I bet the answer is that you aren't going to spend $1M on anything. You intend to put the $1M in some very safe investment and live off the interest, correct?

So you don't really need $1M, what you need is $100K per year passive income. It's the same thing.

If you look at your problem that way, things seem more doable. Instead of spending 10 years making $1M, you can spend the same 10 years growing your passive income from $1K to $10K to $100K.

As somebody who has made a lot of money in real estate and in stocks ... and who has also lost much of it, I believe a business is a better investment for you than stocks or real estate. A business is a machine that produces money. Making your money in stocks or real estate is like hunting. Every time you go hunting, you may be lucky, but you may be unlucky. It's not conducive to a stress free state of mind.

Since your current business can't ever be passive, you'll need to start a new one that can be. Your sailboat electronics passion seems like a good one. Electronic products can be passive income and sailboat owners have money.

Good luck.

On a personal note: I'm in a similar position to the OP, except I inherited the money a few weeks ago, and am still trying to figure out how to go about this. Thanks a lot for this new perspective!!!

I used to do this by working 6 months out of a year at most but I still don't own a house and don't have a nest egg. Nothing to ensure my family has a comfortable life if, God forbid, anything happens to me.

I like your perspective of growing passive income from 1k to 10k to 100k!

In all seriousness, drop the desire to turn 100k into 1 mil in x amount of time. That will lead you into wreckless, speculative behavior. Trading is tempting for you because it offers instant feedback. With one or two successful trades, people tend to extrapolate their returns into future returns, believing that it's possible to repeat these trades over and over again. Odds are stacked against them. Don't fall victim to this thought pattern.

Smart investors invest where their odds are highest of winning. From what you've written, it sounds like that investment would be in yourself. What led you to this "blockbuster" year? Can you grow and expand upon the factors that led to such a successful year? I'm sure there's some opportunity. Do it.

Worse, he describes how he has tried trading various times with no success, and still thinks trading is his best bet for meeting his goals.

Sounds more like a compulsion than a well thought out strategy.

I think you meant wreckful. Or reckless. :-)

[and feed them adderall!!]

if you had asked "how do I turn 1 million into 100K?" I think I'd agree with that statement.

(I'm assuming here we're not considering inflation. )

If you need it in 10 years, you're going to need an annualized 25% or so rate of return. That's unlikely.

If you need it in 25 years, you can get by with 10%. That's definitely possible, if you follow good principles.

On the other hand, if you can put in an extra 50k a year, You should have close to $1mm in 10 years. (550-600k in investment, 400k in growth).

Given that you hate people and are super smart, and have a self described penchant for gambling, I would suggest you not try to grow your business, and also that you stay away from the stock market as long as you think timing it is a great plan.

All that adds up to (in my mind) buying some real estate. You live in a beautiful vacation spot, and could find property managers so that you don't have to deal with tenants.

Your 100k could easily buy a 300k small property, with some left over for unforeseen problems. Try it! It won't fluctuate in value like your previous stock market purchases, that's for sure.

My timeline is 10 years or less and I could, likely, add 50K a year.

I don't have a penchant for gambling, I traded twice in ... ugh... 15 years or so. I stopped because I figured I didn't know enough and wasn't capitalized well.

Real estate is great long-term. There are some awesome deals to be had in Tenerife as a lot of people are giving up their speculatively bought houses. You can buy a 1-bedroom apartment in a well-travelled tourist area near the beach. This will cost less than 100K in foreclosure.

Buying one apartment a year and renting it out to tourists is a great option, so long as the market has hit bottom, more or less. I don't think the Spanish real estate market has hit bottom, though.

You might like this book: http://www.amazon.com/Retire-Early-Live-Million-Dollars/dp/1... He gives some advice about real estate investing for income, and suggests that a 'safe' amount of margin is 50% if you may want income from them to live off. So, you could possibly buy two of those apartments now. If the market drops 30% next year, and you have another 50k, buy another one. The first two are still going to cashflow, and you're making a long-term bet here.

