Jack Zenger-Strengths Based Leadership

Here is the link.

Growth Comes From Moments of Being Uncomfortable - Jack Zenger @LEAD Presented By HR.com

Here is the link.

84 years old Jack Zenger gave the talk. I like to spend 20 minutes to watch the video, and spend time to look into my life from 1996 to 2019.

Myth #1

Myth #2 We are the product of our past

Same family friend met with the man's brother to talk about his life.
"My Father was an alcoholic, and I saw what that did the family. I have no other choice but to work hard and be successful."

Myth #3 People do not change


Conclusions

1. Focus on strength
2. Resist playing "victim"
3. Believe in change
4. Make yourself uncomfortable

Growth Comes From Moments of Being Uncomfortable - Jack Zenger @LEAD Presented By HR.com

Here is the link.

John H. “Jack” Zenger is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Zenger Folkman, a professional services firm providing consulting, leadership development programs and implementation software for organizational effectiveness initiatives. Jack is considered a world expert in the field of leadership development, and is a highly respected and sought after speaker, consultant and executive coach. He is the co-author of five books on leadership, Results-Based Leadership, (Harvard Business School Press, 1999) voted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) as the Best Business Book in the year 2000, the best selling The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders (McGraw-Hill, 2002), Handbook for Leaders (McGraw-Hill 2004), The Inspiring Leader: Unlocking the Secrets of How Extraordinary Leaders Motivate (McGraw-Hill 2009) and The Extraordinary Coach: How the Best Leaders Help Others Grow (McGraw-Hill 2010).

9 Habits That Lead to Terrible Decisions

Here is the article.

I like to take some time to read the content and then write down my own notes.

Laziness

This showed up as a failure to check facts, to take the initiative, to confirm assumptions, or to gather additional input.

Basically, such people were perceived to be sloppy in their work and unwilling to put themselves out. They relied on past experience and expected results simply to be an extrapolation of the past.

Not anticipating unexpected events

It is discouraging to consistently consider the possibility of negative events in our lives, and so most people assume the worst will not happen.

Unfortunately, bad things happen fairly often. But many people just get so excited about a decision they are making that they never take the time to do that simple due-diligence.

Indecisiveness

Those paralyzed by fear are the ones who believe that one mistake will ruin their careers and so avoid any risk at all.

Remaining locked in the past

Poor decision makers fail to keep those base assumptions in mind when applying the tried and true. 

Having no strategic alignment

A clear strategy - what is it? Look up google.

Over-dependence

Effective decision makers find a way to act independently when necessary.

Isolation

Networking skills

Lack of technical depth

Failure to communicate the what, where, when, and how associated with decisions

A Historical Look at a 50/50 Portfolio

Here is the article.

My Valentine day

Feb. 15, 2020

Introduction

I am a single person and 53 years old. I used to have problems to plan what to do in holidays and also Valentine day. What should I do in order to build wealth and grow rich in Valentine day?

Valentine day

I spent over 14 years in Florida and then 10 years in Canada. How should I give myself good learning opportunities in life?

I found out that I did not spend time to learn how to invest from 1999 to 2019. Over 20 years being a single, I should have demonstrated good determination to learn something, so people in my community respect me more.

Being frugal

I did big surprise after Chinese new year break, I brought some plant into the office and showed that I am so frugal. So people will trust me that I will not waste time and money, I am working hard to push myself, help business and myself to next level.

6 Tips for Expanding Your Social Circles

Here is the article.

【下班經濟學#73】一堂30萬的美股投資課！那些巴菲特教我的投資招數 ft.林修禾、Peggie

Here is the link.

2019 年美國股市整年上漲 28.9%，第四季更上漲 9.9%，三大指數創下歷史新高，你也想投資美股卻不知道該如何開始？今天邀請到美股投資達人林修禾、Peggie，來跟我們分享怎麼用股神巴菲特的價值投資法，成功邁出投資美股的第一步！

Asset allocation

50% ETF equity
50% on bonds

Diversification, and wait for bear market to invest using those 50% bonds.


25:50 / 28:01
bear market, when the price goes down, you should purchase more. Be disciplined.

How to advice new investor?
26:00/ 28:01
Asset allocation - diversification, diversify different industries
Keep 50% cash, wait bear market, and purchase more

US stock PE - 20, so keep 50% cash

20% - ETF
80% - individual stocks, different industries

Wall Street Week - Full Show (02/07/20)

Here is the link.

Feb.07 -- One of the most iconic brands in financial television returns for today's issues and today's world. Zanny Minton Beddoes, The Economist Editor-in-Chief, Glenn Hubbard, former Council of Economic Advisors Chairman, Daniel Tarullo, former Federal Reserve Board of Governors Member and Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary join host David Westin for a new look at the financial and economic stories that shape our world in "Bloomberg Wall Street Week."

Wall Street Week - Full Show (02/07/20)

Here is the link.

Think you can time the stock market? Look at this chart first

Here is the link.

Learn How to Become Rich

Here is the article.

Realize That More Money Isn't the Answer

More money is not going to solve all your problems. Money is a magnifying glass; it will accelerate and bring to light your true spending habits. If you are not capable of properly budgeting a $25,000 salary, bumping your pay up to six figures won't solve the problem. You may be surprised to learn that many people earning $100,000 a year live from paycheck to paycheck, and they don't understand why it is happening. The problem isn't the size of their checks, it is the spending habits they have built up over the years.

