by other cryptocurrencies such as Etherum, Litecoin, and Cardano.

This article is adapted from an original by Investopedia with the title "Cryptocurrency".

What is a Virtual Private Network (VPN)

2020-03-22T19:33:00.000+01:00

A virtual private network (VPN) gives you online privacy and anonymity by creating a private network from a public internet connection. Much like a firewall protects the data on your computer, a VPN protects your activity by encrypting (or scrambling) your data when you connect to the internet from a remote or public location so you can hide your internet protocol (IP) address and online activity.

VPNs mask your internet protocol (IP) address so your online actions are virtually untraceable. Most important, VPN services establish secure and encrypted connections to provide greater privacy than even a secured Wi-Fi hotspot.

Why do you need a VPN service?

Surfing the web or transacting on an unsecured Wi-Fi network means you could be exposing your private information and browsing habits. That’s why a virtual private network, better known as a VPN, should be a must for anyone concerned about their online security and privacy.

Think about all the times you’ve been on the go, reading emails while in line at the coffee shop, or checking your bank account while waiting at the doctor’s office. Unless you were logged into a private Wi-Fi network that requires a password, any data transmitted during your online session could be vulnerable to eavesdropping by strangers using the same network.

The encryption and anonymity that a VPN provides helps protect your online activities: sending emails, shopping online, or paying bills. VPNs also help keep your web browsing anonymous.

How a VPN protects your IP address and privacy

VPNs essentially create a data tunnel between your local network and an exit node in another location, which could be thousands of miles away, making it seem as if you’re in another place. This benefit allows online freedom, or the ability to access your favorite apps and websites while on the go.

Here’s a closer look at how a virtual private network works. VPNs use encryption to scramble data when it’s sent over a Wi-Fi network. Encryption makes the data unreadable. Data security is especially important when using a public Wi-Fi network, because it prevents anyone else on the network from eavesdropping on your internet activity.

There’s another side to privacy. Without a VPN, your internet service provider can know your entire browsing history. With a VPN, your search history is hidden. That’s because your web activity will be associated with the VPN server’s IP address, not yours. A VPN service provider may have servers all over the world. That means your search activity could appear to originate at any one of them. Keep in mind, search engines also track your search history, but they’ll associate that information with an IP address that’s not yours. Again, your VPN will keep your online activity private.

Also read: 5 Tips to Stay Secure If Working From Home

VPN privacy: What does a VPN hide?

A VPN can hide a lot of information that can put your privacy at risk. Here are five of them.

1. Your browsing history

It’s no secret where you go on the internet. Your internet service provider and your web browser can track just about everything you do on the internet. A lot of the websites you visit can also keep a history. Web browsers can track your search history and tie that information to your IP address.

Here are two examples why you may want to keep your browsing history private. Maybe you have a medical condition and you’re searching the web for information about treatment options. Guess what? Without a VPN, you’ve automatically shared that information and may start receiving targeted ads that could draw further attention to your condition.

Or maybe you just want to price airline tickets for a flight next month. The travel sites you visit know you’re looking for tickets and they might display fares that aren’t the cheapest available.

These are just a few isolated examples. Keep in mind your internet service provider may be able to sell your browsing history. Even so-called private browsers may not be so private.

2. Your IP address and location

Anyone who captures your IP address can access what you’ve been searching on the internet and where you were located when you searched. Think of your IP address as the return address you’d put on a letter. It leads back to your device.

Since a VPN uses an IP address that’s not your own, it allows you to maintain your online privacy and search the web anonymously. You’re also protected against having your search history gathered, viewed, or sold. Keep in mind, your search history can still be viewed if you are using a public computer or one provided by your employer, school, or other organization.

3. Your location for streaming

You might pay for streaming services that enable you to watch things like professional sports. When you travel outside the country, the streaming service may not be available. There are good reasons for this, including contractual terms and regulations in other countries. Even so, a VPN would allow you to select an IP address in your home country. That would likely give you access to any event shown on your streaming service. You may also be able to avoid data or speed throttling.

4. Your devices

A VPN can help protect your devices, including desktop computer, laptop, tablet, and smart phone from prying eyes. Your devices can be prime targets for cybercriminals when you access the internet, especially if you’re on a public Wi-Fi network. In short, a VPN helps protect the data you send and receive on your devices so hackers won’t be able to watch your every move.

5. Your web activity — to maintain internet freedom

Hopefully, you’re not a candidate for government surveillance, but who knows. Remember, a VPN protects against your internet service provider seeing your browsing history. So you’re protected if a government agency asks your internet service provider to supply records of your internet activity. Assuming your VPN provider doesn’t log your browsing history (some VPN providers do), your VPN can help protect your internet freedom.

How can a VPN help protect against identity theft?

Identity theft occurs when thieves steal your personal information and use it to commit crimes in your name — like taking over or opening new accounts, filing tax returns in your name, or renting or buying property. A VPN can help protect against identity theft by helping protect your data. It creates an encrypted tunnel for the data you send and receive that’s out of reach of cyberthieves.

If your smartphone's Wi-Fi is enabled at all times, your device could be vulnerable without you ever knowing it. Everyday activities like online shopping, banking and browsing can expose your information, making you vulnerable to cybercrime.

A VPN can protect the information you share or access using your devices. That’s especially important when using a public Wi-Fi network, where a cyberthief on the same network could capture your login credentials and the credit card number you type in when you shop online.

You can’t prevent identity theft. No one can. Some security aspects — like a data breach at an organization where you have an account — are out of your control. But a VPN can help safeguard the information you send from and receive on your devices.

What should you look for in VPN services?

The VPN market is crowded with options, so it’s important to consider your needs when you’re shopping for a VPN.

Think about what is important to you. Do you want to be able to surf the web anonymously by masking your IP address? Are you afraid that your information could be stolen on public Wi-Fi? Are you a frequent traveler who wants to be able to watch your favorite shows while you’re on the go.

A good VPN can help you check all three boxes, but below are some other points to consider.

How to choose a VPN

A smart way to stay secure when using public Wi-Fi is to use a VPN solution. But what’s the best way to choose a virtual private network? Here are some questions to ask when you’re choosing a VPN provider.

Do they respect your privacy? The point of using a VPN is to protect your privacy, so it’s crucial that your VPN provider respects your privacy, too. They should have a no-log policy, which means that they never track or log your online activities.
Do they run the most current protocol? OpenVPN provides stronger security than other protocols, such as PPTP. OpenVPN is an open-source software that supports all the major operating systems.
Do they set data limits? Depending on your internet usage, bandwidth may be a large deciding factor for you. Make sure their services match your needs by checking to see if you’ll get full, unmetered bandwidth without data limits.
Where are the servers located? Decide which server locations are important to you. If you want to appear as if you’re accessing the Web from a certain locale, make sure there’s a server in that country.
Will you be able to set up VPN access on multiple devices? If you are like the average consumer, you typically use between three and five devices. Ideally, you’d be able to use the VPN on all of them at the same time.
How much will it cost? If price is important to you, then you may think that a free VPN is the best option. Remember, however, that some VPN services may not cost you money, but you might “pay” in other ways, such as being served frequent advertisements or having your personal information collected and sold to third parties. If you compare paid vs. free options, you may find that free VPNs:
- don’t offer the most current or secure protocols
- don’t offer the highest bandwidth and connection speeds to free users
- do have a higher disconnection rate
- don’t have as many servers in as many countries globally
- don’t offer support

There are many points to consider when you’re choosing a VPN, so do your homework to make sure you’re getting the right fit for your needs. Regardless of which provider you choose, rest assured that a good VPN will provide more security, privacy, and anonymity online than a public Wi-Fi hotspot can.

Is using a VPN legal?

It's legal to use a VPN in most countries, including the U.S., however:

Anything that's illegal without a VPN remains illegal when using a VPN (e.g. torrenting copyrighted material).
VPNs are banned by a few countries including China, Russia, Iraq and North Korea.

Otherwise, using VPN is pretty much okay.

Recommendations

Rest assured, SaibaWorld does NOT have any connection with the recommended companies below. We have recommended purely based on our own experience of their service, either directly or indirectly from close associates.

You may keep your online activity more secure and private using the Norton Secure VPN which helps prevent companies from tracking your online activities or location by encrypting your information on its no-log VPN. Browse the web anonymously from Internet service providers and cybercriminals. See https://us.norton.com/products/norton-secure-vpn.

By connecting through a virtual server at locations around the world, you can access geo-restricted content, apps and sites from anywhere with the McAfee VPN. Get the free 7-day trial McAfee Safe Connect VPN and enjoy 250MB of free data every month. See https://www.mcafee.com/en-us/vpn/mcafee-safe-connect.html.

Remember, a free VPN may not always be the best option for you.

5 Tips to Stay Secure If Working From Home

2020-03-22T00:03:00.001+01:00

According to OWL Labs, 52% of the employees work from home (WFH) at least one day a week. In the U.S., 4.7 million employees now work from home more than half the time, with the work-from-home population growing by 173% since 2005.

Working from home – a new reality

It’s evident that working from home has become a new reality for many, as more and more companies are encouraging and even requesting that their staff work remotely. In fact, recent events around the new Covid-19 disease have accelerated this WFH trend, or workforce transformation process, with companies restricting employee travel and many allocating more resources to enable virtual work. Major tech players, like Twitter and LinkedIn, have made even bigger moves by implementing policies that require all employees to work from home. Clearly, work from home is no longer just an initiative to harness global talent but also a way to protect workers from risk.

Increased security risks

Many online security companies like McAfee and Norton report huge increases in the number of personal devices connecting online. And while working from home offers benefits to employees, this upswing in personal devices connecting to enterprises can actually expose organizations and employees to security risks, such as malware attacks, identity theft, and ransomware. With the world now facing this new reality, the question remains–how can employers and employees equip themselves with the resources to work from home securely on a full-time or part-time basis?

Work from home securely

Employers must not only educate their employees on digital security best practices but also give them the tools to combat online threats that may stem from remote work. With many of us relying on emails and the web to work remotely, we need to be aware of the key giveaway signs that indicate a threat. From there, we can spot, flag, and report anything that looks suspicious. By sharing the responsibility and encouraging others to flag anything sketchy, we can all naturally raise awareness and help others avoid falling into similar traps. By staying open with one another, we can stay ahead of hackers.

Tips to protect both personal and corporate data

Want to ensure you work from home in a safe and secure way? Here are five quick tips and tools you can use to protect both personal and corporate data:

1. Utilize a VPN

Many people use public Wi-Fi at coffee shops, airports, etc. in order to stay connected both professionally and personally. However, by using an unsecured Wi-Fi connection, you may be creating an easy gateway for hackers to access your personal information and data. Be sure to use a virtual private network (VPN), which is extremely important for establishing a secured connection to work files and personal photos saved in the cloud.

2. Be aware of phishing emails

We’ve seen hackers attempt to take advantage of people’s fears by pretending to sell face masks online to trick unsuspecting people into giving away their credit card details. Do not open any email attachments or click on any links that seem suspicious.

3. Regularly change cloud passwords with two-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication is a more secure way to access work applications. In addition to a password/username combo, you will be asked to verify who you are with a device that you–and only you—own, such as a mobile phone. Put simply: it uses two factors to confirm an identity. Ultimately, getting access to something supposedly confidential isn’t that hard for hackers nowadays. However, a second form of identification makes it so hackers are limited in what they can pull off.

4. Use strong, unique passwords

In the chance a hacker does gain access to one of your accounts, make sure to use complex passwords for each of your accounts, and never reuse your credentials across different platforms. It’s also a good idea to update your passwords consistently to further protect your data. You can also use a password manager, or a security solution that includes a password manager, to keep track of all your unique passwords.

5. Browse with security protection

Ensure that you continue to update your security solutions across all devices. This will help protect devices against malware, phishing attacks, and other threats, as well as help identify malicious websites while browsing. There are many good ones in the market from online security companies like McAfee, Norton, etc.

In conclusion

As we start and grow in implementing the five tips shared above, we will all hopefully continue to remain as safe as we possibly can be on the internet. This will eliminate completely, or at least reduce to the barest minimum, any risk of falling into nasty online threats that are always out there.

Connect with or contact us

To connect with us or to contact us, use this online form. Also, be sure to follow us on Twitter via @SaibaWorld, and also 'Like us' on Facebook.

Six Simple Steps to Buy Shares Online

2020-03-19T14:36:00.001+01:00

You've probably imagined many times how you're going to buy shares in a company and make enough money to travel the world and last you for the rest of your life.
Achieving this is not easy, but you have to start somewhere. Investing in shares online is one of the best ways to reach this goal. And the good news is you that can do all of this completely online, from the comfort of your own home.

In this article, we will explain jargon-free, in plain English, how to buy shares in a company. It's not as easy as watching your favorite TV show, but don’t worry, it's not rocket science either.

People usually ask about how to invest in a company because they either want to make money (profits) or gain some trading experience. Both are possible, and can also be fun, if you select the right stocks.

You can make a profit if your share pays dividends or its price increases. If you do this in the long run, these profits can add up and even make you a millionaire, as it happened with Mr. Gremel: the now 98-year-old investor bought 20 Walgreens shares for $1,000 in 1953, and today they are worth $2 million.

As you gain experience, you will improve your financial literacy. This is one of the best long-term investments. Have your friends ever talked about investments or the stock market, and you had no clue what any of it meant? Don't worry, once you start investing and learning more about it, this won't happen again. You'll understand better how the stock market works and how it influences the economy, as well as your everyday life.

Last but not least, as a shareholder you will be part of a company's story. Have you ever wanted to sit in the same room with Warren Buffet, and participate in a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting? If you buy some Berkshire shares, you'll have the chance, all you have to do is master the buying of the shares.

Let's take a look at the six steps for how to buy shares online!

The six-step plan to buying shares online

Buying shares online is not rocket science. Follow this simple six-step plan:

Find a good online broker
Open an investment account
Upload money to your account
Find a stock you want to buy
Buy the stock
Review your share positions regularly

Step 1: Find a good online broker
First of all, you need to find a good online broker. Some banks offer this to their customers, so ask your bank whether this is on offer. Alternatively, you can choose any of the trusted members of recognized organizations such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC).

When choosing a broker, it is important to take into account the broker’s fees, trading platform, accessible markets to trade, and how easy it is to open an account. Safety is very important, but you do not need to worry about this if you are using your bank or brokers who are members of recognized organizations, like FINRA, SIPC or other similar well-recognised and trusted organizations.

Step 2: Open an investment account
After finding your online broker, you need to open an investment account. This can usually be done with your bank as well, if they offer it; or it can also easily be done with online brokers. The investment account is basically what you need to start buying shares online. Think of it as a bank account where in addition to holding cash, you can also shares. Opening an account usually takes a couple of days, although at some banks or brokers you can get it done within a day.

Step 3: Upload money to your account
In order to buy shares online, you need to have money on your investment account. Usually, you can choose between a bank transfer or depositing funds via credit/debit card. If you are using a broker, check with them because some would even allow you fund your investment account via Paypal, e.g. at eToro.

Are you interested in broker deposits? Then compare broker deposits.

Step 4: Find a stock you want to buy
After uploading some money into your account, you can start searching for the best target stocks to buy. You can get inspiration from others' ideas or you can do your own research. Most people listen to others, but if you put some time and energy into your research, the payoff is usually bigger and you can learn a lot more from it. Investment ideas can come from your broker in the form of stock reports and analyses, but you can also use other, independent research. The financial news and investment courses can also be useful in learning how to pick a winning stock.

Step 5: Buy the stock
You have the account, the cash, and the stock you want to buy. Now all you need to do is press the 'Buy' button. You log in to your online trading platform, find the stock you have selected, enter the number of shares you wish to buy, and click 'Buy,' which will initiate the purchase of shares.

When placing an order, you can choose from different order types. A market order buys immediately at the current market price, while a limit order allows you to specify the exact price at which you want to buy the shares. Find more details on order types here.

Step 6: Review your share positions regularly
You're done, you've bought the shares, they are yours. Now it is key to monitor your investments. This basically means following your investment strategy. If you bought the shares with the goal of holding for a longer term, you might participate at the company's annual meeting and collect all the news and information about the firm.

For short-term buyers, position management could mean setting up the stop-loss price of where to cut losses, and the target price of where you want to sell the shares with a profit.

Now that you have mastered the 6 steps of buying shares, we will next be publishing the top 5 brokers specially selected for you. So subscribe to SaibaWorld to keep a date with us!

What is Vishing Scam. And What to do if You Are A Victim

2019-10-05T02:26:00.003+01:00

Unsolicited phone calls from fraudsters can cause you to lose your hard-earned money. Vishing scams are on the rise, so here are some things you need to take note of.

As long as consumers have money to spend, there will be criminals working hard to steal it.

A typical vishing scam targeting your bank or financial institution would go like this:

You receive a phone call from a local number, claiming to be calling from your bank, or other financial institution, or even a government agency.
The fraudster confirms your account name, date of birth and other details, and then comes up with a story that will require you part with sensitive information. For example, they may claim that one of your details have some issue that need to be fixed immediately for you to continue to operate your account.
The fraudster then requests for your debit (or credit) card details including PAN (16-digits number at the back of the card), CVV (3-digit security code also at back of the card), Expiry Date and debit card PIN.
If you unsuspectingly share your details, the fraudster will initiate online transactions with your card (or other) details.
The fraudster then calls again to retrieve the one-time password (OTP) sent to your registered telephone line to authorize the transaction, while pretending to need the OTP to finalize resolution of the bogus issue.
Few minutes later, you are shocked to see debit alerts, and your account is emptied.

We implore you to be very alert. If someone calls asking for money or your personal banking information, hang up. Never disclose your banking details to anyone, especially strangers.

See below on what to do if you have a vishing attack.

What is a vishing (or telephone) scam?

Vishing is a type of phishing scam that happens on the phone. The word vishing is a combination of ‘voice’ and ‘phishing’. Generally, these criminals are looking for your personal details, such as your card, PIN, passwords or card reader codes.

Vishing scams are unsolicited calls from fraudsters on your landline or mobile phone claiming to be a staff of your bank, building society or a government agency and trying to get you to part with sensitive details about your account. These scammers fish for information from you, so they can steal your money or collect your information thereby using your identity to commit fraud elsewhere.

These scams are on the rise, with one phone call, you can lose too much. So we implore you to beware of unsolicited phone calls.

Unfortunately, however, companies as opposed to individuals can also suffer this. See the video below to understand the enormity of the problem.