In my experience, it's hard to time the market, really any market. I remember being desperate to buy a place in Cambridge, MA while the housing boom was going on in the late '90s. 800 square foot condos were selling for $500k+, in two to three days. Now, 10+ years later, you might have made a little money, net.

Meanwhile, in 2008, real estate looked 'risky'. Thinking about asset value first, market pricing second can fundamentally change one's decision matrix; this is one of the big points that Value Investors make, repeatedly.

Just a quick note here:

With 100k in year 1, plus 50k per year after, for a total of 10 years, you need to get about 11.5% annualized return after taxes and fees.

Good luck. :)

Okay, so he only has to return 10% annually. Still extremely difficult. :)

Very very few people who market themselves as investment advisors successfully deliver these returns to their clients, net of fees and taxes.

With real estate, you need to be in it for the long haul. Let your tenants pay the mortgage and put the bit you have left over away so that you can buy a new unit every year or two. Real estate will appreciate with inflation and after 20 or 30 years (or 15 if you want to pay off aggressively) you'll be mortgage free and can retire on the rent. Or you can finance new properties with a mortgage on the equity in the other ones in 5 years... Real estate is awesome like that, but you'll get burned if you see it as a get rich quick scheme.

You have a terrible investment track record and a good programming track record. Go with your strength. Since you have a short attention span, you should focus on short projects that you can ship quickly.

Bring maritime weather / charts to the iphone, I'd buy that :-)

EDIT: I just tried wearing a Ziploc sandwich bad as a mitt and operating my iPad. There's apparently no degrading of the touch screen! I'll have to pick up some large Ziploc bags the next time I'm at the store.

Took two days for my shoes to dry.

The Ziplock bag around my Runkeepering iPhone didn't miss a trick. :)

You're right that chart plotter on the ipad would be pretty tops. As waterproofing.. you'd have to use a material that lets the capacitance of your finger through.

The other issue is connecting a GPS to the iPad if the internal GPS is not good enough. I don't know if it is yet, will take my iPad sailing this August.

Apple requires you to build external accessories specifically to work with iOS devices. I think that even requires a special chip. An external Bluetooth GPS would likely be power-hungry.

I think http://www.tacktick.com/ are an awesome example of low-power marine electronics. They designed and built their own low-power wireless network to connect their instruments and powered them with solar energy whenever possible.

Regarding the connection of a GPS to the iPad, I don't have on hands the technical details of the iPad (or iPhone) GPS, but on open water, it will surely be better that in an urban canyon. It can see a lot of sky --> a lot of satellite. So, the internal GPS may be not so bad in your scenario.

But an external GPS with an active antenna will always be better (better GPS chip, better antenna and fewer electronics noise being far from the iPad radios). You can find kits build by Microchip and Cypress for the connection of external devices to the iPod/iPhone, but you first, must enroll in Apple’s Made for iPod licensing program, by completing the online application at http://developer.apple.com/programs/ipod/.

Here is the microchip kit: http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_P...

And here's the Cypress one: http://www.cypress.com/?rID=41030

Let me know if you need some advice on the GPS stuffs.

"High-sensitivity, -157dBm assisted acquisition sensitivity (with coarse time assistance) and -162dBm tracking sensitivity, enabling indoor and deep urban operation"

You can compare this with an usual SIRF Star III based GPS receiver (Leadtek 9101x), which is not assisted: http://www.leadtek.com/eng/gps/overview.asp?lineid=8&pro...

With a sensitivity of -159dB and a cold start time of 35s (worst case scenario).

I think that, on open water, with a good sky visibility, the GPS included in the iPad 3G and the iPhone 4 should be more than adequate for this kind of usage.

Tacktick looks pretty awesome, i will check them out!

Read The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, both by Benjamin Graham; and F Wall Street by Joe Ponzio (His website fwallstreet.com also has a number of gems. Particularly, his post about how to value a business http://www.fwallstreet.com/article/25-calculating-the-value-... )

If you read those materials, you will learn how to invest and using the approaches set out in those books, I believe you can turn $100k to $1m.

II and SA are phenomenal books, but they are also more relevant to a different time in market history. The basic tenets certainly hold true. (Ben Graham famously loved buying companies under book value. Thats still a winning bet and will continue to be.)