The Best Ways to Become a Millionaire

Here is the article.

How Millionaires Manage Their Money Differently?

Here is the article.

Top 5 Investing Tactics of Millionaires

Here is the article.

3. Pay Close Attention to all Ventures

Dr. Stanley illustrates the point well in The Millionaire Next Door. Millionaires spend an average of five or six hours per week on financial planning (including managing investments) whereas those with a lower net worth tend to spend an hour per week.

Focusing on finances and investments literally pays off. By paying attention to what you're spending, what you are making, and where you keep your financial assets, you can make more optimal decisions and place investments in higher performing asset classes and higher yielding fixed income investments.

4. Take Calculated Risks

Millionaires take risks when the odds are in their favor. A large part of being able to take risks is having the wealth available to put at risk. To a millionaire, a $20,000 or $30,000 loss on an investment gone bad won't send them to the poor house. Consider what those losses would do to a household living paycheck-to-paycheck and you can easily see why millionaires can afford to take such calculated risks.

Millionaires don't limit their investments to only stocks and bonds. Many use capital to start a business or invest in private equity deals that require high initial investments.

How the average American millionaire is managing their money in this market

RIAs spar with Wall Street for Silicon Valley's rich clients

Here is the article.

The U.S. Now Has More Millionaires Than Sweden Has People

Here is the link.

“Some of this slowing in wealth creation has to be expected due in part to softening equity markets, after almost a decade of very strong returns, coupled with the early effects of the tax reform on affluent households,” said Greg Soueid, head of wealth management at advisory firm Treliant. “That said, the growth rate of wealthy households continues to outpace middle-class growth rates.”

The US has more millionaires than Greece has people

Here is the article.

A new study has found that in 2018, there were 11.8 million households in the United States with a net worth of more than $1 million, making up 3 percent of the US population.

Also, 1.3 million well-off Americans were in the ultra-high-net-worth category — defined as having household assets excluding primary-home real estate of between $5 million and $25 million. And some 173,000 households have a net worth above $25 million.

US added 700,000 new millionaires in 2017

Here is the article.

US personal finance Millionaires' new challenge: they're not rich enough for private banking

Here is the article.

How hard it is to train a single person business smart?

Next Recession Will Have A Softer Landing: Paul Hastings' Brady

Here is the link.

World’s Wealthiest Say Equities Will Rally in 2020

Here is the link.

Bloomberg Money Undercover (02/11/2020) - Full Show

Here is the link.

Ariel Investments' Rupal Bhansali: ‘Growth is working, but it's time to switch to value'

Here is the link.

January 28th, 2020, 5:19 PM PST

Wealthy investors are almost unanimously optimistic about markets in 2020, according to UBS Global Wealth Management. A whopping 94% of rich investors expect positive returns this year, according to a survey of more than 4,800 global respondents. About two-thirds are optimistic about their own regional stock markets. On "Bloomberg Money Undercover", Bloomberg's Lisa Abramowicz and Tom Metcalf talk about the poll that was conducted between Dec. 19 and Jan. 12. (Source: Bloomberg)

Upside-down Investing Approach

Here is the link.

6 tips to navigate volatile markets - Fidility.com

Here is the article.

1. Keep perspective: Downturns are normal and typically short
2. Get a plan you can live with – through market ups and downs
3. Focus on time in the market – not trying to time the market
4. Invest consistently, even in bad times
5. Get help to make the most of a down market
6. Consider a hands-off approach

Missing 10 best days in market research

Feb. 14, 2020

Introduction

I spent over 30 minutes to look up all articles related to this topic. I like to write down something important, never time the market again. I did a few times in 2001, in 2009, and then in 2019 May.

Things I learn

I like to write down some good arguments in the following. Will come back.

2015 to 2020 five year celebration - Failure is the best teacher

Feb. 13, 2020

Introduction

I like to write something simple and meaningful. How do I become such a great programmer and also enjoy the life? I think that everything started from an one hour onsite interview from Facebook, in the city of Vancouver, Westin hotel back in 2015. 

Five years memory

I like to take five selfies to memorize those last five years. I was not so smart back in 2015, I tried to push myself to prepare the onsite, I remembered that the event was such great experience, I attended a talk and then asked for onsite interview. And I got one. 

I should become an investor, it is much easy to profit as a long term investor. Instead I chose to have a dream instead,  be one of programmers working for Facebook, my dream. Here is the link with blogs I wrote tagged birth of my coding blog. 

Patient

The interviewer was very patient. I remembered that I could not write code since I did not practice sliding window technique before. I also was so nervous and thought about wasting time of the interviewer and the company. I do believe that Facebook makes the community stronger, help others grow in technical skills. I talked to myself one day I will treat others like this, even though I would be so experienced on problem solving on the interview.

Facebook stock value 5 times more from 2015. I worked full time from 2010 to 2015, I never invested on anything; but I never thought about investing on Facebook. I just thought about myself, how to advance myself technically.

49 years old is still young age, I was 49 years old in 2015. I will treat myself better when I write things about myself.

Corinthians 13:4-7 New International Version (NIV)
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

2015 

It is a busy year working on Leetcode algorithms. I started my journey to solve 426 algorithms lasting 5 years.

