Important
Starting with Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio no longer includes .NET Framework components for .NET Framework 4.0 - 4.5.1 because these versions are no longer supported. Visual Studio 2022 and later versions can't build apps that target .NET Framework 4.0 through .NET Framework 4.5.1. To continue building these apps, you can use Visual Studio 2019 or an earlier version.
The minimum supported .NET Framework version for Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX 2024.2.513 is 4.6.2. This is the version that was released in May 2024.
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Cal-Maine Foods Inc. has more than 45 million employees. That is, if you count the roughly 36.1 million egg layers and 9.5 million pullets—young female chickens—and breeders, which make Cal-Maine Foods the largest producer and marketer of shell eggs in the U.S.
That’s a lot of birds to keep track of and each comes with a host of data points—feed consumption, ideal laying temperature, productivity—which is why technology has become increasingly important to the company.
Headquartered in Jackson, Mississippi, Cal-Maine Foods has facilities in 15 states and distributes eggs to retailers like Walmart, Publix and Costco, essentially anyone looking to resell eggs in the shell and in the carton. It also sells to egg product companies that separate the yokes and whites for further processing. Cal-Maine owns two egg product companies, American Egg Products and Texas Egg Products.
Not long ago, Cal-Maine Foods was in the dark ages when it came to technology. Much like other farm-based producers in the early 2000s, it had few desktop computers—everything from financials to flock management was stored on standalone, legacy computers—and employees were running individual email accounts through providers like AOL. There was no intranet.
That started to change in 2000, when Cal-Maine Foods hired Bob Gilmore, now the company’s IT director.
“They thought they needed somebody to come fix PCs,” Gilmore says. “There wasn’t a vision as to what they needed from IT. I saw this as an opportunity to take an agriculture company out of the 20th century and into the 21st century because I just knew there were tremendous needs here.”
Naturally, there were practical improvements to be made. With farms located in rural areas, connectivity was a challenge. Bob established a relationship with Southern Telecommunications to more reliably manage all of Cal-Maine’s voice and data functions. But Gilmore began to ask questions of the data itself: Where does it come from? Where does it go? Who uses it? How is it created?
“I was able to present an answer to their problems that they just really hadn’t comprehended before because they operated as a collection of silos at that time,” he says. “Every location did its own thing.”
The company didn’t entirely understand how it could use automated, consolidated data to analyze its business and run more efficiently.
To demonstrate how technology could improve business operations, Gilmore began to look at how Cal-Maine Foods handled orders for one of its larger customers. At the time, the company had a manual system. All orders were sent to a facility in Texas as electronic data interchange (EDI), printed out, written up on order sheets, and finally, faxed to the various locations which supplied the customer’s local warehouses.
In a presentation he called “The Fax in the Hen House,” Gilmore suggested automating that system. Orders would come in via EDI, data would be extracted automatically, ingested into databases and presented through web views for each individual location. Cal-Maine Foods agreed to try it, and in doing so, the company saved $1.5 million in just one year.
With that success under his belt, Gilmore was able to convince Cal-Maine Foods to make other considerable changes. Among them, Cal-Maine Foods now has a company-wide ERP system (Aeros from Cultura), through which all orders are processed automatically, as well as an animal inventory management system (Aeros Live). Thanks to those systems, data is consolidated and employees, regardless of location, have uniform access.
Major improvements were made to keep the management team informed. Cal-Maine adopted CafoPro® from Enviro-Ag to enhance compliance with governmental agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.
In similar fashion, mobile forms were designed and implemented with the Forms on Fire app, enabling Cal-Maine employees to collect the information offline and automatically sync with database servers when their tablets are back within wireless range.
Once the ERP system was up and running, Gilmore recommended that Cal-Maine Foods needed to revamp its data center. He also realized that doing so in the company’s Jackson, Mississippi, headquarters would be costly, and it didn’t make much sense to invest in the 50-year-old facility, which, as Gilmore puts it, left a lot to be desired.
Instead, Gilmore opted to move Cal-Maine Foods’ data to a private cloud offered through M3COM, a cloud infrastructure provider based in Ashburn, Virginia. Then, Gilmore and his IT team, which now consists of nine employees, assembled a data recovery center in Cal-Maine Foods’ headquarters.