Its important to realize the macro picture here as well though. The last 70 years have produced tons of literature saying that long term growth is the way to do it and that int he last 70 years long term investments have outperformed. This period of "proven returns" coincides with the US rising to the world superpower, becoming the richest nation on earth, and spending beyond our means.

I have a massive faith in America, but its irresponsible to not consider that times have changed. The next 70 years could be like the last 70, but we stand at a social/economic/global power precipice which could imply a dramatically different America in 10 years. If the American economy sucks hard for the enxt 10 years, returns are just going to suck. Long buy and hold portfolios have won in large part also because the American economy has expanded for the last 70 years.

The other huge difference is that HN is comprised primarily of extremely computer savvy people. The tools wielded by the readers here are uniquely suited to tackle financial problems that can produce excess returns that far exceed

The risks aren't significantly higher, yet the upside is disproportionately greater when utilizing the techniques (computing) and infrastructure (electronic markets and cheap execution) that have become available in the last 10 years that did not exist in almost the entire duration of the period that produced all of the "buy and hold is the only way to go" literature.

HN people are smart. REAL smart. That's why a lot of people have read mountains of literature to educate themselves. Unfortunately, the success of buy and hold strategies in the last X years produced a bias towards that sort of literature and everyone's drank the kool-aid.

The last 5 years, and even more the last 2 years have democratized the quantitative trading process, exposed the tools to those not in the industry, and changed the face of finance.

There's still a place for the Intelligent Investor. But if you're the average HN reader, Ben Graham style investing isn't your best shot in finance. Quantitative trading is. Both will take a lot of work. It won't be easy. But if you're going to invest serious time, think about how much the tools and the game have changed in the last 2 years and ask yourself if you really think that all the literature that predates this change is indicative of the new world.

I too believe you can turn 100k to $1mm. and I think you can do it a lot faster.

I read 'The Snowball' about Buffett, and one of the things he mentions was sitting around compiling these forms about companies to determine their value. Isn't that the kind of thing that's automated these days? And if it's automated, it means someone big is likely doing it better than you can. In other words, Graham had an advantage because he was doing something noone else did at the time, and had some very real costs associated with it (paying people to sift through data) that don't exist today.

But then again, I don't know much about this stuff...

So diversify with foreign assets.

But the real point is that trading isn't a chump game and the entire notion of "long term holding is the best strategy" is premised on a lot of old notions that predate the current market environment.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...

It basically comes down to how long you'll be in the house, and how much you think it will appreciate over that time. There are plenty of scenarios where renting comes out ahead.

I still have the Punto and hope to get a residence this year. It's an 80% mortgage when I do and 50% while I don't so I'd rather wait.

Iterate this last year ten times. ^_^

On a more serious suggestion, try to stick to something a bit longer, make a product, iterate it some times and finally take profit from it. BTW, What happened to your poker server?

I ended up writing a server that's scalable and robust but incompatible with the original Delphi client. Part of it is that the contract programmers blackmailed me into Delphi (C++ will cost you more!) and I was greedy. The other part is that they are serializing Delphi objects and shipping them down the wire. Supporting that would be a nightmare.

It's hard to sell a server without a client and my server is pretty bare bones too. There's only Texas Hold'em, no tournaments. There's no accounting, payment processing, affiliate tracking, etc. I tried to sell it as a base people could build around but not very successfully. I broke even on development but that's it.

Ultimately, poker people are fine with running a 200K solution on scores of servers that handle just thousands of clients. There's not much interest in squeezing that into a handful of servers since marketing expenses of a new poker room dwarf those of hardware and software.

You obviously have some skills, or you wouldn't have been able to earn the 100K. So, given the recent windfall, there ought to be a way to use the 100K to magnify your income.

What's the bottleneck in your regular business? What is it that is keeping you from having a blockbuster year each year? Or, even better, having a double-the-blockbuster year?

Once you've identified the constraint, try to figure out how to use some (or all) of the 100K to lift it.

Then: rinse, lather, repeat.