I started to work on my coding blog and also algorithm practice in January 2015. I had hard time to learn by myself, over a year I did not explore Leetcode.com carefully, I did not notice that there is a tab called discuss and there are thousand discuss posts to learn from. If I was a good product manager, or very patient person, I can figure that out in less than a day.

Instead I always used Google.com search, and I always read the blogs shared by Chinese.

2016 

I got the chance to go for Amazon onsite in June 15, 2016. I still remembered the day I worked on preparation.

I had hard time to work on system design, and I did not work on large distributed system study from 2010 to 2016 at all.

My interest was shopping, church activities, tennis sports, weight control, and programming in general.

2017 - 2020

Lovely bear - the art makes working life happy

Feb. 14, 2020

Every one should have some luck in 2020

Feb. 14, 2020

Introduction

I like to write a short research talk about how to reach out to other people. And also I like to write my case study how I apply it to myself.

My communities 

I went to Crystal mall shopping and then I purchased Chinese fortune baboon, and then I put them on my office table.

My ex-roommate left and went back to Victoria island to work. She gave me some used scarf, and I took picture with my own haircut. I hacked a haircut in less than 10 minutes. I took a selfie in the office as well.

I spent less than four Canadian dollars to get the plant in Chinese new year. I wish the best luck for the place I work and things I do in 2020.

I moved to the table near the elevator and also window more than one year ago. I was so happy to move away from the center of the office. I think that it is such great for my plants, better lighting and sunshine!

I cut my own hair again. This time my coworkers told me that it is not even, but it may be a special style.

I made the day special to memorize my ex-roommate. She moved away from Vancouver, and I still remembered how a 31 year old work hard with more than five places, with over $18,000 student loan. Compared to her, I am lucky to have a stable job and with stable income. I never need to worry about pay checks.

leveldb数据库的put ,get ,compaction操作总结

Here is the article. I think that it is definitely a good idea to read some blog written in Chinese.

What Every Programmer has to know about Database Storage by Alex Petrov

Here is the talk I like to spend time to watch. I am not sure if it is the best one to fit my level right now.

Alex Petrov, here is the linkedin.

17:24/ 47:09
Summary

• Immutable
• Write-optimized
• Read multiplexing
• High maintenance costs
• Well-suited for concurrent ops
• Simple to implement

Design large data intensive application - find 10 mentors

Feb. 13, 2020

Introduction

It is so important for me to learn advanced topic about storage design - LSM tree this week. I like to encourage myself to learn better from reading book: Design large data intensive application, so I have to find terms like LSM tree, and then find good talks first. I like to give my ranking from those presenters.

Best talks 

It is so important for me to find mentors through youtube.com, so that I can learn most important content about storage design like LSM tree. I spent over 10 hours to read a book chapter, but I found out that I could not learn by myself, I need to get some help from those mentors.

1. Oana Balmau
2. Niv Dayan
3. Alex Petrov

Here is data structure research Niv Dayan's page.

1. Scaling Write-Intensive Key-Value Stores
2. SILK: Preventing Latency Spikes in Log-Structured Merge Key-Value Stores

3. What Every Programmer has to know about Database Storage by Alex Petrov

Analysts: These Companies Will Be The Most Profitable In 2020

Here is the article.

The 69 tech companies in the S&P 500 together are expected to report net income of nearly $300 billion. That's more profit than any of the 11 S&P 500 sectors. Only stocks in the Financial Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLF) come anywhere close with total expected net income of $273 billion in 2020. No wonder the Technology Select Sector SPDR is up 40% this year, which is more than any other sector.

Prediction: Apple Will Be The S&P 500 Profit Winner

Apple will continue to be the biggest S&P 500 profit machine next year, analysts say. Analysts think the smartphone maker will make $58.1 billion next calendar year, topping Microsoft's $42.9 billion expected profit and Alphabet's $38 billion net income haul during that time.

On an adjusted EPS basis, Apple's profit is seen rising nearly 12% to $13.59 a share in calendar 2020. Hopes for a strong 2020 help explain the powerful 68% jump in Apple's stock this year, even as its earnings per share in the calendar year 2019 are essentially flat. Apple commands a strong 89 IBD Composite Rating, according to IBD Stock Checkup.

20 Predictions for the Stock Market in 2020

Here is the article.

1. There will be no recession in 2020
2. The stock market will have another positive year
3. The market will experience at least a 10% correction
4. Interest rates will remain unchanged the entire year
5. Gold and silver will outperform, once again
6. Warren Buffett will make a big purchase
7. Healthcare will be the hottest sector in the S&P 500
8. FAANG stocks will outperform the benchmark S&P 500, as a whole... 
9. ...But Netflix will finish the year lower
10. Bitcoin will lose half of its market value... again
11. A 900-plus-store retailer will go bankrupt
12. Brexit will finally happen
13. Marijuana industry M&A will come to a complete halt
14. More pot stocks will be delisted than uplisted to a major U.S. exchange
15. Corporate share buybacks will fall from 2019's record levels
16. United Technologies will be kicked out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average
17. Facebook or Costco will replace United Technologies in the Dow
18. Restaurant stocks will significantly underperform the broader market
19. Pinterest will shine in 2020 -- other second-year stocks, not so much
20. Value stocks stage a comeback

18 5 Phrase Queries and Positional Indexes Stanford NLP Professor Dan Jurafsky & Chris Manning

Here is the link.