Unfortunately, there’s little you can do to protect against scammers who trick your bank or other businesses into giving up your information. The fault in these cases lies with business support staff who fail to follow proper procedures and instead fall victim to intelligently deceptive vishing scams.

In general, however, you need to beware of Vishing scams!

What to do if you suspect a vishing scam

Vishing and telephone scams are particularly devastating because getting your money back is unlikely; however, you should always report a scam, because at the very least, it may help stop others from being scammed in the same way and the authorities (bank, police, etc) will be able to launch an investigation to try and stop these criminals.

If you suspect that your account information has been compromised, please cut the call immediately and do one of the following:

call your bank immediately on a secure number you are sure belongs to your bank, for example call the numbers on your debit (or credit) card, or visit your official bank website to get their number. Report what happened to them
if your bank has a fraud team, send an email immediately; you can find the email to write to from your bank's website. If you live in the UK, you can report to Action Fraud over the phone on +44300 123 2040, or online here if you would prefer.

Having considered all things, it is essential to know how to avoid vishing and phone scams.

How to avoid vishing and phone scams

Unfortunately, there’s little you can do to fully avoid vishing scammers. Fraud against the businesses and institutions that house your private information is completely out of your control.

There are steps you can take to avoid vishing scams. Some employ technical means, while others involve being proactive.

1. Never answer a call from an unknown number
It may be tempting to answer calls from unknown numbers, but doing so could lead you right into a scammer’s waiting arms. Additionally, picking up may only alert the vishing scammers that the number is active, leading to more calls down the road.

Instead, let the call go to voicemail. The rule of thumb is that any real person, business, or government institution that was calling for something important will invariably leave a voicemail or call back later. Many vishing scams will also leave a pre-recorded voicemail message, which will give you a chance to properly vet the whether the caller is a legitimate source.

Do note, however, that many vishing scammers will now call back immediately. The purpose of the call back is to counter the above advice. We are more likely to pick up an unknown number that calls back, as traditionally this has indicated that the caller is not only someone that we know, but that the call is important. This tactic helps define why vishing is considered a type of social engineering.

2. If you do answer, never give personal information over the phone
Banks and government institutions should never ask for personal information over the phone. That said, banks will call you if they believe fraud may be occurring on your account. However, they will typically only call to confirm your location and alert you to the event. They won’t ask for private information in a call you receive from them. Government institutions almost exclusively communicate by mail or occasionally email to conduct official business.

If you are asked to give personal information, ask for the caller’s name and let them know you’ll call back after acquiring an official number. The suspicious caller may try to give you a number to call back on. If that occurs, cross-reference this number with information available online. If the numbers differ, call the number you found through your online search made available from the business or institution’s website. Once you call back, inquire about the original caller to verify identity.

3. Use a caller ID app
Google and Apple have done a lot of work over the years to improve their native caller ID methods. However, neither the Android nor iOS operating systems can effectively handle most spam calls or spoofed IDs. Thanks to the many voice over internet protocol (VoIP) options available now, scammers can easily create spoofed numbers. Hidden identities allow them to leave little to no trace of where they’re actually calling from.

A good caller ID app can help boost your phone’s spam call detection and blocking capabilities. Some phone companies are now installing caller ID app by default, for example Hiya and Samsung phones. For both Android and iOS phones, Truecaller is a good option. Downloaded and used by over 250 million people worldwide, Truecaller has over 2 billion spam numbers locked into its database. Confirmed spam numbers are blocked, while good numbers are allowed through. If a number does end up being a vishing scam, you can add it to their database.

4. But don’t completely trust caller ID
Even with a more effective caller ID app installed, avoid numbers that are not in your phone book. You may still receive fraud calls from spoofed numbers that appear to be legitimate. Even with a caller ID app installed, let any calls not in your phone book go directly to voicemail.

5. Treat vishing scams as you would smishing scams
Vishing and smishing scams are all in the same family. Both utilize your mobile device to target you. As with smishing, vishing scams rely on the personal nature of mobile phone contact to try to extract valuable information. However, it’s important to know that your personal cell phone number is not private. Both phone calls and text messages you receive could be from anyone, including scam artists.

6. Refrain from sharing personal information on social media and online platforms
This is the one where many of us have made mistakes in. We think we are safe so we share personal details online, especially on social media like Facebook. Hackers can easily find out who are our family members, and partners, if we are careless on social media. With this single information, they may be able to trick our banks or cell phone companies, like illustrated in the video above. However, it is amazing how careless many of us can be with not only revealing online who our family members or partners are; but also about revealing where we live, what we do for a living, where we work and many other personal details. The most alarming are those who go on to share parts, or all, of their debit (or credit) card details online.

Beware of online criminals. Do not help them by giving them materials to work with, even on 'safe' social media platforms. Beware of vishing. Hang up all suspicious calls, and immediately inform your bank.

Win This Car! in the FirstCar win a car competition 2019 for UK residents

2019-04-28T08:03:00.004+01:00

Are you at least 17 years old or over? Are you resident in the UK? If yes, then, this is your chance to win a brand new car for nothing in the WIN THIS CAR! promo by FirstCar and Ingenie. Irrespective of your country of origin, you only have to be resident in the UK at the time of drawing this contest.

Ingenie is a black box insurance company that is dedicated to making new drivers safer. They are this year's sponsor of the FirstCar win a car competition. You can find out more about Ingenie by visiting their website here.

FirstCar is the multi-award winning, market-leading publisher for new drivers. We’ve teamed up ingenie the young driver insurance brand, to offer the chance to win a brilliant new Vauxhall Corsa 1.4i 75PS ecoFLEX Energy 3dr worth £14,340!

WIN THIS CAR!: Vauxhall Corsa 1.4i 75PS ecoFLEX Energy 3dr

FirstCar 2019 win a car competition - terms and conditions
Terms & Conditions for Firstcar Limited and Ingenie Services Limited Prize Draw

1. This competition is run by Firstcar Limited and Ingenie Services Limited.

2. This competition is open to all UK residents who are 17 or over at the time of the draw, except employees of Firstcar Limited and Ingenie Services Limited and their affiliated companies, their families and agencies.

3. Entries must be received by midnight on 14 July 2019.

4. The winner will be randomly selected by the promoter from the correct entries received once the prize draw finishes.

5. Firstcar Limited will not be liable for any failure of receipt of entries.

6. Entries will not be acknowledged or returned.

7. By entering, all entrants agree to be bound by these terms and conditions and any associated entry requirements. Any breach of these terms and conditions by an entrant will void their entry. Misrepresentative or fraudulent entries will invalidate an entry.

8. Only one entry per person. The prize is non-negotiable, non-transferable and non-refundable. No cash alternative is available.

9. The prize is a Vauxhall Corsa 1.4i 75PS EcoFLEX Energy 3dr.

10. The promoter reserves the right to change the specification of the car, but will endeavour to ensure the car promoted is the one given away.

11. The prize does not include travel to collect the prize and the winner must make his or her own arrangements.

12. By entering, the winner agrees to their names and general locations being used for publicity purposes.

13. The winners may be required to submit valid identification before receiving their prize.

14. By entering the prize draw, participants agree to i. the terms and conditions of the prize draw; ii. being contacted by Firstcar Ltd and Ingenie Services Limited for marketing purposes.

How to apply for this competition
>> To enter the competition, please click the link below and you'll be taken to the entry page. It only takes a few seconds to complete and you could win a brand new Vauxhall Corsa 1.4i 75PS ecoFLEX Energy 3dr, courtesy of ingenie (see image above). Features include:

16” alloy wheels
LED daytime running lights
Bluetooth connectivity
Touch-screen infotainment system
Electrically heated front seats
Digital radio with six speakers
Worth £14,340

Please note: You'll need to be over 17 or over at the time of the draw. To apply, please click here.

Consumer BBM Shuts Down, Sends Goodbyes to Users Worldwide

2019-04-22T00:33:00.001+01:00

Blackberry Limited through Emtek, the current developer of the BBM messaging service, has announced it will soon shut down the BBM Consumer service. The shut down will affect both its for Android and iOS users. BBM messaging service currently has two major editions of the app service-the free BBM Consumer and the paid BBM Enterprise.

In an announcement titled "Time to Say Goodbye" published on 18 April on the company's blog and also sent out to BBM app users, Emtek lamented its inability to break even, despite spirited efforts, with many of its app users preferring apps from its more powerful competitors. It has set 31 May as the day of shut down. The announcement is below:

Time to Say Goodbye – English Version

Today we’re announcing that we will be closing BBM consumer service on 31 May 2019.

Three years ago, we set out to reinvigorate BBM consumer service, one of the most loved instant messaging applications, as a cross-platform service where users can not only chat and share life experiences, but also consume content and use payment services.

We poured our hearts into making this a reality, and we are proud of what we have built to date.

The technology industry however, is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on.

Though we are sad to say goodbye, the time has come to sunset the BBM consumer service, and for us to move on.

We are grateful for your support and wish to thank everyone, especially our users, partners, and employees, for being part of the BBM consumer service journey.

We hope you will cherish many fond memories of BBM consumer service that helped shape messenger platforms to become what they are today.

For more details, please visit the FAQ page by clicking the link below: https://help.bbm.com/en/support/solutions/folders/19000163838

With this reality, BBM will continue to operate up to 31st May 2019, after which time the BBM application will stop working.

What is BBM

BBM, formerly known by its full name BlackBerry Messenger, is a proprietary mobile instant messenger and videotelephony application included on BlackBerry devices that allows messaging and voice calls between BlackBerry, iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile users. BlackBerry Messenger was launched on August 1, 2005.

BBM was the original "mobile-first" messaging service, and was popular for a while before it started to lose out to rivals. Communication using the BBM app was only possible between BlackBerry devices until late 2013 when BBM was released on iOS and Android systems.

The consumer edition, BBM Consumer, is currently developed by Indonesian company Emtek under license from BlackBerry Limited (formerly known as Research In Motion), whilst the paid enterprise edition, called BBM Enterprise (formerly known as BBM Protected), is developed fully by BlackBerry Limited.

What is BlackBerry's current involvement in BBM Consumer?

BlackBerry owns 100% of BBM but licensed its rights on BBM Consumer (i.e., the Android, iOS and Windows Phone versions of BBM) to CMW. BlackBerry continues to operate the BBOS and BlackBerry 10 versions of BBM, as well as BBM Enterprise (formerly BBM Protected). If you use these other versions of BBM, keep in mind that they are distinct from BBM Consumer and not affected.

Who are Emtek and CMW?

Emtek is a leading digital media content company with an impressive portfolio of television, web, and content production assets. Creative Media Works Pte Ltd (CMW) is Emtek's subsidiary and has tried taking BBM Consumer to the next and higher levels over the past few years.

Since becoming involved with BBM, CMW added great new BBM content and services, including in-app transportation services such as Uber, content such as News, Games, Video, Comics, Polls, and e-commerce offerings such as shopping, travel and vouchers, however, it appears all these could not save the app from crashing out of use.

How to Find, Download or Delete Every Information Facebook Gathers on You

2019-03-22T08:28:00.001+01:00

If you're worried about what personal information Facebook has gathered on you, there's a way to find it and delete it. This article demonstrates how to locate and delete personal information gathered by Facebook.

Following the backlash over data breaches and privacy issues which plagued Facebook in recent years, some users of the platform expressed desire to learn how they can access all the information the social media giant has gathered on them, so they can decide whether to delete them or not.

How to assess your personal information from Facebook

You may view all your Facebook account data in one single place. In addition, there are a number of tools and resources outlined below to help you review and control your information on Facebook.

Currently, you can review your information on Facebook from the Your Facebook Information section of your Facebook Settings. Information include your recent activity, personal chats, deleted friends, events attended, photos and videos of family and contacts, contact list with phone numbers of everyone stored in your phone, log of sms and mms sent and received on your device, and many more. There have been cases of data of not only Facebook friends, but all the contacts in a user's phone regardless if they are Facebook users or not.

To view Your Facebook Information from a computer:
1). Go to the top right corner of any Facebook page and click the upside-down triangle image.
2). Click "Settings".
3). Click "Your Facebook Information".
4). Go to the information you want to review and click "View".

Facebook recently revamped its privacy settings on mobile devices to make it easier for users to access their personal information. The changes include a new "Privacy shortcuts" menu and tools that will allow users to more easily find, manage and delete their personal data.

To view Your Facebook Information from a phone:
1). Access the Facebook app on your phone.
2). Hit the button with the three lines on the top right (or bottom right in some devices), scroll to "Settings & Privacy", select it and click on "Settings".
3). Scroll down to "Your Facebook Information".
4). Click on the information you want to review.

The following tools and resources are also available in the Your Facebook Information section of your settings:
1). Access Your Information: A summary of your Facebook information that you can access at any time and in a single place. Facebook categorized this information by type so you can find what you're looking for.
2). Download Your Information: Download a copy of your Facebook information. You can download all your categories of information at once, or you can select the specific categories and date ranges you want. To learn more about downloading your information on Facebook, see below.
3). Activity Log: Within your account, your activity log is a history of your activity on Facebook. From your activity log, you can review and manage things you share, from posts you've commented on or liked to apps you have used or anything you've searched for. Learn more about your activity log.
4). Manage Your Information: Learn how to manage your information on Facebook and get answers to common questions.
5). Delete Your Account And Information: Learn how you can permanently delete your Facebook account and information.

Note: You can learn more about controlling your data and privacy settings in your Facebook Privacy Shortcuts.

How to download your information from Facebook

If you want to download a copy of your information from Facebook, you can use the Download Your Information tool.

To download a copy of your Facebook data:
1). Go to the top right corner of any Facebook page and click the upside-down triangle image.
2). Click "Settings".
3). Click "Your Facebook Information".
4). Go to "Download Your Information" and click "View".
5). To add or remove categories of data from your request, click the boxes on the right side of Facebook.
6). Select other options, including:

The format of your download request.
The quality of photos, videos and other media.
A specific date range of information. If you don't select a date range, you'll request all the information for the categories you've selected.

7). Click "Create File" to confirm the download request.

After you've made a download request, it will appear as "Pending" in the "Available Files" section of the Download Your Information Tool. It may take several days for Facebook to finish preparing your download request

Once the company has finished preparing your download request, they'll send a notification letting you know it's ready.

To download a copy of data you requested:
1). Go to the "Available Files" section of the "Download Your Information" tool.
2). Click "Download" and enter your password.

You can also click "Show more" to view information about your download request, such as the format and when it will expire.

How to delete categories of information or your entire Facebook account?

While accessing your information on Facebook as described above, you can easily select which information and date range (like as from 2010) you can delete from. However, you may also want to delete your entire account. If you want to delete your entire account on Facebook, follow the steps outlined here: How to Deactivate or Delete Your Facebook Account.

Electing to delete categories of your information or your entire account on Facebook takes it off the Facebook servers, but the company says it could take up to 90 days for that information to be completely wiped from their servers.

How to Deactivate or Delete Your Facebook Account

2019-03-19T21:58:00.000+01:00

There are several reasons why you may want to temporarily deactivate or permanently delete your Facebook account. Whatever your reason may be, this guide makes it easy to get rid of your entire Facebook account either temporarily or permanently.

You may have come across the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the British political data-mining firm used the personal data of millions of unwitting Facebook users, and you're now itching to go off the online service. On the other hand, you may just simply be concerned about your online privacy and want to reduce your personal online information; or it may be some other issue totally unrelated to the afore-mentioned reasons.

Whatever is your reason for wanting to leave the Social Media giant, there are two ways to get rid of a Facebook account: either to temporarily deactivate your Facebook account, or to permanently delete your Facebook account.

Are you deactivating or deleting your Facebook account

What is the big difference between deactivating or deleting your Facebook account? Deactivating gives you the flexibility to return whenever you wish, while deleting your Facebook account is a permanent action which cannot be reversed.

When you deactivate your account, your timeline, including posts, photos, friends lists and "About" information are hidden, and others cannot search for your account. However, some information, such as messages you've sent, remains visible. Facebook saves all your information (friends, posts, photos, interests) in case you choose to reactive in the future.

Deleting an account, on the other hand, is set in stone. You will not be able to regain access once the account is deleted and everything associated with the user will be permanently removed. For this reason, Facebook delays deletion for a few days after the request is made, in case you change your mind. It can take up to 90 days after your account is removed for all of your data stored in Facebook's backup systems to be completely deleted.

How to deactivate your Facebook account

You can deactivate your account temporarily and choose to come back whenever you want.

To deactivate your account:
1. Click the upside-down triangle in the top right corner of any Facebook page.
2. Select "Settings"
3. Click "General" in the left column.
4. Click "Manage Account."
5. Select "Deactivate Your Account" and follow the written instructions to confirm your choice.

If you’d like to come back to Facebook after you’ve deactivated your account, you can reactivate your account at any time by logging back into Facebook or by using your Facebook account to log in somewhere else like an app or website. Remember, you'll need to have access to the email or mobile number you use to log in to complete the reactivation.

How to delete your Facebook account

Before deleting your account, you may want to log in and download a copy of your information (like your photos and posts) from Facebook. After your account has been deleted, you won't be able to retrieve anything you've added.

To permanently delete your account:
1. Go to the "Delete Your Account" page.
2. Click "Delete Account" in the bottom right-hand corner.

Can you cancel your account deletion?

If it's been less than 30 days since you initiated the deletion, you can cancel your account deletion. After 30 days, your account and all your information will be permanently deleted, and you won't be able to retrieve your information.

It may take up to 90 days from the beginning of the deletion process to delete all the things you've posted. While Facebook is deleting this information, it's not accessible to other people using Facebook.

To cancel your account deletion:
1). Log into your Facebook account within 30 days of deleting your account.
2). Click Cancel Deletion.

NOTE: Facebook recommends downloading a copy of your information before deleting your account so you have a copy of it and don't lose everything you've posted. This is especially important if there are photos or posts from friends that you want to save. Click here to learn how to download your information on Facebook,

Instagram Founders Departure Show Zuckerberg’s Rule is Absolute

2018-10-01T22:30:00.000+01:00

Last week, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram, announced that they were leaving Facebook, where they had worked since Mark Zuckerberg bought their company six years ago.

“We’re planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again,” Systrom wrote in a statement on the Instagram blog. “Building new things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what we plan to do.”