I found a niche in writing Mac device drivers for a big company this year. I had to buy a hardware USB analyzer and IDA Pro to reverse-engineer a good chunk of LabVIEW so I was able to charge a good price for that project.

I could raise my base rate and charge more for projects (fixed price) but that doesn't scale and there are only 24 hours in a day.

You sell the client on the fact that they'll save heaps of money using your platform because a lot of code is already written. This isn't actually true, code re-use doesn't save that much money, but it sounds good and they tend to buy it. I've seen it happen over the years again and again and again.

It's a bit tricky but loads of people do it. It used to be cms platforms, now it's social networking platforms or mobile app platforms. Same trick.

It's a little dirty though but one of the only ways to actually "scale" consulting. The other way is to have high-powered sales people, and hire superjunior beginner who do all the work. I think that's even dirtier.

Per person.

Trade on your name? You are an A+ player. You must be turning work away. Take on more work than you can handle and farm it out to A-/B+ players.

Consultants don't scale but consultancies can benefit from scale to some small degree.

I haven't had to turn work away only because I've been able to queue up projects and space them out. Oh, and because clients have been patient while I've done that.

Diversify your investments. Putting $100K in 1 stock is how you lose money. Try picking 10-15 companies in different industries: technology, healthcare, finance, commodities, etc. Do your research and pick companies that have a lot of upside potential.

For example, if you wanted to make a bet that the mobile space is going to be the future of computing, which seems pretty likely, start buying up suppliers of tablet computers. ARM holdings, Qlogic, etc, find all of the chip makers that make chips in an iPad and research each one of them.

Finally, I would recommend you protect your earnings. My portfolio is up 35% in the past year, and I keep trailing stop limit sell orders on all of my securities to protect my winnings. The global economy is uncertain enough right now, and who knows if we're going to see a repeat of fall 2008 again (my bet is we are). I want to lock in my earnings. Consider pair trading, or hedging yourself in other ways.

Definitely think long-term, protect your earnings with stop limit orders or hedging and pair trading. This is the only way to come out ahead of the market.

I'm not planning to use more than 25-30K if I trade and 0.5-1% of that on every trade. Proper money management and risk controls are key.

I also like selling. I spent a year as a commission-only sales person, selling trading software over the internet. I think I did reasonably well and I enjoyed it tremendously.

I did notice that I missed the technical challenge, though.

Take 60% of the 100k and invest in Apple, the rest in a selection of index funds. Reevaluate Apple in four years. Invest 15% of your ongoing contracting gross income the same way.

Pick some 'just for fun' iOS apps and write them in your spare time. Brainstorm for app ideas weekly, and other low-capital ideas. If one shows promise, partner with some other developers and put more time into it. Only invest cash you can afford as long as it doesn't get in the way of continuing the 15% long term investing.

Quite possibly at the top of the market right now. Or maybe not. But if you're good enough to run the analysis on the market for smartphones and high end consumer electronics to be reasonably sure Apple is a good buy right now, then you're good enough to find better buys. Maybe some of Apple's suppliers or manufacturers, for instance - I don't know personally, I don't have the skills to evaluate on those things. But I do know buying a stock just because it's cool, fashionable, and has gone up a lot recently is a pretty good way to lose your shirt.

Let the wheel spin and enjoy the adrenaline. Worst case you go back to your lucrative consulting gig. Consider that you already paid the amount you lost in taxes and you don't even miss it.

Something that you can sell to media operators or gambling sites either as a standalone product or white label.

Coding and selling.

Addendum: I also believe pretty much anything you do for the next ten years has a fair chance of being big. The only problem I see is that you're constrained by having a family and so might not have 10 years to fritter away like that.

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=eur+ars++exchange+ra...

I don't know what Spain's real estate market is like, but in a touristy location there are probably opportunities to get creative.

My wife is a self-employed travel agent catering to the Russian market (I'm Russian/Cuban). I she would love to go into property management, specially if the property is ours.

I'm reading about LBOs in "Barbarians at the gate" and I think it's a bit like that. You need to figure out the potential rental income of a property and convince the bankers that it's enough to service the mortgage debt. All the while putting as little of your own money in as possible.