18 3 The Inverted Index Stanford NLP Professor Dan Jurafsky & Chris Manning YouTube

Here is the link.

It is such a good lecture and I like to learn more from the professor Dan Jurafsky & Chris Manning.

13 Ways to Beat the Single-Person Penalty

Here is the article.

Scaling Write-Intensive Key-Value Stores

Here is the link.

In recent years, the log-structured merge-tree (LSM-tree) has become the mainstream core data structure used by key-value stores to ingest and persist data quickly. LSM-tree enables fast writes by buffering incoming data in memory and flushing it as independent sorted batches to storage whenever the buffer is full. To enable fast reads, LSM-tree sort-merges batches in storage to restrict the number that reads have to search, and it also uses in-memory Bloom filters to enable point reads to probabilistically skip accessing batches that do not contain a target entry. In this talk, we show that such LSM-tree based designs do not scale well: as the data size increases, both reads and writes take increasingly long to execute. We pinpoint the problem to suboptimal core design: the Bloom filters have been attached to LSM-tree as an afterthought and are therefore not optimized to minimize the overall probability of access to storage. Point reads are therefore unnecessarily expensive. To compensate, more merging than necessary has to take place thereby making writes unnecessarily expensive. As a part of the CrimsonDB project at the Harvard DasLab, we developed two insights to address this problem. Firstly, we show that the optimal approach for allocating Bloom filters given any amount of available memory resources is to assign significantly lower false positive rates to smaller data batches. This shaves a logarithmic factor from point read cost thereby allowing key-value stores to scale better in terms of reads. Secondly, having lower false positive rates for smaller batches allows to merge newer data more lazily without compromising point read cost. This allows eliminating most of the merge overheads of LSM-tree thereby improving the scalability of writes. We close by describing a higher-level lessons from our work: while data structure design up until today has focused on the cost balance between reads and writes, the inclusion of memory utilization as a direct additional optimization objective opens up new avenues for asymptotic improvements, which studying reads and writes in isolation could not have revealed.

Actionable Item

Go over the author's web page, watch as many videos, slideshow as possible. I like to build some interest in storage research, I like to learn the foundation of storage design. Here is data structure research Niv Dayan's page.

Log-structured merge-tree LSM tree

Here is the link.

Oana Balmau, Florin Dinu, and Willy Zwaenepoel, University of Sydney; Karan Gupta and Ravishankar Chandhiramoorthi, Nutanix, Inc.; Diego Didona, IBM Research–Zurich Awarded Best Paper! LSM-based KV stores are designed to offer good write performance, by capturing client writes in memory, and only later flushing them to storage. Writes are later compacted into a tree-like data structure on disk to improve read performance and to reduce storage space use. It has been widely documented that compactions severely hamper throughput. Various optimizations have successfully dealt with this problem. These techniques include, among others, rate-limiting flushes and compactions, selecting among compactions for maximum effect, and limiting compactions to the highest level by so-called fragmented LSMs. In this paper we focus on latencies rather than throughput. We first document the fact that LSM KVs exhibit high tail latencies. The techniques that have been proposed for optimizing throughput do not address this issue, and in fact in some cases exacerbate it. The root cause of these high tail latencies is interference between client writes, flushes and compactions. We then introduce the notion of an I/O scheduler for an LSM-based KV store to reduce this interference. We explore three techniques as part of this I/O scheduler: 1) opportunistically allocating more bandwidth to internal operations during periods of low load, 2) prioritizing flushes and compactions at the lower levels of the tree, and 3) preempting compactions. SILK is a new open-source KV store that incorporates this notion of an I/O scheduler. SILK is derived from RocksDB, but the concepts can be applied to other LSM-based KV stores. We use both a production workload at Nutanix and synthetic benchmarks to demonstrate that SILK achieves up to two orders of magnitude lower 99th percentile latencies than RocksDB and TRIAD, without any significant negative effects on other performance metrics.

How to tell if I am below (should be above now) average as an investor?

Feb. 12, 2020

Introduction

It is time for me to learn how to evaluate myself as an investor. I did buy high and sell 15 years low in 2009, and I did the same thing in VIGRX in 2001. How should I start to learn to evaluate myself or other above average or not.

Above average

I just could not believe that I was 1% in 2009 to act reactively, and I like to figure out how to evaluate myself where I am at the very beginning.

Every area I should work on at least 100 hours first in order not to stay 1% lowest level.

Case study: Victoria portfolio performance review

Feb. 12, 2020

Introduction

It is a good idea for me to review my Victoria performance. Now it is easy for me to put those transaction into Excel sheet and then generate dividend, positions and commissions quickly.

Case study

I like to push myself to learn how to invest S & P 500 index fund; one thing I learned to do is to push myself to work on something simple and easy first. So later I can come out some creative idea to work on improvement.

Those are my 10 years saving from 2010 to 2020. I was naive and I did not learn to invest on the stock market from 2010. If I have invested $10,000 dollars on VGT ETF from 2010 to 2020, then the growth of fund will be around $50,000 dollars. Knowledge is power, I did not push myself to learn, so I live so frugal to save all those $50,000 dollars in Canada over 10 years, which is all I can save in Canada.