Quite so. It’s always refreshing when young millionaires decide to spend more time with their money. (Facebook paid $715m for their little outfit when it acquired it; Instagram had 13 employees at the time.) But to those of us who have an unhealthy interest in what goes on at Facebook, the real question about Systrom’s and Krieger’s departure was: what took them so long?

Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom

Since they’re smart lads, one imagines they must have realised that what they were trying to do within the Facebook empire was doomed to fail. They evidently hoped to continue to run Instagram as a distinct entity while harnessing the engineering and global computing infrastructure of Facebook to enable it to grow more quickly than it would have done as an independent company.

In that, at least, they were right. Instagram has grown like crazy. In June, it reached the one billion user mark. This year, it’s expected to bring in $6bn in advertising revenue, which means that it’s the biggest generator revenue within Facebook after the main news feed. One analyst thinks that Instagram will provide Facebook with $20bn by 2020, about a quarter of the company’s total revenue.

If Systrom and Krieger imagined that they would be left alone to run such a money pump within the Zuckerberg dictatorship they were delusional, especially given that for some time there were intimations of things to come. Earlier this year, for example, Facebook removed a shortcut link to Instagram from its bookmarks menu inside the Facebook app, thereby eliminating traffic that flowed from Facebook to Instagram.

And whereas Systrom and Krieger originally reported directly to the Supreme Leader, a few months ago, Zuckerberg installed a layer of management between them and him, with the result that the boys found themselves reporting to Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer. At which point it must have been clear that the writing was on the wall.

All of which is par for the Facebook course. In 2014, the company paid a staggering $19bn for the messaging app WhatsApp, whose founder, Jan Koum, always vowed that its users’ privacy would be paramount.

“Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA,” he wrote in a blog post after the Facebook acquisition had been announced, “and we built WhatsApp around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible. You don’t have to give us your name and we don’t ask for your email address. We don’t know your birthday. We don’t know your home address. We don’t know where you work. We don’t know your likes, what you search for on the internet or collect your GPS location. None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp and we really have no plans to change that.”

Reading that at the time, one wondered what Koum had been smoking if he believed that he would be able to stick to those lofty principles within a corporation whose business model depends on knowing all those things about its users.

Within Facebook, Koum tried to run WhatsApp on his lofty principles. He even provided end-to-end encryption for users to make sure that their messages could not be monitored for targeting purposes. But Zuckerberg, who had left WhatsApp untouched and independent for some years, finally snapped.

The service would have to start making real money, either by weakening encryption or by some other means such as mapping users’ networks. In April, Koum announced his resignation from Facebook and departed, a sadder, wiser (though much richer) man.

So the only surprising thing about the experiences of the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp is that anyone should be surprised by what’s happened to them. Facebook is a data vampire; the only thing it does is suck people’s life data in order to paint targets on their backs for the benefit of advertisers. All that sanctimonious guff about “building a global community” is just corporate cant.

And any startup founder hoping to be acquired by Zuckerberg’s empire ought to remember Winston Churchill’s definition of appeasement as “feeding a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last”. Because he will.

Article adapted from an original by The Guardian under the title "The exit of Instagram’s founders shows Zuckerberg’s rule is absolute" here.

Email & Newsletters: Getting Started (Interest, Commit and Convert People into Loyal Customers)

2018-06-30T10:44:00.000+01:00

Lesson #39–EMAIL AND NEWSLETTERS: GETTING STARTED

We continue our revised course with Internet Income 2.0, Lesson #39: Email & Newsletters: Getting Started. Each new lesson contains updated tips, real-world advice, and in-depth, step-by-step instructions on setting up your Internet-based business. In this lesson, course author, George Little, reviews and expands on using email to create ongoing contact with customers. Read the previous lesson 38 here.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
In this lesson, we will review and expand on using email to create continuing contact with both potential customers and active customers.

How Email Marketing Fits In

Recall the five goals of Internet traffic building we stated in Lesson 3:

Branding
Promotion
SEO
Flow
Social Media

Email marketing is not a goal per se. It is a tool we can use to reach our goals. Email marketing comes into play in promoting your branding. Indirectly, it can also be used to enhance your search engine presence. Email marketing also assists you with your social media presence. It can be used to extend the flow of your content, allowing content to continue after the site visit is over–containing content that flows from the visit and that will bring your visitors back to the site.

The emphasis you place on Email marketing will determine your style of Internet marketing. Some see email as the most crucial step in the marketing process. Others, recognizing the lack of dependability of email being viewed, put less emphasis on it, while still recognizing its importance. In any event, email marketing is a necessity to any good Internet marketing campaign.

Don't Spam

The cardinal rule of email marketing is to avoid spam. Before you embark on an email marketing campaign, review Lesson 2 to refresh yourself on how to avoid spamming. To avoid spam, it is crucial to have an effective opt-in and opt-out process.

The Marketing Funnel

Although I don't believe we've used the "marketing funnel" terminology, we have discussed the processes involved in it throughout this course. The popular analogy is that the process of promoting your marketing campaign through the life cycle of a customer is like a funnel. Your target market is poured in at the top and must work its way through various sieves before purchasing your product or service. While there are several versions of the steps involved, a good comprehensive example goes like this:

1). Awareness
This is what occurs when someone enters the funnel.

2). Interest
Those who, after becoming aware, want to know more.

3). Engagement
Taking active steps to become more familiar with your product or service.

4). Consideration
Those who, after learning more, think there might be something for them here.

5). Evaluation
Weighing the pros and cons of committing to your product or service.

6). Commitment
Accepting a free trial, joining your newsletter or following your social media.

7). Conversion
Becoming a customer of your product or service.

8). Loyalty
Buying more of your products or retaining your service.

9). Advocacy
Enjoying your product or service so much they enthusiastically promote it to others.

I bring this up now because discussions of email marketing and newsletters often involve the marketing funnel approach. The reason I haven't mentioned it by name before is because I believe the analogy has some problems.

The traditional funnel analogy is finally giving way to a more holistic view of the customer journey, however. While the funnel analogy conceives of customers being poured in the top and then dripping out the bottom, better analogies put the customer in the center of the diagram. It works better to think of the customer life cycle more like an atom.

Placing the customer at the nucleus of the atom provides for a customer-centric focus. The various stages of engagement (from awareness to advocacy) can be thought of as electrons orbiting the nucleus. This more holistic approach avoids using a straight line to visualize something that, in reality, is not always a straight line. Rarely do customers follow the steps of the funnel in perfect order. They jump into their engagement with your company at different places and in different ways. The electrons of the atom are the various approaches to engagement at different stages in the customer "life cycle." Just as the charges from electrons react with the charges of the protons in the nucleus of an atom to keep the atom stable, the customer communications that were previously to be taken in sequential order through the funnel can now be taken in response to the customers' needs, as needed, when needed, to keep the customer relationship stable.

An even better and more simple way to think of this process, though, is to use the terminology we have consistently used in this course. It is simply a matter of flow. You don't want to pour customers into a funnel. You don't want to drag them through the sieves. Getting it right means that customers' experiences with your campaign will flow naturally, from the first encounter throughout the life cycle of the engagement. You want your site's content to flow with what is on the customer's mind when he or she arrives. You want the experience to continue that flow from interest to advocacy by following the customer's preferred path. You provide options for the customers to move from one stage to any other, according to their own needs rather than a dictated path. With the linking options available for websites, that is not difficult to allow. One of the options you will provide is the opportunity to join your newsletter. Your newsletter should then strive to maintain a relaxed flow from the content of your site and lead the customer back to your site at the point in the process chosen by the customer.

Setting It Up

As stated above, the first step is to provide an opt-in, i.e. a signup form. Then, you need an effective means to deliver your newsletter to all your subscribers in a timely manner. You need to provide a working opt-out option as well. The easiest way to do all of this without need for hours of programming or paying a programming is to subscribe to an email newsletter service.

While there are several to choose from, there appears to be few choices for independent entrepreneurs on a limited budget. At the time of this writing, many such entrepreneurs are choosing Mailchimp as it allows up to 2000 subscribers for free. You can then send up to 12,000 emails per month to these subscribers, also for free. Its upgrade prices are competitive with the other services when you need to expand.

Integration Of Your Newsletter Service

Recall that earlier in this course we discussed adding Contact Form 7 and Flamingo as plugins to your WordPress site. Contact Form 7 allows you to make contact forms on your WordPress site. Flamingo keeps a database of all your contacts, including people who comment on your site. You can use these in addition to a newsletter service, or you can just use one of the signup forms that your newsletter service provides, or you can integrate them.

For those of you who sell goods or services directly from your website, your newsletter service should also allow you to integrate with popular shopping carts so that you can correspond with those who purchase your product or service in addition to those who sign up for your newsletter.

Creating Your List(s)

Creating and organizing your list of subscribers is of crucial importance. You should allocate the time and attention required to do this correctly.

We just talked about flow and how your newsletter content should flow with what's on each individual customer's mind. Thus, ideally you would want to send different content to different customers at different times to best match what's on their mind at the time. How would we do this? We do this by using personalization techniques. The first step in personalization is to obtain and record information about each customer.

It is burdensome to potential customers to be asked to provide detailed information about themselves other than their name and email address. Unless they already see great value in your product or service, they will not do so. Thus, the trick is to collect and record all the information we can ascertain about them without asking our potential customers to actively provide the information. It is important, in this regard, to be mindful of privacy concerns of our potential customers. Your site needs to include a privacy policy that explains what information you will collect, why you collect it, and how you intend to use that information.

Once you have determined what information is available, you need to collect and include that information in your list and sort your list in various ways. It is best to keep a master list and then sublists, with the later sorted according to your needs.

Types Of Email Communication

As I've said numerous times in this course and the previous course, the days of buying an email list and blasting out cold emails to thousands of people at once are long gone. That technique is now relegated only to the worst of the spammers and scammers. We use email differently in our marketing today.

There are three main types of email communications. One, we should respond by email when someone contacts us by email or takes action on our website. We should welcome them and thank them for joining our newsletter, purchasing a product, or signing up for a service. We should promptly reply when they send us a contact form message from our website. Two, those who have signed up for our newsletter should receive periodic content of interest to them. Three, there are times we need to send reminders to particular people.

When someone who has been actively involved in commenting on our website disappears, it is appropriate to email them that their input is missed and inquiring if all is well. If someone leaves something in their shopping cart without completing the transaction, an email reminder to complete the transaction is appropriate.

As for the periodic content of newsletters, that should ideally be tailored to the type of customer and their stage in the customer life cycle. We can use the information we collect about customers and potential customers to know what stage they are in.

Conclusion
Email marketing should be integrated into your overall Internet Marketing approach and used as a valuable tool to help you obtain your goals. The first and most important rule for email is to avoid spamming. Learn the spam rules and principles and follow them. Rather than the traditionally popular "Marketing Funnel" strategy, design a strategy that is customer-centric and allows for more flexible response to your customers' needs.

The easiest and most practical way to create a newsletter is to join a newsletter service such as Mailchimp. If you use WordPress, integrate your newsletter service with your Contact Form 7 and Flamingo plugins. Set up a sign up form. If you sell products or services directly from your site, consider integrating your newsletter with your shopping cart or payment service. Next, you need to create your list, preferably using a master list and a number of organized sublists based on the information you have decided is important to your campaign.

Make sure you have everything carefully configured and ensure that you are responding timely when someone sends you an email or interacts with your site. Design newsletter content to appeal to potential customers at different stages of the customer life cycle and send the right messages to the right potential customers at the right time. Remember to also send reminders when appropriate.

WHAT'S COMING NEXT
In our next lesson, we continue our discussion of using email and newsletters in your marketing campaign. And you may also browse through the Internet Income training Index.

Author
By George Little, Panhandle On-Line, Inc. For more information on the Internet Income Course and other works and courses by George Little, see http://www.profitpropulsion.com

The Cambridge Analytica Scandal: How to Find Out if Your Facebook Data was Shared

2018-04-09T17:00:00.000+01:00

If you want to know if your Facebook data was shared by Cambridge Analytica, there's an easy way to find out. Beginning Monday, Facebook is notifying all 2.2 billion users about whether their data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook will be sending out a detailed notification on Monday to the news feeds of the reported 87 million users who may have had their information shared by the political data mining firm. Cambridge Analytica is accused of using Facebook data obtained without users' knowledge or consent in order to sway the 2016 presidential election.

The company provided screenshots of messages users will find at the top of their news feeds starting Monday.

RELATED: How to find and delete the data Facebook gathers on you

Users whose information was not shared by the company will see the message on the left below. If your information may have been harvested, you will see a message similar to the one the right.

Facebook released sample screenshots of how it will notify users about whether their information was shared by Cambridge Analytica and how to manage personal data.

All of Facebook's 2.2 billion users will get a notification on Monday titled "Protecting Your Information" about how to see what apps and websites they have used Facebook to log into and how to remove apps they don't want connected to Facebook any more.

More than 70 million of the affected users are in the United States, according to Facebook.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie told TODAY last month that the British company met with Trump's former campaign manager as well as former chief strategist Steve Bannon about influencing the election.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg admitted on TODAY last week that there is the possibility that additional breaches in personal information could be discovered by company audits in response to Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of user data.

The company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has apologized in the wake of the scandal and agreed to testify in a hearing before Congress on Wednesday about Facebook's privacy policies.

For users worried about what personal information Facebook has gathered on you, this article outlines how to find that data and delete it.

Activating GOOGLE ANALYTICS: Get Started Using Your Online Business Data For Success

2018-04-02T20:05:00.000+01:00

Lesson #38--ACTIVATING GOOGLE ANALYTICS

We continue our internet income training course with Lesson 38. Each new lesson contains updated tips, real-world advice, and in-depth, step-by-step instructions on setting up your Internet-based business. Author George Little uses plain English to explain the ins and outs of starting and running a profitable online business in today’s ever-changing global market. Read the previous lesson 37 here.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Having laid a thorough foundation in the last two lessons, it's time to activate and get started with Google Analytics.

ACTIVATING GOOGLE ANALYTICS

It will be assumed you have read the last two lessons (Lesson 36 and Lesson 37), already created and organized your Google account, and are ready to go to http://google.com/analytics and get started.

Your situation should fall into one of these three categories:

1). You have only one Google account (your personal account) and you want to use that account for this project;
2). You have created a brand account for this project under your personal Google account; or
3). You have a separate top-level Google account for this domain (i.e. a top-level account different from your personal account).

How you approach getting started with Analytics is determined by which of the above alternatives describes your situation. If you fall under number 1 above, simply sign into Analytics with your personal account. Analytics will automatically create a "Property" for the current project.

If you fall under number 2 above, you will need to make sure that Google understands you want to activate Analytics for your brand account. Check the photo or avatar at the top right-hand corner of the page when you first arrive at the analytics page. If it doesn't show your brand account, click on the photo or avatar and select the desired brand account. (It may be necessary to add the account again to accomplish this.) Success is indicated when you see the profile photo or avatar for the correct account in the upper right and on the page see the words, Start analyzing your site's traffic in 3 steps, followed by a signup button for analytics over to the right of the three steps.

If you fall under number 3 above, you also need to make sure that the profile photo (or avatar) for the correct account shows to the right when the 3 steps and the signup button are on the page. This may require signing out of your personal account and then signing in under the desired top-level account.

Next, at the time of this writing, you will be asked whether you want to track a website or mobile app. Answer that and the remaining questions on the page and then click Get Tracking ID.

To get your tracking ID, you will need to accept the Google Analytics Terms of Service. When provided your tracking ID, be sure to copy and record this tracking ID in a spreadsheet you use to keep up with the information for this domain or project. Remember that as you create new properties you will be assigned new tracking ID for each property. If you don't create additional properties, this original tracking ID will work for your entire site for now.

Make sure you also copy the website tracking code. (It will be several lines of script code, containing your tracking ID, farther down the screen.) You will need to paste this code into your site to enable Google Analytics to track your site activity.

Adding The Tracking ID To Your Site.

If you do not use WordPress, you will need to add the tracking code to the metadata of each website page you want to track. You will need to paste the tracking code exactly as it was provided in the head section of your HTML code on each page to be tracked. It is best to paste this code at the top of the head section of your HTML

If you use WordPress, you can add the tracking code to your site by using a plugin or by directly altering the header.php file of your site. This last method is not recommended unless you really know what you are doing. A mistake in altering the header.php file could disable your site. Plus, changes you make in the header.php file will be overwritten when your theme updates or you change themes. Thus, we do not recommend directly altering the header file.

The other method available for WordPress users involves using a plugin. Two of the popular plugins for this purpose are Google Analytics by MonsterInsights (formerly Google Analytics by Yoast) and Insert Headers and Footers' by WPBeginners. The most noticeable difference between these two plugins is that Google Analytics by MonsterInsights allows you to view your analytics data from your WordPress Dashboard, while Insert Headers and Footers does not. But, this is an illusive advantage. Your data is best viewed from the Google Analytics site itself rather than your WordPress Dashboard. The Insert Headers and Footers plugin has an advantage in that it can be used to make other changes to the head section of your pages when needed. Thus, I recommend using the Insert Headers and Footers plugin at this point as it is simple and yet quite useful. When you become a sophisticated Analytics user and need additional features not offered in this straightforward plugin, you can switch to MonsterInsights or a comparable plugin at that time. It's better to keep it simple for now.

To install the Insert Headers and Footers plugin, go to the plugins tab on your WordPress Dashboard and click Add New. In the search box, search for "insert headers and footers." When you find it, click Install Now and then Activate. After the plugin has been activated, you should have a new link under the Settings tab on your WordPress Dashboard menu, named Insert Headers and Footers. Click Insert Headers and Footers under Settings and paste the tracking code from Google into the Scripts in Header text box. Make sure you scroll down and save your changes. It is also helpful at this point to go to your hosting company's control panel for your website and clear the template cache. (By clearing the cache, you will ensure that all pages served from your domain will immediately contain the new header information containing the tracking code.)

Properties

Note that if you have not previously created any properties under this account, the above procedures will have automatically created a property for you with the tracking ID you were provided. Should you need to create additional properties in the future, please recall that each property will have a unique tracking ID, each of which will be provided as the property is created.

Be Patient

It will take a few days for Google to collect enough data for your reports to have meaning. Note that tracking does not include any past data, but begins when you install the tracking ID.

Google Search Console

At some point in the process of signing up for and using Analytics, you will receive a prompt suggesting that you also sign up for Google Search Console. Follow the prompt and its instructions to do so. The Google Search Console, in conjunction with Analytics, is needed for some of the most important tracking features.