“We felt like we were going to get the best attention and response from a smaller, boutique cloud provider, and that’s what M3COM was,” Gilmore says. “From a financial standpoint, we saved about a half million dollars in the first three years.”
In addition to the cost savings, the move to M3COM’s cloud offered “phenomenal” broadband connectivity. As Gilmore explains, M3COM is connected to almost every carrier known to man, but when Cal-Maine Foods was moving to the cloud, fiber wasn’t even an option at the corporate headquarters in Jackson, Mississippi.
There’s another benefit to the cloud: scalability.
While the egg business isn’t as seasonal as, say, corn or wheat production, demand nevertheless fluctuates. It skyrockets at Easter, slacks off in the summer and jumps back up around the holidays. By operating in the cloud, Cal-Maine Foods can simply pick up the phone and ask M3COM to “spin up” more servers during peak sales and then turn them off in slower times.
Since Gilmore joined the company in 2000, these tech-based changes are among the many that have helped Cal-Maine Foods to grow from $200 million in sales to $2 billion, and today, technology is an integral part of the business.
For instance, there are five different market regions in the U.S. where egg prices are set on a daily basis. Cal-Maine Foods has customers in each of those regions, so with the daily fluctuations, there is endless data to gather and analyze. That’s all made possible through the systems Gilmore and his adaptable team have built.
While Cal-Maine runs a lean IT environment the need for application development to support all areas of the enterprise is vast. Cal-Maine’s app development team of two programmers had been challenged to meet those needs until they partnered with Zudy. Vinyl, an application development platform from Zudy has reduced the time to create and deploy apps by as much as 75 percent.
The company produces for the specialty egg business, too, which includes nutritionally enhanced, cage free, free range and organic eggs. Those prices are not set daily, as are conventional egg prices, so Cal-Maine Foods is constantly watching demand between specialty and commodity eggs to determine which hens to have in production.
Then there are metrics for feed consumption, or how many pounds of feed an average bird in a specific henhouse consumes in order to produce a dozen eggs. Because feed represents 40 percent of the company’s costs, being able to analyze consumption is extremely important, Gilmore says.
Many of the carefully-monitored factors, like henhouse lighting and temperature, can be controlled remotely through automated environmental controls.
In fact, processes are so automated, that on many egg farms, as a hen lays an egg it’s carried via a conveyor belt to a central processing facility cleaned, graded and packaged without being touched by a person.
To market over 1 billion dozen eggs each year Cal-Maine employs sophisticated grading and packing machines made by Moba that crank out up to 500 cases per hour with 98 percent Grade A quality.
With all of these technology innovations in place, there’s certainly no going back to the days before Gilmore joined Cal-Maine in 2000.
webconfig - Telerik API - study notes
FOUNDER, PORTFOLIO MANAGER
Before starting Verdad, Dan worked at Bain Capital Private Equity and Bridgewater Associates. He is the Chairman of the Investment Committee for Plymouth Rock Companies, is a member of the investment committee of the Trustees of Donations of the Episcopal Church, is the New York Times bestselling author of American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt, and in 2017, was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Dan is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and his investment research has been featured in multiple volumes of The Best Investment Writing. Dan earned an AB from Harvard College summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Dan Fitzpatrick is an established technical analyst and trader. He is a frequent guest on CNBC, and his work is regularly featured on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money television show. Dan is also a senior contributor to RealMoney.com and produces the daily video series, ” Three Stocks I Saw on TV”. Fitzpatrick is a former hedge fund manager and has lectured throughout the United States on stock and options trading with an emphasis on technical analysis. He is a member of the Market Technicians Association and his take on the market has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal.
Dan Fitzpatrick’s Stock Market Mentor is the culmination of more than a decade of teaching and corresponding with thousands of aspiring traders and investors with one common goal — to develop the skills necessary to succeed in the stock market. While all traders and investors share the common goal of success, most also make the same mistakes that prevent them from reaching that goal. They take big losses; they are cautious and under-invested at the wrong time, or aggressive and over-invested at the wrong time; they own the wrong stocks at the wrong time, or the right stocks at the wrong time, and they fail to take profits and instead allow large gains to become small gains. The Stock Market Mentor teaches Members how to avoid these common mistakes. Most aspiring traders have heard the Wall Street maxim “Cut your losses short and let your profits run.” Nevertheless, few traders are skilled in using the two essential tools necessary to follow that rule — trailing stops and scaled entries and exits. Mentor Members learn how to use these tools and develop the skill and discipline necessary to succeed in the stock market.