I just use this as a small example to illustrate how important it is to learn to work on research, stay confident to learn, and also examine all possible leaks in my personal finance. It took me six months research from Nov. 2018 to May 2019, I found out my biggest finance mistake.

I have to say that I am lucky to be healthy, smart to find out my own weakness.

Actionable Items

Knowledge is power. Hard work beats talent, but I have to learn again in my 50s the importance to take risk, grow with USA and world economy by investing S & P 500 Index, and FTSE.

I had over $25,000 US dollars in my 401 K and IRA in 2010 for me to invest. If I have above average knowledge how to invest, and I put those fund into VGT etf. During 10 years period, I was busy with Willingdon church small group activities, I never even opened my book to look into what I should work on, at least 5 hours a year. I just could not believe that I was so biased and could not move away from daily busy activities, focus on basics of personal finance.

If I learn to be frugal, put all my savings from full time job in a manufacture company in the city of Vancouver, no matter how small the wage it is, I will save $5,000 dollars each year to put in VGT using dollar cost average. From 2010 to 2019, I was busy with so many things but I never spent over one hour to study what is S & P 500 index. I am not a learner at all.

SILK: Preventing Latency Spikes in Log-Structured Merge Key-Value Stores

Here is the presentation by Ph.D. shared by Microsoft research.

LSM-based KV stores are designed to offer good write performance by capturing client writes in memory and only later flushing them to storage. Writes are later compacted into a tree-like data structure on disk to improve read performance and to reduce storage space use. It has been widely documented that compactions severely hamper throughput. Various optimizations have successfully dealt with this problem. These techniques include, among others, rate-limiting flushes and compactions, selecting among compactions for maximum effect, and limiting compactions to the highest level by so-called fragmented LSMs. In this work we focus on latencies rather than throughput. The root cause of high tail latencies is interference between client writes, flushes and compactions. We introduce the notion of an I/O sched- uler for an LSM-based KV store to reduce this interference. We explore three techniques as part of this I/O scheduler: 1) opportunistically allocating more bandwidth to internal operations during periods of low load, 2) prioritizing flushes and compactions at the lower levels of the tree, and 3) preempting compactions. SILK is a new open-source KV store that incorporates this notion of an I/O scheduler. SILK is derived from RocksDB, but the concepts can be applied to other LSM-based KV stores. We demonstrate that SILK achieves up to two orders of magnitude lower 99th percentile latencies than RocksDB and TRIAD, without any significant negative effects on other performance metrics.

Here is the link for slideshow.

Actionable items

I spent one hour to watch the video, and it is such a great presentation. But I also like to see if I can review second time, so that I can have ideas how to learn better next time, LSM-tree.

Time spent: 10:00 PM - 11:03 PM

Why it is so important for me to find a video to learn LSM-Tree?

Feb. 12, 2020

Introduction

It is so hard for me to read a few articles about LSM-Tree. I did spend over three hours to read, but for some reason, I could not go over the original paper LSM-Tree in 1996 which has more than 30 pages. I like to find some videos from Youtube.com, and see if I can learn quickly from teaching video.

LSM-Tree

LSM stands for Log-structure Merge tree, and it is so interesting since I could not figure out what S stands for while I took a break in swimming pool this evening.

I tried to learn LSM-Tree by reading original papers in wiki article, but this was a serious problem.

Actionable Items

Follow up
Feb. 13, 2020

I spent two hours to watch Microsoft research video about paper written on LSM-Tree, and also Stanford post doctor's presentation.

Recession 2020? Economists See High Chances

Here is the link.

Behavioral Finance Foundations

Here is the course called Behavioral Finance Foundations on Linkedin learning.

LSM-tree

Here is the video.

Inverted index - youtube.com video

Here is the link.

Ric Edelman Offers Advice On Managing Your Finances

Here is the link.

Truth About Money with Ric Edelman-Season 3 Episode 15

Here is the link.

Here's how Ric Edelman suggests you avoid big financial mistakes

Here is the link.

How to find some one hold hand, avoid impulsive decision making.

Most people act emotionally, not intellectually. I did act emotionally, sold everything in stock market in 2009.

Ignore noise, work on long term goals. Do not sway you from long term strategy.

How to make investment study much more fun?

Feb. 11, 2020

Introduction

I like to work on a short research how to make my investment study much more fun, so that I can prepare better to go through a bear market with all my 10 years savings in Canada.

10 ideas to make investment fun

I like to work on ideas how to make the research fun.

1. I will buy VGT ETF second dip in next bear market
2. I will do rebalance first dip in next bear market
3. I will write something related to being frugal in the city of Vancouver, talk about how I enjoy my simple life
4. I like to work on 20 lbs weight loss in first dip, 10 lbs weight loss in second dip. 
5. I will solve 100 Leetcode algorithm if there is first dip in 2020
6. I will think about 5 more ideas

I closed Amtrust bank account and moved $2600 US dollar CD over 10 years, and then the fund was moved to scotia bank, and then TFSA account.

I like to study better this time before bear market hits in 2020. I will enjoy better my time if bear market is not coming in 2020.

The S&P 500 is really the S&P 5. Big tech dominates the index

Here is the article. I like to learn three facts from the article.