Getting Oriented

At this point, if all went well with the above procedures, you have Google Analytics up and working for your site. You should begin your orientation to Analytics by perusing the menu. Then, find and click Settings in your Analytics Dashboard. (Hint: Look for the orange cog icon at the bottom of the left-hand menu.) Don't change anything yet, but have a look around. Note that there is a link for goals, which will be useful later as you set up your conversion tracking.

Learning More About Analytics

Next, go back to the left-hand menu and click on the Discover link (the one with a lightbulb icon, just above the Settings icon). There should be a link on the resulting page to Analytics Academy. If, for any reason, you cannot find the link, here it is:

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/

Analytics Academy contains a wealth of information on using Google Analytics, presented in easy to use videos and simulations. I highly recommend it. Start with the Google Analytics for Beginners Course. Please also recall The Google Help Center, which can provide help with any specific questions you have. With the background that you have obtained from the last three lessons in this course, along with all the information you can learn on Analytics Academy, you will soon be an expert Google Analytics user and thus well on your way to become a profitable Internet Marketer.

CONCLUSION
The two lessons before this one, while packed with a lot of information, introduced you to the world of Google Analytics and explained why planning and organizing your Google accounts are important to the proper use of Analytics. In this lesson, we laid out the steps for activating Google Analytics: signing up with the appropriate Google account at http://google.com/analytics, obtaining your tracking ID, inserting your tracking ID into your website, and beginning your orientation to Analytics. By following the steps set out in this lesson, you now have, if all went well, an activated Google Analytics account which is currently tracking activity on your site. To learn more about using this powerful tool, you can go to https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/ and you can get specific help as needed from https://support.google.com/analytics.

WHAT'S COMING NEXT
In our next lesson, we continue our exploration of the exciting world of Internet Marketing. Read the next lesson: Email & Newsletters: Getting Started. And you may also browse through the Internet Income training Index.

Author
By George Little, Panhandle On-Line, Inc. For more information on the Internet Income Course and other works and courses by George Little, see http://www.profitpropulsion.com

WorldRemit - A Better Way To Send And Receive Money And Airtime Worldwide

2018-04-02T06:24:00.002+01:00

Do you live far from family and friends? WorldRemit is an online service that lets people send money or airtime to friends and family living abroad, using a computer, smartphone or tablet.

It is a convenient, low-cost alternative to traditional money transfer companies that use high street agents and charge high fees.

Money can be received as a bank deposit, cash pick-up, Mobile Money, or mobile airtime top-up.

WorldRemit’s service is available to senders in 50 countries. We offer transfers to more than 140+ destinations across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas.

Why choose WorldRemit?

It’s hard to be thousands of miles away from the people you care about. But it needn’t be hard to send money or airtime to them. Or receive money or airtime from them either. With WorldRemit it’s easy.

Advantages include:

1). Low cost
Our low fees and exchange rates are shown upfront!

WorldRemit offers greater convenience than traditional money transfer services that often require their customers to travel to a high-street agent. These older, more traditional services also tend to charge higher fees.

2). Fast
Get your money to family and friends in minutes!

Your money’s there in an instant – because we’re already there.

We always get your money to the people you love fast. How? We already hold funds in all the countries we send to, so there’s no wait. And, as soon as your transaction’s complete, you and your recipient will be alerted with an SMS and email.

3). Simple
It’s easy to use and we’re here to help round the clock!

Sending and receiving money or airtime with WorldRemit is simple and seamless. You'll find the website and app instructions very clear and self-explanatory.

4). Trusted – a very safe pair of hands
Your money’s in safe hands with us. We’ve sent millions of transfers to over 125 countries!

Every year WorldRemit goes from strength to global strength. And every month we seamlessly handle over half a million transactions, so you can be sure your money’s secure with us.

Our industry-leading technology protects your money and guarantees it arrives safely every time. We’re licensed by government regulators around the world, so you can be sure we meet the highest possible standards.

Getting started: It's simple online

Sending money with WorldRemit is so easy.

It’s so much simpler and more convenient to send money online, than having to visit an agent or a bank. Just follow these steps to get started:

1). Choose the country you want to send to: WorldRemit offers a choice of over 140 different countries.

2). Choose how you want to send your money:

Cash pickup,
Bank deposit,
Mobile money or
Airtime top-up.

3). Choose how much you want to send: Enter an amount and WorldRemit low fees and exchange rates will be clearly shown.

4). Enter your recipient’s details: Add a new person by entering their details or choose from a list of people you’ve already sent to.

5). Pay and relax: Choose how you want to pay – bank account or debit/credit card - then confirm the amount.

As you can see WorldRemit offers a choice of ways to send money, but please remember that not every service is available in every country. Whichever service you choose, the company’ll require certain personal details from you, to ensure each transaction is as secure as you’d like it to be.

Take your first step: JOIN NOW!

NOTE: The above link to sign up for WorldRemit contain my personal referral. If you sign up through my invite link and send at least 100 GBP, I will get 20 GBP and you will also get 20 GBP! However, if you decide to sign up without my invite link, you're welcome but both of us get nothing!

About the company

WorldRemit's founder Ismail Ahmed first saw the opportunity to improve money transfers while at university. Studying for an MBA at London Business School, he needed to send money to family members in Africa. Every transaction meant an epic journey across the city to an agent who charged a small fortune in fees to send modest amounts of money.

It seemed wrong to Ismail that an industry handling billions of dollars every year should deliver such poor service to its customers. Even then, he knew that change was needed.

Over the coming years Ismail worked with a number of remittance businesses as well as international policy makers.

As an advisor to the United Nations, he helped companies comply with tough new money transfer regulations, introduced after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In 2010, Ismail decided that the time and technology were right to shake-up this stagnant industry and he founded WorldRemit.

Global success
In 2014 it was announced that WorldRemit had received the backing of Accel Partners, one of the world’s most high-profile investment companies, and an early funder of Facebook, Dropbox and Spotify.

Accel invested $40 million, one of the largest ever Series A funding rounds in Europe.

In early 2015, WorldRemit secured a $100m investment, led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV). Working with Accel and TCV, WorldRemit continues to expand internationally – launching in more countries, adding innovative ways to receive money, and developing new products and services such as our mobile apps.

Even as WorldRemit grows we remain focused on delivering the best possible service to our customers– the people who made all of this happen.

Our goal is to get your money – to your recipient – however they want it – whenever they need it.

SIGN UP AND SEND MONEY NOW!

NOTE: The above link to sign up for WorldRemit contain my personal referral. If you sign up through my invite link and send at least 100 GBP, I will get 20 GBP and you will also get 20 GBP! However, if you decide to sign up without my invite link, you're welcome but both of us get nothing!

Preparing for GOOGLE ANALYTICS: The A-B-C Of Understanding Data for Your Business Success

2018-02-12T00:01:00.000+01:00

Lesson #37–preparing for GOOGLE ANALYTICS

We continue our revised course with Internet Income Lesson 37. Each new lesson of this course contains updated tips, real-world advice, and in-depth, step-by-step instructions on setting up your Internet-based business. Author George Little continues to use plain English to explain the ins and outs of starting and running a profitable online business in today’s ever-changing global market. Read the previous lesson 36 here.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
In our last lesson, we discussed some of the confusion around Google Analytics as well as the advantages of using Google Analytics. In this lesson, we will discuss planning your organizational structure for Analytics. This planning will prevent confusion and facilitate convenient use of your Analytics data. You will then be prepared to set up and configure Google Analytics.

YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNTS

The first step to get started with Google Analytics is, of course, to have a Google account. If you have a Gmail address (whether you use it as your regular email or not), then you already have a Google account.

Even if you do already have a Google account, you need to ask yourself, "is it the right account to manage my website analytics?" The answer depends upon how many Internet Marketing projects you have had in the past, how many you currently maintain, and how many you plan to have in the future. As Google now supports two different types of accounts (owner and brand accounts), lets you link different accounts together, and allows multiple people to share ownership or manage accounts, it is important to organize your Google account setup before starting with Analytics. Google prefers (and, in most cases, it is your best solution) to have one main personal Google account and then a Google brand account for each of your websites or projects.

With this approach, you create a new Google brand account (under your personal account) for each domain you create. Google did not make it easy to manage multiple accounts in the past, but now allows for convenient management of brand accounts. While Google did not make it easy to sign in and out of different accounts in the past, it now allows that to be done easily by linking accounts and switching between them. You can also now give another account access to things within an existing account (by making the other account a "user" for this account). These features make it easier to manage multiple accounts for multiple domains, especially if you create them as brand accounts. With brand accounts, you can have a separate name and profile, as well as a separate YouTube and Gmail account, for each domain name that you own or manage.

Another option is to create a separate Google brand account for a grouping of websites and/or apps that are related to a specific project, goal, or campaign. In this manner you can have multiple websites (domains) and they will be tied together within one brand account when they are all working toward the same goal (for example, when they are all separate landing pages, but leading to the same conversion page).

If you do not already have a Google account, you can easily create one just by navigating to almost any Google page. Just go to google.com or accounts.google.com and sign up. In most cases, you will create this as a personal account using your own name and information. Allocate some time for this endeavor as Google will run you through a series of prompts to set up security for your account and to set up other Google features for the account (such as a Google Profile and Google Plus). You can set up this profile and additional features now or you can postpone it until another time. Or, if you do not plan to have much activity on your personal account and plan to use brand accounts for your interactions and promotions, you may not want to bother with much detail for the profile. Instead, you would carefully set up the profiles of your brand pages as they are created. (You still time to carefully set up security for your account however.)

Even if you do already have a Google account, but have created a new domain that will have its own website, you can create a Google brand account for this new domain, linked to your existing personal Google account. You will then activate an Analytics account while signed up under the new brand account, but be able to easily switch to it from your main (owner) account.

As stated in the previous lesson, confusion mostly comes from the history of Google evolution. For example, at the time I created most of my YouTube accounts, YouTube had not yet been acquired by Google. Google didn't acquire YouTube until late in 2006. Prior to then, my YouTube accounts were entirely separate accounts on an entirely separate service. Brand accounts weren't fully implemented until 2014. Prior to then, you had to create multiple Google personal accounts if you wanted separate accounts for your separate businesses or campaigns. Google was quite awkward (for reasons explained in the last lesson) in integrating these old accounts. Now, thankfully, Google allows you most of the flexibility needed to sort your old legacy accounts and all the flexibility needed to create a new organizational structure for your new accounts.

Avoiding Confusion Within Analytics

The more flexibility built into a system, the more confusing the system can become to use. Google, historically designing its services for sophisticated users and professionals, has built tremendous flexibility into its services, especially its Analytics system, thereby fostering some confusion if one does not sort things out ahead of time. The flexibility provided is needed by professional web developers who plan, design, and maintain websites and manage SEO for multiple clients. The flexibility is also helpful for individual Internet Marketing entrepreneurs who maintain multiple sites and multiple campaigns. But, for the average single website owner, the flexibility only adds confusion.

Here are a few pointers to help you sort out the confusion before you get started with Analytics.

Understanding Levels

A key to avoiding confusion in Google Analytics is to understand that Google coders think in terms of "levels." They also think in terms of "spaces" or "context." The instructions for carrying out a specific task depend upon how you set the levels, which level you are on, and the context within which you are performing the task. You need to be aware of where you are in the system and what you are doing to understand the instructions in the proper context. Just like in the English language, you must understand the context in which a word is used to understand the intended meaning in a specific instance.

For, example, I have referred thus far in this article to the different "features" that Google makes available to users (such as Gmail, Google Plus, YouTube, etc.) The correct word for these "features" and the word most often used by Google for these things is "properties." Gmail is a Google property providing email services. Google Docs is a Google property providing word processing services. Google Plus is a Google property made available for social media. However, I have avoided using the word "properties" in this article thus far to avoid confusion with "properties" as that term is used within Google Analytics. Within Analytics, a "property" is a category for tracking results for a specific thing – usually a single website or app or combination thereof - a different meaning for a different level.

Note that a Google Account is an identify with which you sign up for access to all the Google's services (a/k/a "properties") that you need. However, for many of the services offered by Google, you are required to activate the service. When you activate a particular service, you do not create a new top-level login. Instead, you use the identity of your preexisting Google account (or one of them if you have multiple accounts). You must associate a top-level Google account, be it an owner account or brand account, with each new service activation. Activating a new service such as Analytics is often referred to as "creating an account" for that service, as in "creating a Google Analytics account." Don't let that confuse you, however. You should have already created a Google account. What you are doing in effect is activating Google Analytics for an account.

Accounts vs. Properties vs. Views

In other words, there is a difference between creating a Google account and "creating a Google Analytics account." In the latter case, you are just activating Google Analytics within a Google account, which can be either an owner account or a brand account. When Google's Help Section and other articles refer to an "Analytics account," they are really referring to a Google Analytics setup activated within a Google account.

An "account" is a top-most level of access to Google services such as Analytics. A "property" within Analytics is a website, mobile application, or device (e.g. a kiosk or point-of-sale device or some combination of these things). An Analytics "account" can contain one or more properties. Within an Analytics account, you add the properties from which you want to collect data. When you add a property to an account, Analytics generates the tracking code that you use to collect data from that property. The tracking code contains a unique ID that identifies the data from that property, and makes it easily identifiable in your reports.

The flexibility built into Google Analytics allows us to have different websites tracked all within the same Google account or to use multiple Google brand accounts with Analytics activated in each, each having one or more websites included. To track different websites in different accounts, you obviously need to create multiple Google brand accounts. However, if you prefer to track all your domains and websites under one account, you can add them as different "properties" within a single account. It's up to you how you want to structure it.

When you create a new property within an account, an unfiltered view is generated automatically. This view displays all the data being tracked for that property. You can then create additional views that show only certain data. For example, you can create a view that only shows traffic from organic search listings and another view that shows only traffic from AdWords.

Thus, to summarize the hierarchical levels within Analytics:

Google Account
Properties
Views

If you are part of a team, you can add additional users at any level. By "add users," I'm referring to giving other Google accounts access to view and even manage certain aspects of your Analytics. That is, you can add users at the account, properties, or view levels and you can set the users permissions for each level. You can restrict other "users" (accounts) from a level as well. Depending on the permissions you assign, a user can manage other users, perform administrative tasks (like creating additional views and filters), and access report data.

Linking Accounts

In addition to adding users directly to your Analytics account, you can also link accounts in Google. On most Google pages, your profile photo or icon will appear in the upper right corner of the page. Clicking on your photo or icon yields a dropdown box identifying your account. At the bottom left of this dropdown box should be a link to "Add an Account." By clicking on this link, you can then log into any other Google account you have created and authorized it to be linked to the account. After this is accomplished the added user account can log into the account from by clicking the profile picture and selecting the account.

If you want to work as a team with someone else, you can also give another Google user authority to link to your account. You do this by "inviting" the other account owner to be a user of your site.

YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL PLAN

If you have only one Google account and one website and do not plan to create additional websites anytime soon, the simplest approach would involve only one Google account. If you should add additional websites in the future, you could create brand accounts for them or, if you do not want to create brand accounts, just add the additional websites to your Google Analytics as new "properties." In the latter case, there would be no necessity to switch between Google accounts or have any concern about authorizing users or linking accounts. For promotional reasons, though, it is often best to create a new brand account for each new website.

If you already have multiple domain names registered and multiple websites created, you need to ask yourself whether all those domains and their websites are really part of one campaign or represent different campaigns. For example, the first domain I registered and website I created was a regional website for the Florida Panhandle geographical area. Later, I registered another domain and created another website for my law practice. I have since registered domains and created websites for my SFI business, a city in my area, my music interests, for selling Internet access and webhosting, and for my freelance writing endeavors. Clearly, most of these are unrelated to the others. As the city and area sites are related, however, I linked them together with one being a brand account of the other. But, due to the history of my use of these sites, it was not convenient to make the old area site a brand account under my personal account. It was easier for me to leave the area account as a separate Google owner account and just authorize my personal account to be an additional owner of the account.

Thankfully, many of you reading this are younger than me and do not have this convoluted legacy of accounts. It will be easier for you to sort out your accounts as you go and keep them organized. Some of you will be creating a Google owner account for the first time. In this case, if you do not allow yourself to be confused by the instructions for moving and linking accounts which have been published to help those with legacy accounts, setting up the structure of your accounts and activities should be straightforward and activating and using Analytics should not be difficult for you.

CONCLUSION
To use Google Analytics, you must have a Google account. The first account you create with Google will be your personal owner account. You may also want to create an additional brand account (under your owner account) for your website. If you have multiple websites, you may want to consider creating multiple brand accounts. You should decide how you want to set up and organize your accounts before signing up for Google Analytics.

It helps to avoid confusion while using Google Analytics to understand that Google is built on levels. The top level within Analytics is the account level. In the account level, you can create one of more "properties." A "property" within Analytics is a website, mobile application, or device (e.g. a kiosk or point-of-sale device) or some combination of these things. You generate a separate tracking code for each property. Within each property, you can then create one or more "views," each which may specify different data to be seen.

You can authorize other accounts to have access to and control of your Analytics at each level (i.e. either the account, property, or view levels).

WHAT'S COMING NEXT
In our next lesson, we will walk you through signing up and configuring Google Analytics. Read the next lesson here: Activating Google Analytics. And you may also browse through the Internet Income training Index.

Author
By George Little, Panhandle On-Line, Inc. For more information on the Internet Income Course and other works and courses by George Little, see http://www.profitpropulsion.com

Alarming WhatsApp Security Flaw Permits People ‘spy on private chats’

2018-01-17T23:57:00.004+01:00

A massive WhatsApp security flaw has been discovered that allows anyone to infiltrate people’s group chats.

Despite the service’s encryption, experts have said that hackers can insert anyone into WhatsApp groups without anyone knowing. The hackers can also insert the person without the permission of the chat’s admin — who usually has to approve people before they are added to the chat.

Despite the flaw being found, Facebook who owns WhatsApp, has said that they won’t be fixing the problem. They are adamant that group chats ‘remain protected’ by the app’s encryption.

Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos wrote on Twitter that the bug is not effective because WhatsApp users are notified when new members join conversations.

The study was presented at the Real World Crypto security conference in Zurich, Switzerland, by a group of researchers from Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. They found that anyone who has control over WhatsApp’s servers can add people to private group chats. These include staff, hackers and governments who legally demand access to WhatsApps conversations.