This last part is not true. 100% leveraged properties are hard to make serious money on, and it makes for a fragile business (you only need one down cycle to bring down the, ehm, house). Average return on rental in the private is 4-5% in most parts of Europe. Right now you can get a mortgage lower than that (I actually took one out this morning for this exact purpose) but only for variable rate ones, which will reset almost surely to above 4% in a few years. It depends on the circumstances what the most profitable thing to do is, but it's almost never to finance 100% (which would be 100%+ because of closure costs...)

The asking prices are set high all over the island in the hope that foreigners will bite. You need an official appraisal by the bank before you get a mortgage and you may then get 80% of the amount.

Asking prices used to be exactly 80% of appraised value or less and people are still clinging to the high prices from the market top. Try negotiating, though, and you'll see prices come down rapidly.

I rented a house a few months ago and the owner wanted 330K or so. I insisted on renting and the owner said that if the price is the problem then he could go down to 290, 280, etc.

It's not even funny how prices in the US are more or less uniform, as if people are aware of property values around them and are trying to price them fairly. No such thing around here as people ask what they want and then negotiate down, down, down.

For $100k? Where in the US would that be?

I meant in terms of down payment. Even here, (rural Minnesota outside the Twin Cities), people want to rent. A house around here with 20 acres of land can be had for less than $300k. Houses in town on 1/2 acre can be found for under $200k, and this is in a pleasant small town. There are many people who for one reason or another can't afford their own home, and make great tenants. My favorite was the guy who paid cash, months in advance because he traveled a lot and "didn't want to be late."

There are lots of high-frequency trading shops that could put your engineering chops to work, most of the shops are small enough that I'm sure they'd be happy to offer you some form of partnership with your spare cash. HFT strategies have very definite limits on lifespan and investment cap, but tend to produce out sized returns (yes, 10x).

Most of the big shops are in Chicago. Start with Jane St: http://www.janestcapital.com/

How did you pay 200 dollars in commissions on a 700 dollar trade? How did you find work at an investment bank without being sufficiently savvy to realize that buying options on a credit card and then paying a gigantic commission is an absolute, guaranteed way to lose money over time? I'm genuinely confused here.

At any rate, the only people profiting on derivatives are the market makers. And even they blow up eventually. (Example: Bear Stearns).

Is this deliberately intended to be disparaging? 1. There are plenty of people at investment banks whose principal function isn't to understand options. 2. What makes it so clear that buying options is a "guaranteed way to lose money over time".

At any rate, the only people profiting on derivatives are the market makers. And even they blow up eventually.

This is empirically false. There are a lot of people who make money in derivatives. Vol stat arb funds have performed very well over the last 5 years, dispersion has long been a popular trade.

Bear stearns did not blow out in its marketmaking capacity.

Typically the options traders that are said to "blow up eventually" are premium sellers, not buyers, which is in direct contradiction to your previous comment about option buyers being guaranteed to lose money over time.

This is unnecessary and not really in the spirit of providing help to someone asking for advice.

You either think he's full of BS and are trying to call him out or are just being rude. I think he sounds sufficiently accomplished and is trying to understand a new field. Don't discourage that.

edit: had to look up how to properly italicize

Derivatives are mathematically zero sum minus costs. That's why. For traders in aggregate, they are a certain loss. Tack on leverage via credit cards, well...

Is this deliberately intended to be disparaging

Sort of. The guy needs to realize that he's capable of really stupid mistakes before he opens that fresh new brokerage account. 700 dollars is obviously nothing, but should be a valuable lesson, and not an optimistic one.

1. Fair enough. HSO makes the point that this is true for all financial transactions. So by your logic, investing in the stock market is also a guaranteed way to lose money over time. I don't think this is your contention, but this is really going to end up being a silly conversation if we have it. We'll just agree to disagree.

2. On a different note, in the interest of sharing something I learned recently. Options almost always trade at a volatility premium to their realized volatility. The reason for that is that vol traders want to price in the future uncertainty in vol.