Technology’s Impact on Investment Management

Here is the link.

1. Low interest
2. tax
3. Inflation
4. Annuity - get second opinion - inflicted with commission 

1-2-3 challengs

1. income keeps pace with inflation

Going broke by safely 

Hypothetical interest rate 1.5%  $100,000

33% Fed/State Tax Rate  -0.5%
                                          1.0%
Hypothetical inflation     -3.0%
Real annual return           -2.0%
(net of taxes and inflation)  x 20 yrs
----------------------------------------
                                        -40%        $60,000


guaranteed to fail because net of taxes

                                          

Ric Edelman Offers Advice On Managing Your Finances

Here is the link.

Here's how Ric Edelman suggests you avoid big financial mistakes

Here is the link.

Availability bias - lighting attacks or shark attacks
recency bias -

Long period - do it yourself, or by fund managers

Human tendency - error checking - hand checking
How to avoid buying you are excited, sell if you are scared.

Soccer - penalty kicks - act, stand there

We do realized that we are emotion creatures -

fall - wrong thing/ wrong time
facts/ get caught

What is my motivation? Sound facts

Opportunity to buy on the dip
Ignore the noise <=> long term goal
Sway you from long term goals

Old news -

Here's How to Tell Within 5 Minutes If Someone Will Never Get Rich

Here is the article. I like to take the test and understand better about interest rate with bond pricing.

6. Suppose you owe $1,000 on a loan and the interest rate you are charged is 20 percent a year, compounded annually. If you didn't pay anything off, at this interest rate, how many years would it take for the amount you owe to double?

• Less than 2 years
•  2 to 4 years
• 5 to 9 years
• More than 10 years

6. Suppose you owe $1,000 on a loan and the interest rate you are charged is 20 percent per year compounded annually. If you didn't pay anything off, at this interest rate, how many years would it take for the amount you owe to double?

Answer: 2 to 4 years.

People who thought it would take five years forgot about interest compounding. After one year you'll owe $1,200. After two years the 20 percent gets applied to that amount, which means you'll owe $1,450. And so on...

If that sounds complicated, here's an easy rule of thumb. Just apply the "Rule of 72" to any interest rate or rate of return: Divide 72 by the rate of return and the result is how long it should take your savings to double -- or, in this case, your debt to double.

So if you get a 10 percent return, it will take 7.2 years for the amount to double. Getting a 6 percent return will require 12 years. Getting a 4 percent return will take 18 years. 

Which means it will take 3.6 years, if you don't make any payments, for the $1,000 you borrowed to double.

And if that sounds a little loan shark-y, it is.

Actionable Items

72 rules - review (1 + 0.01)^72 = 2

SSDs and Distributed Data Systems

Here is the article.

Diff-Index: Differentiated Index in Distributed Log-Structured Data Stores

Here is the paper.

Tokutek White Paper: A Comparison Of Log-Structured Merge (LSM) And Fractal Tree Indexing

Here is the paper.

How does the log-structured merge-tree work?

Here is the link on quora.com.

The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree)

Here is the paper about LSM-Tree.

I may not be able to understand the paper, but it is better to invest 20 minutes to give it a try.

SSTable and Log Structured Storage: LevelDB

Here is the article.

Here is the article.

阅读目录

• 背景知识
• The Base LSM Algorithm
• Basic Compaction
• Levelled Compaction
• 关于 LSM 的一些思考
• Beyond Levelled LSM
• 延伸阅读

Log Structured Merge Trees(LSM) 原理

十年前，谷歌发表了 “BigTable” 的论文，论文中很多很酷的方面之一就是它所使用的文件组织方式，这个方法更一般的名字叫 Log Structured-Merge Tree。

LSM是当前被用在许多产品的文件结构策略：HBase, Cassandra, LevelDB, SQLite,甚至在mangodb3.0中也带了一个可选的LSM引擎（Wired Tiger 实现的）。

LSM 有趣的地方是他抛弃了大多数数据库所使用的传统文件组织方法，实际上，当你第一次看它是违反直觉的。

You may be tempted to make this mistake as the market tanks. Here’s what to do instead.

Here is the article.

12 Signs That You Are a Writer At Heart (And 3 Signs You Are Not)

Here is the article.

4 hours reading - Design large data intensive application

Introduction

It is important for me to track my progress how to learn by reading a book. I have to spend over four hours to read one chapter, and I like to figure out how I can improve my reading skills.

Case study

Here are highlights:

1. Book chapter: Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval
2. How many hours? More than 4 hours
3. How I read the book chapter? I copy a few paragraph and paste into word, so I break the sentence, and then find keywords, and then think about.

What are my problems?

The reading is too slow, and my understanding is limited how good the book is written. I tried to get the main idea how the storage is design. LSM-Tree is so confusing, in those 8 hours of reading, I am not so sure what it is.

Follow up

Feb. 12, 2020

After I spent two days over 8 hours to read the book chapter, I found out that I did not learn things at all. I decided to look up baidu.com, and then find an article, and then go one by one reference, so I can read original papers and other blogs written by Google engineers.

The writing of book chapter is not so good for my level. I need to catch up a lot of terms, and also I need to read quickly, and go over the main ideas.