Researchers suggest that people who want to keep their privacy, stick to one on one chats or use a different encrypted messaging service for group chats.

In response to the study, which was first reported by Wired, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos wrote on Twitter, ‘Read the Wired article today about WhatsApp – scary headline! But there is no a secret way into WhatsApp groups chats.’

He added that it’s a ‘stealthy’ strategy to spy on people’s conversations.

On WhatsApp, existing members of a group are notified when new people are added. WhatsApp is built so group messages cannot be send to hidden users and provides multiple ways for users to confirm who receives a message prior to it being sent.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) January 10, 2018

WhatsApp has looked at the report carefully – following the researcher’s plan would necessitate a change to the way WhatsApp provides a popular feature called group invite links – which are used millions of times per day.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) January 10, 2018

In sum, the clear notifications and multiple ways of checking who is in your group prevents silent eavesdropping. The content of messages sent in WhatsApp groups remain protected by end-to-end encryption.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) January 10, 2018

‘On WhatsApp, existing members of a group are notified when new people are added,’ he wrote.

‘WhatsApp is built so group messages cannot be send to hidden users and provides multiple ways for users to confirm who receives a message prior to it being sent.’

4 Important Apps Every Entrepreneur Should Have

2017-12-25T08:52:00.000+01:00

Written by a Guest Contributor

FOUR APPS EVERY ENTREPRENEUR CANNOT DO WITHOUT

As an entrepreneur, staying organized can be very demanding. However, technology/ propelled innovation has changed work propensities, daily administration objectives and the way tasks are being accomplished. Efficiency is important for any entrepreneur that is continually juggling different tasks as the quicker you can access information and execute, the faster your organization will be built.

In this article, we discuss 4 of the everyday apps which optimizes to the highest level the efficiency of every entrepreneur, whether an interpreneur or a brick-and-mortar entrepreneur. Below is a rundown of the 4 apps every entrepreneur should have, as compiled by the Jumia Market research team.

1). Mint

Mint is a money manager, budget and personal finance app designed to help you spend smarter and save more. It makes it simple to stay updated with your funds and deal with your investment funds while on the go. You can make spending plans, set objectives and record costs of doing business. It offers email alerts and bill payment reminders to help you remain focused on both your own and business funds.

2). GotoMeeting

GoToMeeting allows business visionaries to lead their gatherings from anyplace they wish. It allows entrepreneurs to meet with representatives or clients from any place. Regardless of the restaurant, park, gathering room you get caught in, occupied business people will never miss or need to reschedule a meeting again.

New look control-panel of the GoToMeeting app

3). Humin

For every entrepreneur, networking is very important. The more connections you have, the greater your business. Humin recalls the little insight about every contact you have. This way, it’s easier for you to build as many connections as possible. Humin looks into your telephone, Facebook and LinkedIn contacts and joins them with your logbook, email and voice message to provide context to each one of those individuals recorded in your telephone.

4). Evernote

Evernote remains the best digital note-taking app with an assortment of instruments that performs searches, keeps track of your expenses and manages your schedules. You can record audio notes, pictures and web screenshots with evernote’s “clipper” tool as well. On top of that, whatever you save in Evernote can be shared and sent to the rest of your team.

Author
Article compiled and written by the Jumia Market research team. Jumia Market is an online marketplace and e-commerce company under the umbrella of the Jumia Group conglomerate. The company currently operates in 14 countries across Africa with its headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria.

Related: More Articles for Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship

4 Important Things You Should Know About Online Security

2017-12-05T18:18:00.000+01:00

With increasing online phishing and fraud attacks, it is important to pay more attention to online security. The internet is a free and largely uncensored domain, protecting your online privacy is therefore crucial to using and enjoying the internet without fear.

This insightful article shares 4 things you should know about online security.

1). Password Management

If you really want your online data or information to be protected, it’s best to avoid letting your browser or password wallet remember your passwords. However, this doesn’t mean that you should use the same password for all sites. The best way to preserve your online security is to have a primary email ID linked to all your services or applications, so instead of focusing on remembering the password for each service or application, you can instead focus on remembering one email ID. This way, if you ever forget your password for any service or application, you can easily change it through the ‘forgot password’ link, once you know your email ID.

2). Online Safety Practices

Installing an anti-virus software on your device is one of such safety practices that can help boost your online security. Additionally, it is best to use a private internet connection when sending or sharing sensitive data online, rather than public Wi-Fi or a public internet connection. Sending or sharing sensitive data over a public internet connection puts your data at risk of being intercepted by a malicious third party, who ends up having the power to do whatever he/she wants with your data.

3). Keep Your Windows Operating System and Vulnerable Applications Up to Date

Updating important and vulnerable software is the best way to keep it secure and take care of software vulnerabilities or holes that can leave these applications vulnerable for cyber-criminals to take advantage of. Software updates help to deliver new features for your use and also fix potential and existing security issues on the software. You can easily set your apps to update automatically or you can use a tool to help automate the process, this will help you avoid the hassle of having to manually apply updates all the time.

4). Be Careful of the Links You Click On

It is best to ensure that you are careful about the links you click on when surfing the net. Most phishing attacks are carried out using links embedded in email messages mimicking messages from well-known financial institutions, brands and trusted persons. These links attempt to retrieve your private information by redirecting you to fake web locations, controlled by online criminals. You can use free apps or tools like ‘Redirect Detective’ to help you see the complete path of a redirected link and ensure you are going in the right direction. Another helpful tool is the URL checker called ‘VirusTotal’.

Google Analytics - Understanding the Basics to Maximize Your Business

2017-12-02T01:48:00.003+01:00

Lesson #36–GOOGLE ANALYTICS

We continue our revised course with Internet Income Lesson 36. Each new lesson of this course contains updated tips, real-world advice, and in-depth, step-by-step instructions on setting up your Internet-based business. Author George Little continues to use plain English to explain the ins and outs of starting and running a profitable online business in today’s ever-changing global market. Read the previous lesson 35 here.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
In this lesson, you will learn about Google Analytics. Google Analytics, in a nutshell, is a measuring tool. It measures information about activity on your Website. You take that information and learn from it. Then, you take what you have learned and use it to improve your site for better performance. Better performance translates into a more profitable Website.

Setting Up Google Analytics

Old cities like Rome, Paris, London, and even New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, have modern public works systems engineered to be built over old systems. While they are modernizing their water, sewer, or transportation systems, they must keep their old ones running efficiently until the new systems are fully in place. It would be cleaner and simpler if they could just tear out the old ones first and then build the new, more modern systems. But, they can't do that. Likewise, Google, while not old compared to these old municipalities, is getting relatively old in Internet time. When you consider the rate of advancement in Internet technologies, as much modernization has been needed on the Internet in just the last couple of decades as has been needed in many of our old cities' public works systems over the last couple of centuries. Thus, like old cities, Google, although it provides very useful services, can be somewhat confusing to navigate at times. New stuff built over, and designed to work in conjunction with, old stuff, is often a recipe for awkwardness and confusion.

Nowhere is this awkwardness and confusion more apparent that when one attempts to set up Google Analytics, especially to work with multiple old Websites that are already using many Google services.

To use Google Analytics, you need to coordinate a few things. If you have more than one Google account, you must know which account encompasses the site on which you are now working. You must have the Website verified by Google, which involves downloading a verification page (provided to you by Google) and placing it in your site directory. You then must complete the verification process (which can be carried out in different ways depending upon your preference, the preferred method being to have an authorization code sent to you by text and then to type the authorization code when prompted. Then, you should ascertain from Google a longer authorization code that you must use in your site code (or input into WordPress using a plugin such as Yoast SEO). To get the full use of Analytics, you also need to sign up for the Google Search Console. A further complication is that the name of this Search Console service changed in 2015. It was formerly called Google Webmaster Tools.

To be an effective marketer, you should also use Google AdWords, which enables you to post Google paid ads. Via the Search Console, AdWords can be incorporated into your Analytics reports as well. To get the most value from your site, you should also consider running Google Ads on your site via Google AdSense. Thus, there are many things to sort out, but it is worth the trouble.

If you have more than one Google Account, it is easy to get the verification and authorization codes confused. It helps greatly to create a spreadsheet ahead of time that lists all your accounts and their verification and authorization codes and to double check that you have not gotten your codes crossed up with the wrong account. For example, if you have the verification code page from one Google account downloaded to a Website that is included in another Google account, Google services will not work properly, if at all, for that Webpage.

Google used to allow one person to create multiple accounts, but would not let you combine them. Now, Google aspires to one login for all your accounts. This can be another source of possible confusion if you have multiple accounts. Plus, Google also allows you to create additional users for an account. If you create or authorize additional users for accounts, you must keep that sorted out as well.

The Google Help Center can help you to sort all these issues out.

It's Worth The Trouble!

We will give you more specific guidance in setting up Google Analytics in the next lesson, but, before we do, we want you to see why it's worth all the trouble. Thus, we will first discuss what Google Analytics can do for you and then return to the questions that may arise in setting it up in our next lesson. In the meantime, if you have just one Website and just one Google account, then you may be able to set up Analytics without any difficulty just by following the prompts from analytics.google.com. (Remember to create a spreadsheet for the information and codes as you go!) If you do not have just one Website and one Google Account, just read through the section below for now and come back to it for review after your Google Analytics accounts are set up, sorted out, and configured.

The Value Of Google Analytics

Acquistion, Flow, & Conversion

We've often discussed the importance of attracting visitors to your Website (acquisition). We've discussed the importance of your content and how your content must flow, influencing your visitors' behavior while on your site. And, we have discussed in detail the importance of your visitors joining or purchasing once they arrive at your Website (conversion). Let's look at how Google Analytics helps us to measure (and improve) how efficiently we deal with these concerns.

1). Traffic to your Website (Acquisition)

Google Analytics allows you to see where your traffic comes from, i.e. the source of your traffic. It is important to know how visitors find your Website. Do they come from search engines? If so, is it the result of paid ads or organic listing? Do they come from social media sites, from other Websites, from email marketing, from other sources? The more realistic question is what percentage of your traffic comes from each of the source categories. Then, within each category, which particular sites (i.e. which search engines, which social media sites, which Websites, etc.) provide the best traffic?

When you log into analytics.google.com (and choose the proper account if you have more than one), you will see a link for "Acquisition" in the menu in the left-hand column. Under the Acquisition link is a list of links to various reports providing information about how people arrive at your Website.

The "Overview" link provides an overview, not only of acquisition, but also "behavior" and "conversion." We will address those subjects later. (The conversions column of the overview link will not display any information until you have configured your conversion goals.)

"Channels" gives you aggregate numbers of visitors for each of various categories of sources. Channels may include categories like organic search, direct traffic, paid search, and social media. This data can be helpful in revealing patterns that apply across many specific sites within each category. For example, if you are getting less traffic from social media than from other sources, you may want to brush up on your social media strategies. If you are getting less traffic from organic search, you may want to take steps to improve your search ranking in the major search engines. "Referrals" breaks it down to specific sites. Look over and orient yourself with the other reports in this submenu as well.

From these acquisition reports, you can learn which sites are referring traffic to your site, determine which sites are most important to your business. You can explore ways to encourage the sites that are sending you the most visitors. You can measure and evaluate your search engine optimization. You can also measure the results of your advertising budget and be guided in allocating your future advertising budget.

2). Flow (Behavior of the Visitors on Your Site)

Another link in the main menu on the left column of the Google Analytics dashboard is "Behavior." The Behavior reports reveal what people do once they arrive at your Website. For example, if they "bounce", that means they left the site rather quickly. Not a good outcome. If they stayed on your site, how long did they stay? What flow of information did they follow?

Recall our earlier discussions in this and the previous course encouraging you to create a path or paths of information that visitors could follow through your site. Ultimately, your desire is to direct the visitor to a conversion. That is, you want the visitor to make it to your conversion page. (Your conversion page is the one with the right balance of opportunity and motivation to prompt that visitor to take an action that will promote your business.)

This action could be to join a mailing list, start following your social media sites, or to go ahead and purchase from the goods or services you offer. The visitor's actions between arriving at your site and either leaving or making the conversion to a customer falls under the category of "behavior." These actions are revealed in the behavior reports.

You can answer many important questions from these reports. Which "landing pages" draw the most visitors? Which landing pages have the highest bounce rate (people left without going further)? Which landing pages attract visitors that make conversions. Which intermediary pages (information pages) have high exit rates and which intermediary pages lead to the most conversions?

From this information, you can ascertain the information on your site that attracts and keeps the most visitors. You can even drill down a bit to see specifically what content is most viewed. You can determine where visitors are most likely to leave your site. You can also detect patterns. For example, many visitors may navigate to one page on your site and then leave. This does not necessarily mean that high exit page is a bad page. It could be and the disappointment may be driving visitors out of the site. On the other hand, it may be a very valuable page to the visitors, one where they found the information they needed. Having found what they needed, they move on. Ascertaining whether the page has a high exit rate because of the former or the latter can be very helpful. If it is the latter case (the site had valuable information that satisfied the visitors' needs) then there are steps you can take on that page to ensure the visitor remembers the site as helpful. You would never know to examine the page carefully to make this analysis without the exit information provided by the behavior reports.

3). Conversion

As we've stated before, the first step is to define what you want the conversion to be. What is it that you want the visitor to do on your Website to make all the work you've done on your Website worthwhile? For most people, this conversion is defined as the visitor purchasing one of the goods or services you offer. Others break it down into steps, defining the conversion for a Website to be joining a mailing list, following you on social media, ordering a whitepaper, or filling out a request for additional information. Then, the actual sales take place in another venue or on another site. While most of us are individual entrepreneurs trying to make some extra money for our families with Internet Marketing, some site owners are involved in non-profit endeavors. The conversion goal for a non-profit might be to have their visitors sign up as volunteers to help with some community project. What your goals are depend on who you are and what you are trying to accomplish. You can't accomplish anything, however, unless you know what it is you want to accomplish. You must define your conversion goals with specificity.

While it is important not to confuse intermediary improvements of behavior of visitors with actual conversions, this information can also help you improve your site. The conversion reports provide you with additional information regarding behavior. For example, you can measure the amount of time a visitor spends on your site, the time duration on your site, and page screens per visit. While you are setting up your conversion goals, you can also set up intermediary goals that can be tracked by the conversion reports, such as whether a video was watched or whether certain content was downloaded.

Once you have determined what your goals are, both final conversions and intermediary success goals, you can configure them in Analytics and see the specific information that you need.

CONCLUSION
Google Analytics, in a nutshell, is a measuring tool. It measures information about activity on your Website. You take that information and learn from it. Then, you take what you have learned and use it to improve your site for better performance. Better performance translates into a more profitable Website. While Analytics can be frustrating to set up and configure, especially if you have a history different Google Accounts, users, and services, the value you receive from the information it can provide makes it well worth the trouble.

Google Analytics provides invaluable help in measuring and analyzing acquisition, behavior, and conversions for your Website. The acquisition reports reveal how visitor find and arrive at your site. The behavior reports reveal how people interact with your site. The conversion reports allow you to set goals and track whether those goals were met. All of these reports provide invaluable assistance in improving your Website to make it more profitable.

WHAT'S COMING NEXT
In our next lesson, we will take a detailed look at Google Analytics set up and configuration in the context of other Google Services. Read the next lesson: Preparing for GOOGLE ANALYTICS. And you may also browse through the Internet Income training Index.

Author
By George Little, Panhandle On-Line, Inc. For more information on the Internet Income Course and other works and courses by George Little, see http://www.profitpropulsion.com

How to Delete WhatsApp Messages for Everyone on a WhatsApp Forum or Just for Yourself

2017-12-01T05:03:00.000+01:00

WhatsApp’s much-anticipated “Unsend” feature has been rolling out since October 2017. WhatsApp users can now retract messages which they regret sending in the first place. The feature, which is officially called “Delete for Everyone” has also been widely referred to as “Recall” and “Revoke”. The "Delete for Everyone" feature works on all types of messages, including text, images, videos, GIFs and documents.

Prior to this, deleting messages on WhatsApp was only for the user, YOU. Now, you can delete WhatsApp messages after the message has been sent and delivered. This means WhatsApp users can now either delete messages for themselves only, or delete messages from everyone else's phone on a forum so that noone has access to it. However, if your reader has already seen the message, deleting it from his phone may not make him forget.

What you need to know first

This is an exciting feature, however, there is a little caveat you must bear in mind. If you wish to delete messages from other people's phones, you must do so within 7 minutes of sending that message, else you loose the ability to delete it from their phone.

WhatsApp's new “Delete for Everyone” feature

Messages you successfully delete for everyone will be replaced with ‘This message was deleted’ in your recipients' chats. Similarly, if you see ‘This message was deleted’ in a chat, it means that the sender deleted their message for everyone.”

WhatsApp says you will not be notified if Delete for Everyone has not worked for you.

It also warns that, even if the feature does work successfully, there’s a chance the person you’ve been chatting to may have already seen the message before you decided to revoke it.

How to delete messages for everyone

Deleting messages for everyone allows you to delete specific messages you have sent to either a group or an individual chat. This is particularly useful if you sent a message to the wrong chat or if the message you sent contains a mistake.

Messages you successfully delete for everyone will be replaced with "This message was deleted" in your recipients' chats (*). Similarly, if you see "This message was deleted" in a chat, it means that the sender deleted their message for everyone.

You can only delete messages for everyone for up to seven minutes after sending. Once seven minutes have passed, there is no way to delete messages for everyone. To delete messages for everyone:

Open WhatsApp and go to the chat containing the message you wish to delete.
Tap and hold the message. Optionally, tap more messages to delete multiple messages at once.
Tap Delete at the top of the screen > Delete for everyone.

Note:

In order for messages to be successfully deleted for everyone, both you and your recipient must be using the latest version of WhatsApp for Android, iPhone or Windows Phone.
(*) If you or your recipient are not using the latest version of WhatsApp for Android, iPhone or Windows Phone, this feature will not be supported.
Recipients may see your message before it's deleted or if deletion was not successful.
You will not be notified if deleting for everyone was not successful.

How to delete messages for yourself

Deleting messages for yourself allows you to delete your copy of messages you've sent or received from your phone. This has no effect on your recipients' chats. Your recipients will still see the messages in their chat screen. To delete messages for yourself:

Open WhatsApp and go to the chat containing the message you wish to delete.
Tap and hold the message. Optionally, tap more messages to delete multiple messages at once.
Tap Delete at the top of the screen > Delete for me.

Using an iPhone or a Windows phone?