Supertrend is a trend-following indicator based on Average True Range (ATR). The calculation of its single line combines trend detection and volatility. It can be used to detect changes in trend direction and to position stops.
The Supertrend indicator was created by Olivier Seban.
To calculate bands of the Supertrend, use the following formulas:
hl2 = (high + low) / 2
basicUpperBand = hl2 + (multiplier × ATR)
basicLowerBand = hl2 - (multiplier × ATR)
upperBand = basicUpperBand < prev upperBand or
prev close > prev upperBand ? basicUpperBand : prev upperBand
lowerBand = basicLowerBand > prev lowerBand or
prev close < prev lowerBand ? basicLowerBand : prev lowerBand
superTrend = trendDirection == isUpTrend ? lowerBand : upperBandThe trendDirection is determined based on the fulfillment of the following conditions:
Until the ATR value is calculated trendDirection = isDownTrend
else if prev superTrend == prev upperBand
trendDirection := close > upperBand ? isUpTrend : isDownTrend
else
trendDirection := close < lowerBand ? isDownTrend : isUpTrendThe Supertrend is a trend-following indicator. It is overlaid on the main chart and their plots indicate the current trend. A Supertrend can be used with varying periods (daily, weekly, intraday etc.) and on varying instruments (stocks, futures or forex).
The Supertrend has several inputs that you can adjust to match your trading strategy. Adjusting these settings allows you to make the indicator more or less sensitive to price changes.
For the Supertrend inputs, you can adjust atrLength and multiplier:
When the price falls below the indicator curve, it turns red and indicates a downtrend. Conversely, when the price rises above the curve, the indicator turns green and indicates an uptrend. After each close above or below Supertrend, a new trend appears.
The Supertrend helps you make the right trading decisions. However, there are times when it generates false signals. Therefore, it is best to use the right combination of several indicators. Like any other indicator, Supertrend works best when used with other indicators such as MACD, Parabolic SAR, or RSI.
Welcome to the 2020s. In the software development world we see a major evolution in the .NET space to providing more inclusive scenarios. Blazor has certainly arrived promising full integration between server and client (and with the assurance of minimizing the amount of web technologies to learn and apply). For us, we have already added the standard controls needed in enterprise apps and are continuing to integrate these Blazor components with our XAF, Dashboard and Reporting libraries.
Even so, the non-.NET web development world is still of major importance. DevExtreme - our pure HTML/JavaScript library - continues to grow and we are investing more time and effort to supporting React, Angular, and Vue as well as working towards better SCSS and TypeScript integration.
Another major push from Microsoft is the .NET MAUI platform for mobile devices. We have already started to provide our usual library of controls for that space. Of course, the big issue that needs mastering for mobile devices is that of an adaptive UI. We have been concentrating on improving that functionality in DevExtreme and this work will naturally continue.
Needless to say, the desktop development field isn't going away and continues to grow, especially with the recent releases of .NET Core and Windows 11. Our work on adding .NET Core support to our WinForms and WPF products continues apace, and we have started on a new undertaking of enhancing our WinForms offering by integrating other platforms' features, such as HTML/CSS formatting, DirectX rendering, and MVVM support.
The 2020s have only just begun but certainly promise to be exciting within our development arena. We thank all our loyal customers for your support over the years, and you can certainly count on us continuing to serve your development needs.
January 9 2024
#EquityTools #StockResearch #PaidStockResearch #PaidTools
The following are the websites I paid for my equity research.
The IBD Live ready stock list is a compilation of stocks that Investor's Business Daily (IBD) focuses on during their real-time streaming video broadcast. IBD Live is a show where IBD's investing experts analyze and identify leading stocks, and the IBD Live ready stock list is the list of stocks that they focus on during the show.