Everything related to data structure like tree, how to understand balanace binary search tree, merge tree, I already study very well last four year through Leetcode practice.

Follow up
Feb. 13, 2020

I spent two hours to watch Microsoft research video about paper written on LSM-Tree, and also Stanford post doctor's presentation.

My volunteer reward

Feb. 10, 2020

Introduction

It is hard for me to get chance to be interviewed on interviewing.io. I only got 9 mock interviews from January 2018, even though I work as a volunteer Mon-Fri 10:00 PM, 10:00 AM/ 10:00 PM Sat./ Sun..

Good news

Today I got an email about a good news. Now I have chance to learn how to push myself to get into 10% in ranking of interviewees.

Sania Mirza lost 26kgs in 4 months post pregnancy, shares video of transformation

Here is the link.

You’re probably not saving enough for retirement — and that’s OK

Here is the article.

The number of 401(k) millionaires hits an all-time high

Here is the link.

The number of 401(k) millionaires hits a fresh high

Here is the article.

The number of Fidelity 401(k) plans with a balance of $1 million or more jumped to a record 200,000 as of Sept. 30, up 7% from a year ago, according to a new report by Fidelity, the nation’s largest provider of 401(k) plans. The financial services firm handles more than 30 million retirement accounts altogether.

In addition, the number of individual retirement account millionaires increased to 182,400, also an all-time high.

- Argument to look into

They also tend to hold more equity, Murphy said, which can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the bull market has buoyed those investments but on the flip side, they may also be exposing their savings to unnecessary risk if the market takes a dive.

Vanguard Group founder on how to manage your 401 (k) plan

Here is the link.


Vanguard Group Founder Jack Bogle on index funds and how people should manage their 401 (k) plans.

Number of 401(K) millionaires hits new high: report

May 18, 2018

Here is the link.

401(K) millionaires

new high

108K  1Q 2017
157K  1Q 2018

Treat it serious, get some professional help. For my case, I should invest time long time ago from 1999. Over 20 years I only got $5000 from over $22,000 investment over years.

Record number of 401(K) millionaires

Here is the link.

10 year bull market

RPT: There are 50,000 more people from a year earlier with $1M in their 401(K).

a year before 118,000, now it is 168,000

Fidelity manages 16.1 million people's 401(k)s


32,000, 5% deposit into 401 K, 13% return every year.

Mutual fund, target fund.

Darbar -

Professional help - pay them by hours

401(k) and IRA millionaires hit new high

Here is the link.

IRA   - 2%      17.4 M accounts
401K - 1%      17.4 M account   

Risk aversion in 2008 -

Stocks go up in long run - it always

Mistakes and discipline issues from 1996 to 2020

Feb. 9, 2020

Introduction

I like to write a case study how I learn mistakes I made from 1996 to 2020. I like to work on a short research how to discipline myself and make a good living as a single Canadian as a 53 year old.

Case study: How much risk I should take as a 53 years old?

Feb. 9, 2020

Introduction

It is my personal finance research. I just spent whole weekend to work on personal finance study, and I like to figure out how much risk I should take. I do not want to time the market, and I like to see how many investment opportunities for me to consider in 2020.

Case study

Target retirement fund for 50 years old is 80% equity, 20% bond. Right now, ...

How to Get $1 Million in your 401k & Become a Millionaire Investor

Here is the link.

==== TRANSCRIPT ===== In America the 401K has become the number one way we save for retirement. More than pensions ,savings accounts, IRAs regular investment counts the average person's balance in their 401ks and all-time high. What do you need to do to get your 401k to a million dollars by the time you retire? 1. Never cash your 401k out. According to research 41% of people between the ages of 20 to 39 are cashing out their 401ks when they leave a job. If you leave a job and take a cash distribution of your 401k you have to pay all interest that's due and you pay a 10% penalty on top of that. 2. Don't borrow against your 401K. One in five people borrow against their 401k but what is the real cost of doing so? When we decide to borrow money in our 401k it's probably not going to be for the reason that's going to be benefiting our retirement. It's a sign we are living beyond our means. 3. Roll it over into an IRA. The cost of owning a mutual fund is called the management fee and you pay that every year out on your investments. The funds in your 401k are going to have some of the highest management fees you will find anywhere so when you leave your job you should roll over your 401k into an IRA where you can invest in low-cost index funds which have much lower fees. 4. Invest heavily in stock. If you are young you want to select funds in your 401k that are 100 % and mutual funds or low-cost index funds if they're available stock market it's going to proven history of generating wealth for investors who are in it for the long haul. If you follow those steps invest early invest often you are almost guaranteed to retire with at least a million dollars Scott Answers Viewers Questions: Should money an employee stock purchase program in an annuity or in a 401k account as an emergency fund? I know you say about the 401 K because he recently talked about not borrowing money against your 401 K but if you have an emergency does that qualify? How do I get out from under a foreclosure I went through a divorce and my ex-wife would not sign the papers to sell the house or rent it out so I got taken back by the bank.

Tips To Become A 401(k) Millionaire

Here is the link.

【朽木】看高盛摩根如何趁机绑架了全世界的经济，经济危机才是投行赚钱的机会《大而不倒》

Here is the link.

金融危机中，他们是怎么赚钱的 ？--让每个人都能听懂：《大空头》|《THE BIG SHORT》

Here is the link.