The steps above are specifically for android phone users. If you have an iPhone or a Windows phone, the steps are essentially the same as with android phones but with very slight differences. Learn how to delete messages on: iPhone | Windows Phone

Skype Updates for Windows 10: What You May Not Be Aware Of

2017-11-13T11:56:00.002+01:00

Did you realize there's been loads of updates and improvements on Skype over the past months which has made it's use and life easier? What's new in Skype for Windows 10?

If you're looking for the latest Skype for Windows 10 release, or if you're wondering what feature changes and improvements have occurred recently in 2017, then you have come to the right place. This article will point these out to you and guide you to the official Skype webpage from where you can always see things for yourself as they come, including future planned releases.

So what's new in Skype for Windows 10 in 2017?

Basically Skype has quietly updates on several quality improvements and general fixes since the year began, however, and more specifically, a lot has happened. See the list below:

Skype released the following on July 13, 2017:

a modern, new look which helps you get to calls and conversations faster.
ability to start new conversations, see your profile and visit the dial pad all from the top of the screen.
able to make changes to your settings via the profile.
you can now tell Skype what you think about the new design and practically anything else using the ‘Send feedback’ option in your profile.
ability to react to messages with a range of fun emoticons. To leave a reaction, simply tap on the emoticon button next to a message. See who else left a reaction by tapping on any reaction below a message.
ability to share files, videos, photos, links and more directly to Skype. Click on the Windows share charm and select Skype.

Earlier on in May 25, 2017, Skype added support for quick switching of light and dark theme dynamically. However, before that on May 8, 2017 you became able to:

Share your PC's audio when you share your desktop. Watch videos and listen to music together!
See your images without having to leave the app. Tap on an image in a conversation and try this out.
Send feedback much more easily – tap on the " on the left navigation bar as Skype sought to hear from you.

For the complete and detailed list of all feature changes and improvements on Skype, see the official page for What's new in Skype for Windows 10?.

5 Simple Ways To Greatly Increase The Life Of Your Laptop

2017-10-26T23:36:00.000+01:00

Can't live without your laptop? If so, I stumbled across these five maintenance tips while searching the internet for something else, and which all sounds simple but are really great tips; and can help you avert a crisis.

Many of us rely on our laptops so much that a simple malfunction can turn into a major crisis. From tiny blips which result in a blank screen to strange noises which come up at unexpected times, and all other events in between them, you just may have been one of those who has experienced computer glitches. This article aims to share how to look after your laptop properly.

Here are the five most important tips.

1. Let your laptop breathe

Using your laptop in bed, where its air vents get easily blocked and suffocated by thick duvets and pillows, isn't good for it.

"There's a reason those air vents are there, and the cooler you can keep your laptop the longer it lasts," says Matt Egan, editor-in-chief of PC Advisor magazine.

"Components like the processor and hard drive generate a lot of heat, so where ever you regularly use your laptop, make sure it's clean, dust-free and vents are clear from walls or surfaces."

If you use your laptop for long periods it can be worth investing in a cooling stand, which you can pick up for under £20 from computer shops or the likes of Amazon.

2. Drain your battery

"With modern battery cells the advice is to run your laptop on the mains until you need to use the battery," says Egan.

"Then it's good practice to run the battery down each time rather than resorting to constant top-ups." So wait for that 10% warning light to come on and then plug in.

And if your battery's running low and you're not able to charge it, you can squeeze more power from it by reducing the screen brightness, which can boost life by around 30 minutes.

3. Don't clean the screen with a damp cloth

A quick wipe with a damp cloth can sound like the easy way to clean your screen.

But aside from the obvious danger of water and electrics, the minerals found in plain old tap water can actually leave marks on your screen.

"You need to clean it with something that's pH neutral," says Egan. He says baby wipes should be fine or you can buy special screen wipes.

4. Use protection

My local computer shop recommends having your laptop serviced every six months which costs £50 a time.

But let's be honest: while we may have good intentions, does anyone actually book their laptop in for a regular service? Or do we all use them until the horrible moment they go blank and pack up?

Even Egan, of PC Advisor, admits he's not one for regular servicing but says the reason most laptops end up running slowly and may need fixing is down to software, not hardware.

"Your priority should be getting good anti-virus software and keeping it up to date," he says.

The package should include anti-virus, anti-spyware and a firewall and you can pick this up from most computer shops for between £40 and £90.

"But don't just buy it and forget about it," Egan says. "You've got to keep it up to date which means paying the annual fee."

5. Back up your files

"Nobody ever does it till they've had a problem," says Egan.

"Most problems aren't mechanical so providing you've backed up your work, then once your laptop's fixed you won't have lost your stuff."

You can buy external hard drives to store documents but for more instant insurance, consider signing up to an automatic online backup service such as Dropbox or if you so love Google products, you can go for Google Drive.

3 Simple But Effective Time Management Tips To Help You Maximize Productivity

2017-10-24T00:31:00.003+01:00

Managing time is one of the things that people of all ages and professions struggle with at some point because it dictates a lot of what we do on a daily basis. It isn’t always easy when there is a lot to do and not enough time in the day to get them done.

However, time management is also one of the things that can be practiced and learned over the course of time. Time management can help maximize productivity if done right, because it allows you to shave small amounts of time off tasks that may take you a long time. This article lists tips to help you manage your time well.

Tips to help you manage time well

1). Plan your next day, the day before
A lot of learning time management is spending a few extra moments the day before to plan for the events of the next day. When close to completing the day, the last thing anyone wants to think about is the long day ahead. However, finishing up small tasks such as setting aside the files you’ll need to hand in or setting up emails you’ll need to send out the next day will help you get ahead.

As you get rid of the smaller tasks, you’ll deal with the larger tasks much more efficiently. Ultimately, you’ll save a lot of time and become much more productive without getting bogged down by the little things later.

2). Do projects as they come
If an issue comes your way, tackle it NOW! In the same, whenever a project lands on your desk and it can be done now, get started on it immediately. Chipping away at it will get you ahead and get you prepared for other projects that are coming your way.

Procrastination is the greatest thief of your time. It takes away precious moments second by second, so benignly that you never notice until things pile up so much that you begin to run at break-neck speed to meet targets. Done this way, several projects and jobs are never executed in a first-class way, instead they get done shoddily and thereafter get delivered as sub-standard products. You do not want that, do you?

3). Plan around big meetings or events
If a meeting lands right in the middle of your day, plan other tasks around your meetings so you can be more efficient. This means that you should prioritize what is second most important after your meeting, what is third and so on. The most urgent tasks should get done first. As you do this more, you’ll notice that you feel as though you have more control of your day than you did before.

IN CONCLUSION
Managing your time doesn’t have to be done with one huge sweep. It is a process that you can start by making small changes and eventually, it will reward you in a big way. You’ll realize that you are now more productive than ever before and you’re getting far more done in the same amount of time you were before.

5 Reasons Smart Gadgets are Now Essential for Learning

2017-10-24T00:20:00.000+01:00

WHY SMART GADGETS ARE ESSENTIAL FOR LEARNING

Over the years, there have been arguments on the relevance of Smart gadgets, including 5th generation laptops, IPads, tablets and smartphones to education and innovative learning. While some are perturbed over the possible damage being inflicted on the young minds’ concentration and critical reasoning abilities, others believe that these smart devices give access to technology which will revolutionize learning.

There is no doubt that recent developments in the technology of these smart gadgets which are now being adopted as a source of learning in schools has significantly influenced the development in the field of education as it has not only made the concept of learning fun, but has led to better results.

For those who are still unsure of what stand to take regarding this argument, this article outlines 5 reasons smart gadgets are now essential for learning.

Role of smart gadgets in learning

1). Simplifies learning

One of the major barriers to learning over the years have stemmed from students and learners in general having difficulties understanding the concepts being taught. The interface, apps and software on these smart gadgets help these students learn various subjects easier.

For instance, smartphones, laptops, tablets and basically any gadget with a word processor the students use to take notes have built-in dictionaries that auto-correct spelling errors and also correct their grammar in a sentence, helping them build their vocabulary on the go.

Also, some of the games and apps (including calculators) on these gadgets make learning difficult subjects like Maths fun, more exciting and easier.

2). Early start in developing Motor and Learning Skills:

The basic learning skills include a blend of audio, visual and kinetic skills. Motor skills come in the areas of using the hands either in moving objects, writing or crafting. With smart gadgets, many students learn concepts and how to make inscriptions at an earlier age.

A toddler now understands the concept of selecting like objects or colours with the help of games on his laptop or Ipad, and the swiping and movements needed to achieve this knowledge builds his motor skills. Also, he can follow instructions and communicate better by following the visual or audio prompts programmed in these gadgets.

3). Better management of Special Educational Needs (SEN)

ADHD, Dyslexia and dyspraxia are some common SEN issues that make learning difficult for certain students. Most schools and teachers find it a challenge getting across to these students and so most times, their needs are neglected or not entirely met.

With the technology available instructors can cater to the needs of these students both in and out of the classroom as most of these gadgets have programs that allow for performance tracking, helping teachers plan for each student based on their performance and learning competences.

4). Fosters independent learning

With these smart gadgets, people have access to tons of data and information in form of articles, audio files and video from which they can either learn new concepts on their own or further explore topics that have been introduced to them by their teacher or instructor.

With just the smartphone, ignorance is taken away from the student. Access to news, new discoveries and developments is made easy and accessible. Students can even download and bookmark whatever interests them.

5). Improved collaboration between teachers and Students

These gadgets bridge the communication gaps between students and teachers as pupils can reach the lecturers easily and in real time too. Mobile text applications and educational social networks including Edmodo and Pals.com connect students with knowledgeable educators who can serve as mentors to them.

Also read: Top 5 Must Have Gadgets for New Parents

6 Tips To Earn Some More Money on The Side

2017-09-28T23:41:00.000+01:00

In many countries, the number of people engaging in efforts to raise a source of side income has been on the increase. Take Britain for example, new research by Gumtree.com suggests one in four Britons are now making a second income through renting out their possessions, skills and time - the so-called "rentrepreneurs". This trend is seen in many other countries of the world.

So could you join the "rentrepreneurs" and make a healthy second income to help tackle your debts, boost your spending power, or save for your family? Whether you’re a student or working a 9-5 job, there are many ways to rent out what you have, make some more money on the side, and thus earn yourself a good second income. You just need to know them and be ready to give the required effort and commitment to making them work for you. SaibaWorld looks at six ways to get you started, and shares some tips for you to earn some more money on the side.

Six top ways to earn a second income

1). Consulting/Coaching

If you have a specific skill-set with adequate knowledge and experience, you can leverage on it and build a lucrative side business on consulting/coaching that’s quite easy and affordable to start. It can involve giving advice to a start-ups on how to build their public image, assisting start-ups with social media marketing and SEO work etc. The best part of this business is that you can build it to fit your schedule and free time.

2). Freelance Work

This is another flexible side business that doesn’t need long-term commitments. You can also adapt this kind of business to fit your schedule and free time. Becoming a freelancer can involve writing content for businesses, doing content marketing for start-ups and doing design work for businesses, which can include graphic designs, web designs, logo designs etc. It really depends on your talent, skill-set and interests. The best part of this is that there is a reasonably high demand for freelancers especially in the area of content marketing, social media marketing and design work.

3). Leverage On Your Vehicle

If you have a vehicle, you can cash in on it by registering with Uber or Taxify or both. The best part about this is that you can keep your keys by becoming a driver on the platform or hire someone to drive the car on the platform for you. However, when considering this option as a means to making some extra money, you should be sure that you are satisfied with the rate of depreciation of your car (because it will definitely be higher). You also have to consider the cost of financing the car and other maintenance costs.

4). Produce Crafts

If you’re good with your hands, are creative and love to create crafts and design work, you can use the talent to create jewelry, clothing, furniture or accessories, and can sell them to make some decent money on the side. The advent of social media has made marketing your craft work and designs much easier, as you can take advantage of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and online shopping platforms like Jumia mall, to put your work out there and get it sold.

5). Photography

If you have good photography skills, you can purchase a camera and start doing photography jobs on the side. Photography is now big business, if you know how to exploit it, and you can start a very decent side business from it. However, in the photography business, it is best to carve a niche for yourself. Don’t be a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, you are unlikely to get positive recognition and referrals that way. You can specialize in weddings, capturing landscapes, taking fashion pictures etc. You can also sell some of your pictures to sites like Shutterstock.

6). Modeling or Voice-Over Work

Modeling is not all about having the perfect body and walking on the runway, there are different aspects of modeling. You can be a body model, hand model, leg model or even a face model, and earn some decent money from it. If you are really good at it, there is a chance that you get more recognition, and even attain a kind of 'celebrity status' from it, which of course means more money for you.

For the voice-over work, if you have a voice that’s great for voice-overs and you have some broadcast experience, you can earn some extra money by doing voice-over work for ad agencies, broadcasting houses etc.

11 things you need to know about Apple's amazing new iPhone X

2017-09-21T22:36:00.000+01:00

Apple has finally pulled back the curtain on the iPhone X, and golly - it's a bit of a departure from the norm, isn't it? With drool-worthy hardware, a new take on iOS 11, and some face-friendly animated emoji that look like a right laugh, it’s surely shot straight to the top of many an Apple fan's wish list.

But what are the standout features, when will you be able to slip one in your pocket, and is it "iPhone X" or "iPhone 10"? Read on for everything you need to know.

Features of the upcoming iPhone X

1) IT'S PRONOUNCED "IPHONE 10"
No, we're afraid X doesn't mark the spot - don't you remember your roman numerals from school?

The next iPhone is officially called the iPhone 10. It's just that X looks so much more fancy.

Apple has prior form with this, after all. Mac OS X was officially OS 10, so it's no surprise to see the iPhone follow suit.

2) IT'S ALMOST ALL SCREEN
Well it's about time. The iPhone X finally sees Apple join the bezel-free-screen brigade, with its 5.8in display filling almost the entire front of the phone.

Rounded edges bleed right into the bezel - which is made of water-resistant, surgical-grade stainless steel - while that notch at the top leaves room for the front camera and speaker.

The trade-off? No home button or TouchID. Good job there's something better to replace it, then...

3) HELLO HDR
With an eye-popping 2436 x 1125 resolution and pixel density of 458ppi, Apple calls the iPhone X screen its first "Super Retina" display.

All of Apple's trademark tech shows up here, including 3D touch and True Tone: the temperature-adjusting wizardry which used to be limited to the iPad Pro.

More firsts? The switch to OLED, which should deliver impeccable contrast, unbelieveable black levels and vivid colours, and the inclusion of HDR for the ultimate streaming experience.

4) FACEID REPLACES TOUCHID
With no home button any more, the iPhone X might seem a little lax on security - but that's because you don't need to press anything at all any more.

Instead of TouchID, you get FaceID, which uses a new ‘TrueDepth’ front-facing camera setup to track your mug and unlock the phone whenever you look at it.

There's a main 7MP camera, secondary infra-red camera, dot projector for mapping thousands of individual points around your face, and a flood illuminator for accurate tracking when you're in the dark.

5) ANIMOJIS ARE COMING TO TAKE OVER YOUR CHAT
All that accurate face tracking serves a second purpose – it makes it possible to map your mug on to a cartoon poo!
Animojis are basically animated emojis that react to your facial expression, so you can gurn, scowl or laugh away and have the onscreen character do the exact same thing.

You can record a message and have a 3D-generated unicorn, chicken or alien read it out to your mates over iMessage, or pull a funny face and pose as a monkey, puppy or a rabbit to create custom static emoji.

6) DUAL CAMERAS ARE BACK AND MORE STABILISED THAN EVER
Like the iPhone 8 Plus, the iPhone X gets dual 12MP rear cameras - but as with almost everything on this phone, they’re better ones.

How so? Well the main wide angle snapper sticks with an f/1.8 aperture, but the telephoto gets an improved f/2.4 aperture that should give it a boost in low light.

Both sensors also get optical image stabilisation - a first for an iPhone - while an improved image processor should mean faster autofocus, more realistic HDR photos, and better pixel processing.

7) PORTRAIT LIGHTING WILL GIVE YOUR SELFIES A BOOST
Apple's Portrait mode already let you play pro photographer by blurring out background details, but the iPhone X should take an even better snap thanks to Portrait Lightning.

Pose for a photo and the dual cameras will create a real-time depth-map of the subject, using machine learning to recognise specific facial features. This will then be used to make a variety of lighting tweaks on the fly. The end result will be like having a pro in the room with you.

Throw in a quad-LED flash and you've got no excuse for a dodgy portrait ever again.

8) WIRELESS CHARGING IS FINALLY ON BOARD
Swapping out an aluminium unibody for a stainless-steel-and-glass sandwich opens the door for wireless charging, and Apple has duly slapped a Qi charging coil inside the X.

That means you'll be able to stick it down on just about any wireless charging plate out there for a top-up, without having to plug in a Lightning cable first.

As far as battery life goes, Apple is promising two more hours of use over the iPhone 7, so expect to get a whole day out it (unless you're a real selfie addict).

9) ARKIT IS HERE TO AUGMENT YOUR REALITY
OK, so the X ain't the only iPhone to get in on a bit of the augmented reality action, but you'd better believe that apps and games are going to pop a whole lot more on the edge-to-edge OLED display.

Everything has been designed to maximise the potential of AR, with cameras calibrated for better low-light performance, 60fps updating, and a new accelerometer and gyroscope for better motion tracking.

10) IT'LL ARRIVE IN NOVEMBER, WITH LOTS OF STORAGE
Don't expect to waltz into an Apple store in two weeks when the iPhone 8 arrives and pick up an X - it's coming a little later down the line.

Pre-orders go up on the 27th of October, in a choice of two colours: Silver or Space Grey. You'll have a choice of storage sizes too, with 64GB and 256GB flavours available. That's double what you got from the entry-level iPhone 7 and 7 Plus last year.

11) IT'S THE MOST EXPENSIVE IPHONE EVER
So it’s all great, then? Well it is until you check out the price tags...

The basic 64GB model will set you back an eye-watering £999/$999. That's right: £999. Nine hundred and ninety nine of your precious pounds/dollars.

If you want to step up to the 256GB version? That'll be £1149/$1149, thank you very much. If you need us, we'll be weeping into our wallets.