Derman writes about this a bit here by comparing it to interest rate term structures: http://ederman.com/new/docs/gaim-trading_volatility.pdf

3. Also, historically (if that matters) selling vol is actually positive EV. BXM is a buywrite index and has outperformed the SP500 on a risk adjusted basis (http://ederman.com/new/docs/gaim-trading_volatility.pdf) indicating that option vols have not been fairly priced.

4. Countering #4 is the popular Taleb wisdom about selling vol. Taleb is a net buyer and won. His general contention though is that kurtosis of the distribution is mis(under)priced. So from those 2, you might think that selling at the money options is positive EV and buying "tails" is positive EV. Of course the rest of the Taleb intuition is that we have no idea what the actual yield distribution should look like, so all pricing is out the window.

I traded twice in ... ugh... 15 years or so.

I advanced a bit since then.

Yeah right. You might want to put your money in this:

https://online.citibank.com/US/JRS/pands/detail.do?ID=SvgCDs

That said, I was green and didn't know anything about trading at that time. I found work by being good at what I do :D.

"Under Greenberg’s control, Bear’s profits grew quickly. At its peak it employed almost 15,000 people. While most Wall Street firms preferred to hire Ivy Leaguers, Greenberg looked for people with “PSD” degrees, by which he meant “poor, smart and a deep desire to become rich.”"

However, building over here is better investment than flipping. You'd need a reliable partner or heavy hands-on overseeing, and I'm not him :P

I also agree with other posters that you stick to your strengths, and research VERY carefully. Edit: sailing over here is quite nice :)

If your burn rate is 3.5K/month, with $100K, you can survive for at least 28 months comfortably, give or take. That's 2.5 years of not working for money. If you're already an amazing programmer, go build a product and sell it at $100/license. You only need 10,000 copies to make $1,000,000, and burn through just a fraction of your money. You can probably build something in less than 6 months and start building a real business around it. With proper SEO, marketing, perseverance, and some luck, the chance of you reaching the sales number isn't all that bad, providing that your product is compelling enough for users to fork out $100. As you say, your weakness is you can get bored easily, then find a way to keep yourself interested: find a partner, outsource boring stuff elsewhere, and plainly just make it a goal to build a meaningful business for yourself and for your family.

Nothing is more profitable than investing in yourself. You can double up your money is no time at all. Instead of solving really hard technical problems just for the fun of it, try solving people's problems and make a tidy profit along the way. There are tons of ideas and problems worth solving. You will be much more wealthier in a short time, and you can have your ego petted as well.

Personally I quit my job last year to work on my own startup. I was making $90,000/year and was billing $85/hr, but I was getting burned out working on other people's stuff. So I quit. $85/hr is quite a bit of cash, the money was addicting. I was 24, single, living cheaply in Chicago. My expense was $1,500/month, and with some light traveling, that was about $2,000 - $2,500/month. I was able to save quite a bit in just a few months. After saved up to $20,000, I quit. I'm not wasting my life working for money. Not when I have other choices to build up a much better future.

Now I'm actually invest 100% of my time into my startup and I'm building it up alone by myself. My life is my start up until I get it launch in September, then I keep on pushing till I make it. Everyday I push out something new, write some thing amazingly awesome, or just get really productive -- all for myself.

I'm very easy to get distracted with new ideas and bored with existing ones. However, I told myself specifically to not think of new ideas, and not to get bored with my startup. It's been 2 months working non-stop on it, and I feel more energized than ever. From HTML slicing to server setup, compiling stuff, to writing the next best UI to solve a problem for user, I'm doing it all. If my startup doesn't generate money right away, I'll keep pushing it. I don't know what next year will be like, but I know it will be a lot better. What's funny is that I don't consider myself a very good programmer. I can get by with some stuff (like JavaScript). I can barely programming Ruby on Rails the right way, none of that C++ hardcore programming. I secretly envy those C++/C guys that can hammer out code that looks really hard, but I don't care. I'm building my own product and I feel good about it. My life has a meaning, instead of just working for money.

The best thing is, if nothing happens (very unlikely), I can still get back to consulting, making a nice 6-figure salary, and execute my plan B of become a millionaire: investing in real estate.