《大空头》是由美国派拉蒙影业公司发行的传记剧情片，由亚当·麦凯执导， 克里斯蒂安·贝尔、史蒂夫·卡瑞尔、瑞恩·高斯林、布拉德·皮特、凯伦·吉兰、梅丽莎·里奥、玛丽莎·托梅、拉菲·斯波、约翰·马加罗联合主演。 影片根据迈克尔·刘易斯同名小说改编。讲述了华尔街金融危机时四个性格怪异的男人抓住机会，从全球经济衰退中捞取了利润，同时他们还试图阻止全球经济的衰退的故事。

So you want to be a 401(k) millionaire? Here's how to do it, according to Fidelity

August 30, 2018


Here is the link.

Values are rising
Retirement funds (year-over-year)

• Average 401(k): $104,000 (up 6%)
• Average IRA: $106,900 (up 9%)

What's in your 401(K)? Vanguard, average retirement account
Ages 65+

• Average: $209,984
• Median: $64,811

1:57
157,000 people are super saver, based on Fidelity, with over a  million dollar

Tip #1
Be aggressive

• Invest heavily in equities
• Be heavier equities when younger, roll out over time
• Gauge age and risk tolerance

Tip #2  (3:22/ 6:04)
Know your end goal

• Always take a longer-term view
• Have an eye on growth
• Don't react to market swings

Tip #3

Examine allocations

• At minimum once a year
• Quarterly when near retirement
• Re-examine when life changes take place

Jeanne Thompson - Fidelity

Target fund - when you are 50, still 10 year to retire, 85% equities, 15% bond

Marathon, a sprint,

60% market,

Allocation once a year. Asset class

Less than 1% - move to cash, but most of them stay on the course

Those over 10 years,
$73,000 -> $200,000 approach $300,000

Do not react too quickly.

Actionable Items

I like to evaluate myself based on my USA 401 K and IRA, my return from 2009 to 2020 is less than 2% annual return. All of those mistakes can be traced back in 2001, I sold VIGRX in 2001 with 30% loss; I did not learn that I have to read at least one investment book related to growth fund, and understand the concepts like index fund return. Later in 2009, since my Canada immigration application was denied in December 2008, I sold all equities in my 401 K and also IRA. I made mistake to move to IRA CD with Amtrust bank.

I got depressed in 2009 since I learned that I may be worth nothing from 1996 to 2009, the home  I purchased does not worth too much, I had 10 year old paid SUV but gas price was $5.00/ gallon, and I had less than $28,000 dollar US retirement fund, and the bank gave me $65,000 home equity line starting from 2006.

I have to examine how to stay healthy, wealthy; Never purchase any brand new car, only gas-efficient car instead.

987. Vertical Order Traversal of a Binary Tree

Here is my discussion post.

C# Avoid using hashmap and sorting practice in 2020

It is challenge for me to understand how to master the algorithm and stay humble when I work on the algorithm I practice before. This week the mock interviewer on interviewing.io asked me to work on the algorithm, after he reviewed my solution using C# Dictionary and sorting based on hashMap's keys, he said that there is no need to use hashMap, no need to apply sorting.

The optimal time complexity can be achieved by using bucket sort.

Here are highlights of my practice.

1. Design a variable xValue, go to left child decrement one, go to right child increment one;
2. Traverse the tree to record maximum and minimum value of horizontal positions;
3. Declare an array of List, apply preorder traversal to visit every node in the tree, and save it into sorted variable based on horizontal value.
4. Stay humble, practice one using the optimal time complexity solution O(N).

/**
 * Definition for a binary tree node.
 * public class TreeNode {
 *     public int val;
 *     public TreeNode left;
 *     public TreeNode right;
 *     public TreeNode(int x) { val = x; }
 * }
 */
public class Solution {
    public IList<IList<int>> VerticalTraversal(TreeNode root) 
    {
        if(root == null)
        {
            return new List<IList<int>>();           
        }
        
        var max = new int[2]{int.MaxValue, int.MinValue};
        
        traversalTree(root, max, 0);
        
        var size = max[1] - max[0] + 1; 
        
        var sorted = new List<int>[size];
        for(int i = 0; i < size; i++)
            sorted[i] = new List<int>(); 
        
        preorderTraveral(root, sorted, -max[0]);
         
        var sortedList = new List<IList<int>>();                        
        
        for(int i = 0; i < size; i++)
        {
            var list = new List<int>(); 
            foreach(var item in sorted[i])
            {
                list.Add(item); 
            }
            
            sortedList.Add(list); 
        }
        
        return sortedList; 
    }
    
    private void preorderTraveral(TreeNode root, List<int>[] sorted, int xValue)
    {
        if(root == null)
            return;
        sorted[xValue].Add(root.val);  
        
        preorderTraveral(root.left,  sorted, xValue - 1);
        preorderTraveral(root.right, sorted, xValue + 1);                             
    }
    
    private void traversalTree(TreeNode root, int[] max, int xValue)
    {
        if(root == null)
            return; 
        
        max[0] = max[0] > xValue? xValue : max[0];
        max[1] = max[1] < xValue? xValue : max[1]; 
        
        traversalTree(root.left,  max, xValue - 1);
        traversalTree(root.right, max, xValue + 1);                
    }
}