Plugins (part 2): Configure Yoast SEO + Install and Activate User Profile Picture plugin for WordPress

2017-09-17T18:09:00.000+01:00

Lesson #35–PLUGINS: YOAST SEO, PART 2

We continue our revised course with Internet Income Lesson thirty-five. Each new lesson of this course contains updated tips, real-world advice, and in-depth, step-by-step instructions on setting up your Internet-based business. Author George Little continues to use plain English to explain the ins and outs of starting and running a profitable online business in today’s ever-changing global market. Read the previous lesson 34 here.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
In this lesson, we will continue our discussion of configuring the Yoast SEO plugin, picking up with the Taxonomies tab under Titles and Metas. Then, we will guide you with installing and activating the User Profile Picture plugin.

Convenient Flow

"Taxonomy" may be an unfamiliar word to many of us. At first glance, you might think it has something to do with taxation and the economy, but that would be incorrect. If, like me, you grew up in a rural setting, you might think it related to the preserving of dead animals for display or study. This is close. That's taxidermy. If you think of preserving samples of species in order to classify various animals, you are getting even closer. In its basic definition, "taxonomy" is classifying things. It is an orderly way of grouping things based on observed similarities. The words "taxonomy", "classification", and "categorization" all have very similar meanings. A concrete way to think about it is to think about shelves in a retail store. You put all the things with one shared characteristic on one shelf and all the things with another shared characteristic on another shelf and so on. You arrange the shelves so that people can easily move from one to the other, depending on what they are interested in at the time. But, what does this have to do with Wordpress and websites?

In WordPress, a "taxonomy" is a grouping mechanism for posts (or links or custom post types). According to the Wordpress codex, "The names for the different groupings in a taxonomy are called terms. Using groupings of animals as an example, we might call one group "birds", and another group "fish." "Fish" and "birds" are terms in our taxonomy. As an example from WordPress, a category or tag is a term." Wordpress has four built-in taxonomies: "Category", "Tag", "Link Category", and "Post Format."

Recall our discussion of the importance of effective "flow" earlier in this course. Creating the proper flow is crucial to engaging your viewers. Taxonomies assist in allowing your viewers to move from one post to another easily in order to preserve the feeling of flow through the material. Flow is facilitated by proper arrangement of your menu(s) and by properly creating and configuring categories and tags.

Categories
To understand the "Category" taxonomy, let me give you an example. Let's say I have a blog about exercising. Some of the posts are about cardiovascular exercise. Some are about strength training. Some are about isometric exercise. Some are about participating in sports games. Some are about exercises in the gym. Others are about exercises you can do most anywhere. I suspect that some of my readers are interested only in cardiovascular exercises that do not require a gym subscription or the purchase of a fancy treadmill for the home. I can use wordpress to create a "category" just for "Cardiovascular." I can create another category for "No Gym Needed." By selecting these categories, those readers will see only the articles that hold their interest and will not have to filter through all the other articles.

I make this possible by going to the Wordpress Dashboard and clicking on "Posts." Under "Posts", I look for the link to "Categories" and click on it. On the resulting page, I can create, organize, and delete various categories. Once I have created a category scheme in this manner, my readers can then select the category of their interest and see a list of posts within that category only.

Tags
The "Tag" taxonomy is more free form. Rather than creating a tag scheme in advance, you create tags for your posts on the fly. Posts can have multiple tags. (Posts can also have multiple categories, but it is more awkward to do so with categories.) Tags then present themselves to the readers as "tag clouds", allowing readers to move from one post to a similar post, based on the particular aspect of the post that caught their interest.

Link_Category
The 'link_category' taxonomy lets you categorize your links. These are mostly used for internal organization of your posts, and are not usually exposed on the site itself. They are handy for defining groups of links to be displayed in sidebars and in inserts. (Although similar, this should not be confused with link organizational hierarchy. Under "Appearance/Menus" in the Dashboard, you can create an organizational hierarchy for your linking structure. This is not the same thing as creating link categories.)

Post Format
"Post Format" taxonomy can be ignored by most users. This is used primarily by theme designers. When you select different "themes" to try on your Wordpress blog, you are using the "Post Format" taxonomy although you may not be aware of it. Advanced users can create certain post formats for certain types of posts in order to utilize advanced features (mostly made available through plug-ins), but this is only useful if you will have many such posts using the same format.

Customized Taxonomies
Wordpress also allows for customized taxonomies. You can ignore these for now, but as you become an advanced Wordpress user, they will become of interest.

The Taxonomies Tab In Yoast

To get to the Taxonomies tab in Yoast, you go to your main Wordpress Dashboard. On the left hand vertical menu look for SEO. Continue moving down in the left hand main menu and a couple of links down you will see "Titles and Metas." (If you don't see this menu option, you may have failed to execute the advanced features earlier. If that is the case, review the previous two lessons and make sure you get these features activated.) When you click on Titles and Metas, you will see six tabs, one of which will be "Taxonomies." On the taxonomies configuration page, you will see sections for Categories, Tags, and Formats. Under each section, you will have the opportunity to modify three or four things: the title templates, the meta description, the indexes for robots, and whether certain boxes show on your pages.

Before we get into the specifics of these possible modifications, let's step back and look at the big picture again. Recall that the purpose of SEO configuration is to optimize the way the search engines respond to your site. When a search engine lists a page from your site (be that a static page, a blog post, or a page listing the posts in a category), it displays your page in the search results according to its ranking. The way it displays the link is of issue here. A particular search engine listing will have three sections, the title, the URL, and the description. The wording of the larger, bolder font at the top of the listing (the title) is influenced by what you name the category when you create it. The ordering format used to display that title in relation to the remainder of your site is determined by what you put in the taxonomies configuration.

This can be confusing, but it will become clear as you work with your site. For example, if I create a cardiovascular exercise category as in my earlier example, what I name that category will determine the words of the title in the search listing for that category page. Whether that title listing also shows additional information (such as the site name) and in what order it shows this information – is determined by how I set up the taxonomy configuration for categories. When you set the taxonomies title template for categories, it will apply to all categories used on your site.

When you modify the meta descriptions, you are modifying the way the description of your page may appear in the search engines. When you adjust the link indexes (turning them on or off), you are determining whether the search engines will even list the page in the first place. All of these adjustments may affect not only how your link appears to people making searches, but whether it even appears in some searches and the ranking it will have if it does appear.

With this big picture in mind, let's look at the specific choices you have on the taxonomies tab. If you choose to adjust the title template, please keep in mind that you are not creating a title here. (You create the title for the category when you create the category under the categories tabs elsewhere.) Rather, you are setting the template for how the link to this category page will be displayed in the search engines. You are including or excluding certain variables that can be shown or not shown and determining their order of appearance.

The default for the title template for categories looks like this, "%%term_title%% Archives %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%." So, if I had a site named "Exercise for Everyone" and if I created a category for "cardiovascular exercise" and did not change the category title template, it would show up on the search engines as follows:

Cardiovascular Exercise Archive – Exercise for Everyone

If I were to change the title template to "%%term_title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%", then it would should up like this:

Cardiovascular Exercise – Exercise for Everyone

Note that I only removed the term "Archives." That's more of a personal preference, but I would rather not see the word "Archives" show up. It is advised that you do not remove the page variable. (If you do, the second page will have the same title as your first page.) If you are confused, it's ok to leave the title_template as is. If you want to experiment, unfortunately it takes some time for your changes to be noticed by the search engines. You will have to wait until your site has been re-indexed and then go to the search engines to see how your changes show up.

Below the title and description templates, you have the opportunity to set index or no index for categories, tags and post formats. On categories, you will almost always want these to index. Otherwise, your categories will not show up at all in the search engines. Categories are helpful in including your pages in search queries, so you definitely want them indexed.

The same is true for your tags with one exception. If you have created far too many tags and they desperately need cleaning up, you may want to turn off indexing until you can clean them up and consolidate them. Otherwise, you want to set indexing to on for your tags.

Why So Much Discussion Here?

You may have noticed that we breezed through many of the other sections of Yoast SEO, just quickly making bulk suggestions to ignore things or leave settings as they are (and we'll finish the remaining settings that way as well). You may be wondering why I covered this particular tab in so much detail. I could have just recommended that you leave all the settings as they are and move on. I chose not to, however, because it would have become dizzyingly monotonous and you may have lost interest. It is important to understand taxonomies as they are important to having an effective site. This was a good place to slow down and bore into the details a bit. I felt that providing some insight here would help ground you before we finished up the subject of configuring Yoast SEO.

Despite the lengthy discussion, you may still be confused. That's understandable. It can be a complicated subject. If you are confused, just leave the settings as is and move on. Hopefully, the discussion will help you more quickly get the hang of things as you work with your Wordpress site in the future.

The Archives And The Other Tabs

There are two remaining tabs on the Titles and Metas page: Archives and Other. It is recommended that you take a moment to read through them so you are somewhat familiar with what they are about, but leave the default settings in place as they are.

Social
The next link on the SEO submenu (within the main Dashboard vertical menu on the left) is "Social." This allows you to designate the URLs of all of your social media accounts that go with your site. It's pretty straightforward (and has been covered in an earlier setting within the configuration wizard). Just look up your social URLs and place them in the appropriate fields. (Note that with Twitter, you just use your handle and not the full URL.)

XML Sitemaps
The next link on the SEO submenu is for XML sitemaps. This page has four tabs: General, Post Types, Excluded Posts, and Taxonomies. XML is a format similar to HTML that is used to display and transfer organized data (much like a database). A sitemap is an XML document that contains information about each page on your site, including when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. The SEO settings for XML Sitemaps that you can adjust under these four tabs allow you to include and exclude certain pages and types of pages or post from your sitemap. Read over the options for education purposes, but I recommend you leave the default settings as they are.

Advanced
The next link on the SEO submenu is "Advanced." This page has three tabs: Breadcrumbs, Permalinks, and RSS. As you might guess since these are advanced settings, I recommend you leave the default settings in place unless you know what you are doing and have a good reason to change them.

Tools
The next link on the SEO submenu is "Tools." Three tools are provided here: a Bulk Editor, a File Editor, and an Import/Export Editor. These are all three useful tools when you need them. The Bulk Editor gives you a shorthand way to change the titles to many pages at once. This can be very useful when you are cleaning up and organizing your site. The File Editor is a bit misnamed in my opinion but can be extremely useful should you need to change your Robots.txt file on your site. Anytime you create a directory or file that you do not want to be part of your public site, you should make an entry in your Robots.txt file to disallow indexing of that directory or file. This is where you can do that on a Wordpress site. The last tool provides you import and export tools which can be handy if you are moving a Wordpress site from one server to another or one directory to another.

Search Console
The final link on the SEO submenu is "Search Console." It is pretty straightforward. It provides a field for you to input your Google Authorization Code (if you have not already done so) in order to use Google Analytics. We will discuss Google Analytics in a separate lesson.

Duplicate Settings and Later Modifications
And that gets us through the initial configuration of Yoast SEO. Note that there are many duplications of the same settings that have shown up in the configuration process. This results from Yoast placing most of the main settings for a particular function under the same tab, even though they may duplicate settings elsewhere. You can go back to any of these settings and modify them at a later date if a need arises.

User Profile Picture
Even though this lesson has run quite long already, we will, as promised, briefly explain using the one remaining Wordpress plugin we will be covering at this point in the course – the User Profile Picture. It won't take long as it is a very simple plugin. What this plugin allows is for you to use an uploaded photo in place of the default avatar in any place on your site where you are identified as the contributor. The advantage provided by this plugin is that it allows circumventing use of the Gravatar service to which Wordpress normally connects, thus eliminating one more place where you have to create an account. Instead, you can just upload your photo like any other media uploaded to Wordpress and use that photo in place of the avatar.

It's very simple to use. Find the plugin "User Profile Picture" using one of the two search methods we discussed in the last lesson, then upload and activate the plugin. Choose and upload the photo you want to use as you would any other media file on Wordpress (using Media/Add New in the Wordpress Dashboard). Then, all you have to do is click on "Users" in the Wordpress Dashboard Menu, select your user account and scroll down and select your photo from available media in the appropriate field. That's all there is to it!

CONCLUSION
In this lesson, we have worked through the remaining steps for configuring the Yoast SEO plugin, taking some time to discuses taxonomies and how they can be used to improve the flow and ranking of your site. Then, we have concluded with a quick how-to regarding the User Profile Picture plugin.

WHAT'S COMING NEXT
In our next lesson, we will introduce you to Google Analytics. Read the next lesson here. And you may also browse through the Internet Income training Index.

Author
By George Little, Panhandle On-Line, Inc. For more information on the Internet Income Course and other works and courses by George Little, see http://www.profitpropulsion.com

How to Discover Which CMS is Used on a Website - Top 6 Online CMS Detector Tools

2017-09-17T11:54:00.000+01:00

A content management system (CMS) is a system used to manage the content of a website or blog. Many people use CMS to more easily manage the content of their website or blog. Have you ever wondered which CMS a site is using? If you like any website, you could easily discover the CMS behind it. In addition, if you're a professional, it might just so happen that a client of yours could ask which CMS their competitors are using or which CMS a website they would like you to design their own like, use.

This brings us to CMS Detectors. With these special tools you can find and detect which CMS any website or group of websites are using. CMS Detectors can recognise hundreds of the most popular and famous CMS(es). Of course there are some more basic (and crude) ways you or anyone else could use to find the CMSes which are running websites, including:

Check the footer or sidebar for a "Powered By" logo.
See the favicon image in your browser address bar (although some types of CMS like Kentico allow easily changing the favicon).
Search for “Login-link” or try a default login link to the CMS (e.g. for Ektron: www.example.com/login.aspx or www.example.com/cmslogin.aspx or for Drupal: www.example.com/?q=user)
Look for the “Designed by” link and check out the designer website – they might often openly speak about the CMS they use

Why CMS Detectors

Despite discovering CMSes which run websites through the crude methods listed above, they may not always work or might be time consuming. This is why online CMS Detectors come in handy. They refine the manner in which you can discover these CMSes, and make the job of discovering CMSes easy and faster.

I searched the internet, and found on a particular website where four of these CMS detectors were tested and used to analyze websites of 11 major CMS vendors with the following results (test was done in 2011):

CMS Analyzer	Effectiveness
1). W3Techs (w3techs.com/sites)	73%
2). BuiltWith (builtwith.com)	64%
3). Wappalyzer (firefox add-on)	36%
4). CMS Detector (detectcms.com)	27%
5). CMSeye (cms.targetinfolabs.com)	27%

6 different tools for detecting CMS on websites

Online CMS detectors are really handy tools for detecting the type of Content Management Systems (CMS) on websites. They're more accurate and do not take time in accessing and showing these CMS types across the internet. The top 6 which we could find have been listed in order of increasing importance with the most powerful as #1 down in the list. They include:

6). W3Techs

Provides a comprehensive information set on the technologies used. It was the most effective tool in the test described above for identifying website CMSes. When SaibaWorld tested it recently in 2017, it appears there were much better CMS Detectors. Thus, it is listed as #6. This tool can be reached via web page or used as a bookmarklet, a browser extension or a google subscribed link.

Visit the CMS detection webpage here: W3Techs

5). Wappalyzer

Is a user-friendly browser add-on that uncovers the CMS and other technologies used on websites. It detects CMS and e-commerce systems, message boards, JavaScript frameworks, hosting panels, analytics tools and more. It shows the results straight in the address bar or in the status bar.

Visit the CMS detection webpage here: Wappalyzer (here, remember to add http:// or https:// as the case may be)

4). OnlineWebTool - CMS Detector

This tool works perfectly well for detecting CMS on various websites, however, the CMS detector has found CMS for about 30% of all its user's requests. OnlineWebTool decided that as long as this tool is popular, it has decided to continue to share statistics with the public via its CMS detector.

Visit the CMS detection webpage here: OnlineWebTool CMS Detector

3). Guess - CMS Detector

This tool will analyze websites and attempt to detect the plaform, language, framework and other technologies used for any website. No plugins or extensions are required and it works with any browser! This is an experimental service, so contact the company if any problem occurs or if you think a site has been wrongly detected.

Visit the CMS detection page here: Guess CMS Detector

2). WhatCMS

WhatCMS identifies which web publishing content manager that different sites use. Every day it visits hundreds of thousands of websites and tries to determine which tool is used. WhatCMS looks at a variety of factors within a webpage to determine what CMS a website is using, but it is admittedly not 100% accurate. WhatCMS has included algorithms for detecting all of the major CMS. This tool can currently detect the use of 192 different CMS applications and services.

Visit the CMS detection page here: WhatCMS

1). BuiltWith

This is the best CMS detector in our opinion. It represents a really powerful tool that even in its free version shows a technology profile for any given website. It would include information on:

Server, CMS and framework used
Analytics and tracking systems used
Content delivery network, aggregation functionality and document information

It also provides a SEO profile with basic SEO items as Metadata, Page Keywords or Response Time. The overall SEO score is given as well (very similar system as WebsiteGrader).

Visit the CMS detection webpage here: BuiltWith

How to Improve Your Digital Life for the Better

2017-09-08T19:08:00.000+01:00

REVAMP YOUR DIGITAL LIFE

Digital technology has been around with us for awhile. It is no longer new as almost everyone is affiliated in one way or the other. From phones to computers to other digital devices, millions of people across the world now have their lives saddled with various digital media platforms and have to keep up with multiple processes and activities to stay on point.

Unfortunately, keeping it all on track can become a chore. Before long, you find you have not cleaned your phone in months, your password has not been changed for ages and is now 'stale' so can easily be 'cracked' by cyber-criminals or is no longer functional or is way too easy to guess, etc. And you realize you need a plan to help you clean up your digital life and kick off a fresh start.

To help you organize the digital clutter all around, while staying abreast of new technology, this article suggests 5 possible, and really easy, tips you can follow.

Photo credit: ThinkPad

4 ways to revamp your digital life

1). Tune-up your device

Computers, laptops and phones require tune-ups at intervals. Take out time to study the device manual and read through relevant instructions that will guide you towards understanding exactly what you need to clean and how to go about it. You may be required to install a software, an app or use an extension, whichever you decide to use, it is wise to ensure you backup before you begin.

2). Reset Your Passwords

Passwords are very sensitive and it is essential you stay on top of password trends, that way you keep yours impenetrable. Get a password manager as it is essential to greater online safety and security: It creates unique passwords for all your accounts, remembers those passwords and types them for you in a secure way. The password manager also collects your logins and passwords, and analyzes their strength, indicating passwords that need to be changed.

There are so many password managers online that are free or at least render a level of free services.