My plan B is simple. I plan to purchase 1 rental apartment every year. Where I lived in Chicago, you can get an apartment for $60K - $80K (foreclosures), and rent them out at $900/month, positive cashflow on day one. I can purchase one a year if I save 50% of my income (not a hard thing), and repeat this a few years. If I leverage the home equity of the rental properties, I can reduce the time to about 6 to 7 years before hitting the $1,000,000 net-worth. And these properties can only appreciate in values, since they are already really low in price. I WILL be a millionaire before 40 and I don't even have to think. However, I chose to be a millionaire by 30, so I quit my job because obviously my job won't get me to where I want to be when I'm 30. I don't think I can get a salary of $333,333/year for the next 3 years to make $1M. And if I really have that salary, I'd just quit to do my own thing. If I'm that good, then why I'm not investing in myself rather than working a 9-5 (or in this case, a 6am-12am job since you'd better be worth every penny at $333,333/year)?

So there you go, it's my plan of turning an amount much less than $100K into $1,000.000. Precisely, I have $2,500 (I traveled quite a bit and invested some money in Vietnam with my family between the time I quit and when I started fulltiming on my Startup) in my bank account and I hope that will last till September, which shouldn't be a problem since my burn rate right now is about a whopping $400/month, if not less. I'm single still, and will be suspending my iPhone very soon to switch to Skype. When I run out of money, I'm sure I'll figure something out.

So I hope you'll have an updated post in a year telling us here about your journey to make $1,000,000. Good luck following your heart and passion.

Alex

The WORST you do as a doctor is about $120K/yr which is one of the best salaries you can make as a programmer.

Doctors don't become Google rich but if you are looking for a solid stable job that pays a lot it's still one of the best.

Law is different because there is no limit on the number of lawyers minted each year. Every year is a new record number of lawyers. A law school grad isn't guaranteed any job at all, even with a degree from a school like Yale. In contrast, doctors can literally kill people and keep their jobs.

Becoming a md/lawyer/dentist is a pretty sure thing. At least where I live (Canada) these professions are in demand. You can always move to smaller communities if needed.

I think the parent comment was pretty good advice.

I really feel very strongly that you should ONLY be a doctor, lawyer, or dentist if you genuinely like doctoring, lawyering, or dentistry. It ain't a get rich quick scheme.

An at the money "straddle option" is essentially purely a volatility play, but the problem is that once the stock moves, the "straddle option" accumulates various other risk factors that are harder to manage.

This is also why you can't just sell the position knowing that the volatility will go down after earnings, because the change in the risk characteristics other than volatility may be sufficiently costly so as to offset the gains from the decrease in volatility with a short straddle position.

This particular play is fairly common though and many option traders who feel they have insight into the magnitude of the future move relative to its pre-earnings pricing will make plays on it (largely based on historical evidence or earnings predictions).

I think I would have made money with a trailing stop but Thinkorswim did not have trailing stops at the time. The problem, of course, is the volatility drop-off right after earnings announcements. You also need to evaluate what the company is doing and see if there's a good chance the stock will move.

I found http://www.theflyonthewall.com to be excellent for research.

The volatility drop-offs doesn't happen right away after the earnings announcements, at least that's what I noticed. There's still a bit of time (minutes?) where traders are slugging it out.

It's virtually impossible to monitor several positions for volatility drop-offs on Thinkorswim, though. ZenFire is available on the Mac but ZenFire equities and options are only available through a couple of brokerages where a large account is required. Contrast with futures (and options on futures) that I can get over ZenFire through my Mirus/Dorman account for a $500 deposit.

bet on yourself. expand your work team into a multi-person team.

seconded.

We didn't start out with 100K euros, more like 30K USD, but my SaaS, developed part time, grew 5x in revenue year over year and that was not with a lot of effort - if we do that again, it'll be earning nearly $600K/yr by June 2011.

So far "we" is me and my husband, part time, plus a summer intern and the occasional freelancer. So it's a pretty good place to be, cost-wise.

I can judge technical skills but I don't think I'm a good judge of character. I'd rather bet on myself.