3). Organize Your Photos

Thanks to social media and the incessant need for everyone to want to update their status daily, almost everyone now has a large vault of pictures online as taking pictures and selfies are now essential parts of today's daily routine.

The truth is, you do not need all your photos on your device all the time. Scroll through the stack of photos on your devices and ensure you delete all useless photos or irrelevant photos. Make up your mind on what photos are essentially important to you, name them, tag them, sort them into albums or folders. Ensure you save them in one location , that way you know that the space is defined for saving photos only. For pictures that you have only in print, you can scan them and save them digitally in these folders as well.

Good thing is, if you do not have an external hard disk, you can use the dropbox app or save to your google drive online.

4). Delete apps you do not use.

Most apps are free and so you find Nigerians crowding their phones with all sorts of apps, even the ones that do not apply to them in any way, even having as much three apps that perform the same functions at a time. While having these apps may seem trendy, they may be the reason your phone keeps clogging or crashing. Sweep through the apps on your phone painstakingly and delete every app you do not use at least once a week.

Also read: Top 5 Must Have Gadgets for New Parents

How To Ensure Security Of Your Web Browser Against Internet Fraud

2017-09-08T19:07:00.000+01:00

SECURE YOUR INTERNET BROWSERS AGAINST FRAUD

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), both frequently referred to as "SSL", are security protocols (in this case, cryptographic protocol as against the encryption protocol) that provide communications security over a computer network.

In order to provide their customers with a reliable and secure connection to its services, some information-sensitive companies in the UK and other countries, began disabling access to their website from browsers that do not support currently available SSL versions TLS 1.1 and/or TLS 1.2.

Aside from fear of companies disabling access from compromised web browsers, the benefits of enabling your browsers for current SSL versions cannot be overemphasized, especially with internet fraud like stealing of personal information and identity theft being so rampant. This article shows which Operating Systems and browsers support TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2; and following that, how to secure your browser while browsing on the internet.

Security Updates and Browser Compatibility

Several versions of the TLS find widespread use in applications such as web browsing, email, Internet faxing, instant messaging, and voice-over-IP (VoIP). Websites use TLS to secure all communications between their servers and web browsers.

Secure Web Browsers Against Internet Fraud

Windows Vista and XP system users that use Internet Explorer as their browser will be the only ones not to have the ability to support TLS 1.1 and/or 1.2. Other Operating Systems will usually have this ability.

To ensure you can carry on accessing websites securely if you use Internet Explorer on Windows Vista or XP you will need to download an alternative browser, such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

To ensure that your browser is enabled to support TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2, especially if you’re using an older browser version, please follow the instructions below or contact your system administrator for further help:

Enabling SSL Versions TLS 1.1 & TLS 1.2

Please select the browser that you usually use to connect to websites on the internet:

Internet Explorer:

Open Internet Explorer
Click Alt T and select “Internet Options”.
Select the “Advanced” tab.
Scroll down to the “Security” section.
Locate and check “Use TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2″.
Then, press the “OK” button.

Google Chrome:

Open Google Chrome
Click Alt F and select “Settings”.
Scroll down and select “Show advanced settings…”
Scroll down to the Network section and click on “Change proxy settings…”
Select the “Advanced” tab.
Scroll down to the “Security” section.
Locate and check “Use TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2″.
Then, press the “OK” button.

Mozilla Firefox:

Open FireFox
Type in “about:config” in the URL bar and press Enter
Scroll down to “security.tls.version.max” and press enter
Set the value to 3
Then, press the “OK” button.

Opera:

Open Opera
Click Ctrl+F12
Click on “Security”
Click on “Security Protocols…”
Check on “Enable TLS 1.1 & TLS 1.2”
Press the “OK” button.
Then, press the “OK” button.

Safari:

There are no options for enabling SSL protocols. If you are using Safari version 7 or greater, TLS 1.1 & 1.2 are automatically enabled.

Related: How to Know Your Computer Needs Upgrading or Replacing

4 Great Apps For Taking Pictures with Your CellPhone - Become a Top Amateur Photographer!

2017-09-03T00:15:00.001+01:00

GREAT APPS FOR TAKING PICTURES

Photography is the science, art, application and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film (Wikipedia, Sept. 2017). You could become a great amateur photographer if you have the right tools.

An amateur photographer is one who practices photography as a hobby/passion and not for profit. In fact, the quality of some amateur work is comparable to that of many professionals. Amateur photography grew during the late 19th century due to the popularization of the hand-held camera. Nowadays, however, it has spread widely through social media and is carried out throughout different platforms and equipment, switching to the use of cellphone as a key tool for making photography more accessible to everyone.

You can get more out of your smartphone camera with these awesome photo apps that help enhance and give improvements to your simple everyday camera shots. This article shares 4 great apps for taking pictures, as you work your way toward becoming a great amateur photographer (lol).

Four great amateur photography apps

1). VSCO Cam

This is a great app for photography and image editing. It helps you capture images, tweak and tune them to your preferences, then sync the images across devices and share them with as many people as you want. It even has a Grid feature that helps you discover the best original photography from other VSCO users.

VSCO® is an art and technology company empowering and inspiring people everywhere to create, discover, and connect. Founded in 2011, VSCO is based in Oakland, CA, and is the parent company to Denver-based printing outpost, ArtifactUprising. Download the app from VSCO website here. Or from AppStore or GooglePlay.

2). Snapseed

This photo app is owned by Google and is one of the most accessible photo editing apps for Android users. It has a wide range of features for experienced users and newcomers, and at it’s most basic level, gives users the option to scroll through image enhancement options and control the intensity of effects used. It has a diverse range of features from basic automatic colour and contrast enhancement to cropping and sharpening. It also gives the option of selectively adjusting colour properties within a particular radius, and has varieties of filters and frames to choose from.

Snapseed is a photo-editing application produced by Nik Software, a subsidiary of Google, for iOS and Android that enables users to enhance photos and apply digital filters. Snapseed was rated as one of the Top 100 Best Android App of 2015 by PC Magazine. Download from Google Play here. Or from iTunes here.

3). Pics Art Photo Studio and Collage

This app includes a robust photo editor with photo editing tools that allow you adjust white balance, tone, crop etc. However, Pics Art goes a step further by letting you purchase sticker packs on the app to use to adorn your photos; you can also add adjustable lens flares to your images, access varieties of filters and even apply Prisma-like features to transform your photos. In addition, Pics Art has its own tiny social media network that lets you share your photos on the app and make it free to edit, so others can edit or tweak your photos into something new and different.

Explore the most awesome images and photos on the web. Save in your collections and share what you love on PicsArt. Download from Google Play here. Of from iTunes here.

4). Camera+

This app offers the ability to manually control both the exposure and focus of your images, which gives you total control of elements like brightness. It also has a ‘stabilizer-like’ feature that helps you avoid blurry pictures, and a one-touch ‘clarity’ button that instantly improves the results of a photograph. Basically, it gives instant improvements to your everyday shot, however, it is an iOS only option for now.

Whether you’re a seasoned photographer or someone who’s barely touched a camera, Camera+ will make you love taking photos. Visit to download from the official website here. Or get from the iTunes here.

Also read: Safety Tips You Must Consider When Using Public Wi-Fi

Want to Share Your Files? Four Top Apps For Sharing Your Files

2017-08-25T01:12:00.001+01:00

4 BEST APPS FOR SHARING FILES

In computer and internet culture, file sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multi-media (audio, video), documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways. Storage, transmission, and distribution models are common methods of file sharing which incorporate manual sharing using removable media, centralized computer file server installations on computer networks, World Wide Web-based hyperlinked documents, and the use of distributed peer-to-peer networking (see peer-to-peer file sharing).

Sharing is a key feature in the developing field of free software and open source software, with implications for economics. This is leading to a need to review licensing, patents and copyright, and to controversy in these areas, as well as new approaches like Creative Commons and the GPL. Furthermore sharing is a key feature of Internet culture in which images, videos, links, knowledge and other content are shared on Web 2.0-platforms such as reddit.

Mobile devices can also be a great way to keep and share files, so long as you know the right tools to use for the job. This article will discuss and share with you 4 apps that are quite simple to use, and yet are among the best apps for sharing files.

Top 4 best apps for sharing files

1). Xender

With Xender you can send files between devices, that is either between Android devices, or between iOS devices or between Android and iOS devices. All you need to do is follow a couple of on-screen steps to create a Wi-Fi hotspot and you’re good to go. Xender file sharing works with a group of up to four devices at once. Also, Xender allows you grab APK files of any app installed on your phone which is very useful when you want to backup specific versions. In addition, with Xender’s desktop interface, you can view images, videos, music, documents, apps and other files stored on your device by switching from one tab to another.

You can visit official Xender website for more and to download.

2). WeTransfer

This is mainly used when you want to upload a huge set of photos and videos at once. It’s a free app that lets you upload up to 10GB at once, and sends a link for recipients to download your files via email, without needing to log in. It is especially convenient when you want to send files to someone remotely, and it lets you email multiple recipients at once and send a message along with it. For the free WeTransfer subscription plan, your uploads are available to recipients for a period of 7 days before expiring.

You can visit the official WeTransfer website.

3). Dropbox

Dropbox is a popular storage provider that’s also a great way to share files. Upon creating an account, Dropbox gives the user free 2GB storage, and the user can share videos, photos or documents with people who don’t even have a Dropbox account. All the recipient needs to do is click a link to gain access to whatever it is you want them to see, without having to download the Dropbox software. Dropbox works across iOS, Android, Windows and OSX, which makes it a great option for sharing files with other devices. Dropbox is also one of the more common enterprise choices for cloud storage.

Visit the official Dropbox website for more or to download.

4). Superbeam

Superbeam uses Wi-Fi direct technology to send files between devices, so it is able to work with or without an internet connection. Superbeam works with iOS and Android devices. To use Superbeam, all you need to do is open the app on the two devices you want to share files between, and then aproceed to trade files by scanning an on-screen QR code or pairing them over NFC. On Android, you can share images, music, apps, documents and even contacts, but for iOS devices, because file management to the camera roll is restricted, you can only share photos and videos from your iPhone or iPad.

You can visit the official Superbeam website.

Related: More articles on mobile devices

Build Your Confidence Online with IBM Security Trusteer Rapport (Advanced Fraud Protection)

2017-08-23T01:15:00.000+01:00

INCREASE ONLINE TRUST WITH TRUSTEER -- PROVIDING INTEGRATED, CYBERCRIME FRAUD PREVENTION PLATFORM

Ever heard of Rapport by Trusteer? Now consider this 2009 report: "A recent test of best-of-breed anti-virus vendors and Web browser anti-phishing filters revealed that more than half of active malware and phishing threats on the Internet go undetected, with an average detection rate of 37 percent for malware and 42 percent for phishing." Cyveillance, February 2009. Now, is that report not scary? It sure is. To counter this, I will introduce you to an online security product I have used since 2013. Discover the IBM Security Trusteer fraud prevention solutions for your online protection!

What is Trusteer Rapport?

Trusteer Rapport is a web security solution that protects your sensitive online communication from being interfered with by criminals and malicious codes. Trusteer Rapport is a software that is highly recommended as an additional layer of security to any anti-virus or security software you already use. By protecting your online connections and creating a tunnel for safe communication with the many sensitive online platforms out there e.g. banking websites, Trusteer Rapport blocks malicious attempts at stealing your valuables e.g. money from your account.

Why Rapport?

Recent malware is capable of stealing your login credentials to online banking, brokerage, shopping, ecommerce, email, and social networking websites. Even if the site is deemed "secure", fraudsters can use your online account to execute unauthorized transactions, place orders, send emails, and much more. Trusteer Rapport works standalone or alongside any desktop, mobile or cross-channel security solution. It hides your login credentials and web communication from any type of malware and prevents unauthorized access to your accounts. You should use Rapport even if your computer runs the most updated antivirus solution.

How it Works?

When you browse to a website, the Trusteer Rapport icon appears in or near the browser’s address bar. The icon turns green when Rapport is protecting your communication with the website, but is grey when the communication is not protected (see below).

Rapport comes preconfigured to protect certain websites which are working directly with Trusteer to give their valued customers the best protection possible. Of course, you should have Rapport protect you on all websites where you login or where you can read or send sensitive information. To activate Rapport protection, browse to the website, click the grey Rapport icon, and then click the “Protect this Website” button.

Trusteer recommends you activate Rapport protection on any websites where you are sending your online identity. On protected websites you can click the green Rapport icon for more information about the forms of protection provided by Rapport for that website.

Advanced fraud protection

IBM Security Trusteer products help detect and prevent the full range of attack vectors responsible for the majority of online, mobile and cross-channel fraud. IBM Security Trusteer products deliver a holistic, integrated cybercrime fraud prevention platform. This platform is based on four key principles:

Prevent the root cause of fraud by helping to detect active threats, analyze risk factors and flag high-risk transactions.
Deliver improved user experiences that help provide transparent protection and significantly reduce disruption to customers who are performing legitimate transactions.
Reduce operational impact with a turnkey software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for rapid deployment that helps provide a quicker response across online and mobile applications.
Utilize a global intelligence service from hundreds of millions of endpoints to dynamically adapt the various protection layers.

Ready to enhance your online security? Download Now!

Trusteer Rapport simply secures your online communications with sensitive online portals and protects your account details from fraudsters. You may download Rapport to further enhance your security even if you are already using a well-established anti-virus program on your device: Download Here.

The download link above is intended for use by online banking users only. Employees of enterprises protected by Trusteer should contact their IT department for details on downloading Trusteer Rapport for Enterprise.

Support

If you encounter problems, contact Trusteer support here. Support for Rapport is free - so do not hesitate to contact Trusteer! More information about Rapport is available here. Trusteer is a Boston-based computer security division of IBM, responsible for a suite of security software. Founded in Israel in 2006, Trusteer was acquired in September 2013 by IBM for $1 billion.

Related: More articles on web security

5 Sure Ways to Start Your Business While Working a Full-time Job

2017-08-21T20:09:00.000+01:00

5 WAYS TO START A BUSINESS WHILE WORKING A FULL-TIME JOB

Are you one of those folks itching to have a business by the side while also having a full-time 9-5 job? Personally, I did do a lot of serious thinking some years back about having a business in addition to my full-time day job. It almost gave me sleepless nights as I considered the ways to go about it. However, I've come to know it's better to take the step than contemplate forever.

The truth is it’s not as impossible as you might think to start a business while working your 9-5 job. There are certain ways to make it work and this article is set to share the top 5 ways to start a business while working a full-time job.

5 ways to start a business while on a full-time job

The suggestions discussed below appear quite simple, but taken for granted by several people. They can generate great potential if seriously considered and followed through.

1). Be Committed

Commitment is one of the major things that will help you get through the hard and difficult times of starting a business while working a full-time job. To help with commitment, you can write a list of all your necessary activities and prioritize them. Try to lessen your involvement with or the time you give to activities that are not very relevant, and invest that time in your new business venture. It might not be the most convenient thing, but you have be determined to sacrifice as much as you can to make it work, without jeopardizing your full-time job or spreading yourself too thin. This is why prioritizing your activities is very important.

2). Consider Your Strengths, Interests and Weaknesses

To help you successfully start a business while working a full-time job, you should take an inventory of your strengths, interests and weaknesses. Your strengths and interests can culminate in you having some of the necessary skills to drive your business success. For the skills you don’t have but are necessary for the success of your business (in other words, your areas of weakness), you can take time out to learn the skill, or outsource or hire someone else who has the required skill and can help you pick up the slack.

3). Be Sure to Validate Your Business Idea

This is very important because a business can’t be successful if there is a lack of market need for its offerings. You should thus ensure that you validate your business idea before starting a business based on it. A business needs a lot more than the passion of its founder to be successful and sustainable. Ensure your business concepts and product ideas are fully thought out, useful and properly researched, and that there is ongoing feedback from your customers or target audience about your product or service. This is one sure way to guarantee business growth.

4). Outsource as Much as You Can

You might have the skills to do virtually everything related to your business, but because of your full-time job, the fact is that you just don’t have the time. This is where outsourcing comes in, to help you pick up the slack and move your business forward. Focus on doing what you can do better than anyone else, and outsource the rest. To help save cost, you can consider outsourcing to people that will be willing to work for free or at a low cost. You can also consider offering some of the shares of your business to some of these people for coming on board, rather than paying them cash, if you consider the skills they are bringing into your business extremely valuable and vital to the growth of your business.

5). Try Not To Blur the Line Between Your Business Work and Your Full-Time Job

When push comes to shove, you’re still being paid to work for your employer so you should ensure that you take care of the work for your full-time job when you need to. Avoid abandoning the work for your full-time job to take care of your business work. Give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s.

Also read: 6 Tips to Make You Stand Out as a Leader in Life and Business

HTML to XML Parser | Medianet Adsense Ad Codes Converter | Blogger Scripts Converter

2017-08-20T17:48:00.000+01:00

PARSE YOUR CODE BELOW

SaibaWorld HTML to XML Parser was created so JavaScript ad codes like Google AdSense can be added into the body of Blogger Templates. However, if there is any other script you add to Blogger Template that gives an error, then putting it through the parser below would very likely solve the problem.

The HTML to XML parser and converter

The tool below automatically converts any JavaScript ad code into the correct format so you can embed it directly into your XML Blogger template. If you get an error while embedding any code into your template, then run it through the tool below, and it will resolve. It is perfect for converting scripts like those of Google AdSense, Yahoo MediaNet, Chitika and any other JavaScript code that you may have.

How to Use the AdSense Code Converter

Just paste your Adsense code or any other code or HTML into the empty box below, and then click the Convert button. Thereafter copy the resulting code. and paste into your Blogger template. If you want to convert more codes, just click the Clear button and paste in the new code into the now empty box, and repeat the former steps to also convert. Simple!

Why you get error messages in Blogger Template when adding codes

HTML has special handling for characters like '<' and '>' symbols, so it does not work well with those characters where they should not be.

Having spurious characters like these symbols in your text can have some weird effects - blocks of text not appearing, broken formatting, and generally just not seeing what you expect to see. And of course, error messages.

This can all be fixed by 'escaping' those characters. This process involves scanning the text for those characters, and replacing them with a special character-code that browsers can interpret as the correct symbol, without actually embedding that symbol in your text.

For example, the escaped character code for > is >.

The SOLUTION is simply to run it through the script parser above.

Related: How to upload your favicon to Blogger blog inspite of error messages