Category: Uncategorized

Must Know : Culture, safety and basic rules

Do This

  • Always keep some form of your identity card with you. It can be your driver license, passport or some other legal document. While driving, you must need to keep driver license and car’s registration number in your car.
  • Greeting – When you see or meet new people, say “Hi or Hello” to greet people with a smile. When you ask or are asked by someone “How are you?”, do not expect or provide personal details. It is used very casually.
  • Practice common courtesy – if you approach a door to enter, make sure you don’t block the person trying to come out, hold the door open for the person behind you, and if there is an obviously older person or lady – hold the door open with a smile and a polite “After you”. Also, if there is someone entering behind you, make sure you hold the door open till they grab it (never let it slam in their face). It is common to smile and nod at strangers in a confined space (e.g. elevator) or walking around your neighborhood. But respect their space – if a person is hurrying along with their head down, leave them alone.
  • Address people by sir/ma’am. If you don’t know someone, and need to ask them a question, say “Excuse me (sir/ma’am),*question*. It is a sign of courtesy, and respect.
  • Police car or emergency vehicles – When police car follows your vehicle (with flash light or siren), pull over your car on side lane and stay inside the car. When police or any emergency vehicle with a siren or flashing light, please stay on the side to give enough passage to these vehicles
  • Tip your server. Whenever you are at a bar, or a sit-down restaurant, always tip who ever brings you you’re food! Some servers do not get paid well, so tipping them 15–20% will make them happy. And they might be even kinder to you if they ever serve you again.Leave reasonable tip to the other service providers in hospitality business such as, taxi, hair salon etc. Usually, cabs and restaurants require a 15-20% tip, and hotels also require a $2-4 per day tip for baggage handlers and room attendants
  • Have a conversation. Americans are generally very open people, and probably will find your background interesting! 
  • Americans drive on the right, so when on a sidewalk they typically walk on the right as well.
  • United States is a country ruled by law and expects that all the laws are enforced in practice. So, you should be aware of basic laws and consequences.
  • America’s constitution provides freedom of speech as basic right. So, you can communicate or share your perspective freely, but please be respectful and ensure that your views are not targeted towards any particular person or group.
  • Learn English. Even if it is only a few words, knowing English will get you far in America. Mostly because it is the language of America. American people have patience to listen and try to understand a very different ascent. They appreciate anyone who is making an effort to improve.
  • Familiarize with British measurement system that US uses rather than the metric system. This means that they use pounds rather than kilograms, feet vs meters, and miles vs kilometers.
  • Celebrate July 4th and other holidays with Americans. Holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, New Years, and especially Fourth of July. They are very important holidays in America. And they are very fun and wonderful holidays, and mean a lot to Americans.
  • Learn about American sports if you are not familiar with them. American football, baseball, hokey and basketball are major popular sports in the United States.

Don’t Do This

  • Touch others. Big one. Americans don’t like to be touched at all by strangers. Even when you see people who may seem to need help, first ask if they need help. Physical touching is not considered normal unless you are very intimate. Also, do not get too close to them when speaking.
  • Don’t get out of the car without permission if you are being stopped or followed by the police. Always sit in your seat, put your hands on the steering wheel, and wait patiently. They will assume you are armed and they have a right to shoot you if you disobey. But please understand that they are your friends and are there to help to enforce law and order. Just be respectful of them.
  • Don’t ask someone’s age, weight and the price of personal items. And don’t say, “You’ve gained weight.” when you meet the others. Because this is all a personal matter.
  • Don’t expect public transportation to help you get across the entire country. Europe has good public transit but America is very much a car driven society. Outside of NYC, Chicago, DC and other handful cities, public transit is not great. You may want to rent a car.
  • Don’t take pictures or make recordings on private property without permission, it’s an invasion of privacy and can be a serious legal problem.
  • Don’t publish photos of children. Images of minors should not be published without parental permission.
  • Whatever you do, don’t ever talk about gun control or politics! United States respects freedom of speech, but try not to discuss religion or politics, especially with people you don’t know well. There are so many people who have different views on politics, and talking about will just create arguments, insults etc. Instead talk about the weather, sports, about a upcoming holiday etc.
  • Do not buy alcohol for yourself or someone else, if you are under 21 years old. American drinking age is 21, enjoy when of age!
  • Don’t rely on public transportation. If you are visiting a big city like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles maybe you can go anywhere with public transportation. But if you are not in a city, don’t expect public transportation to be good at all. Instead you might have to rent a car, or something.
  • Don’t leave your bags unattended. In cities there are a lot of thieves, and pickpocketers, and leaving your stuff unattended will be a huge mistake.
  • If an attractive girl smiles at you, don’t think she likes you.
  • Don’t let your kids run around naked. There are parts of the world where it’s normal for young kids to run around with no clothes, especially when it’s hot, or at swimming pools, beaches, etc. America isn’t one of those places.
  • Don’t point your middle finger at anyone. This is offensive and can cause a big argument/problem. This is just like swearing to someone. Though, you may experience this on a regular basis from other people, it is better to take it easy and stay calm.

Few Slangs or abbreviations

Whats up? means how are you.

You are silly! Typically, it means that you are acting childish or foolish in a fun way. It isn’t a compliment, but silly is too mild for most people to consider it offensive. People coming from some part of the world take the word as mentally incapable and very offensive.

B.Y.O.B means “bring your own beverage” usually alcoholic. If you go to a restaurant and ask if they serve drink, they may say we don’t, we are BYOB. This means, you can bring your own drinks.

 

FAQs

What to do if I get sick?

Medical costs in the United states are extremely high. Unless you have a medical insurance to use medical service, cost can be very high. Just provide some context, one simple doctor visit can cost you $150 – $200 and simple prescription (medicine) can cost $50-$100. If you are sick and have to go to stay in hospital, you can be paying somewhere around $5,000 – $10,000 for all the tests and hospital stay. If you have to go through a surgery, cost can be around $50,000. Overall, it is the worst experience if you get sick and are here only for a few weeks or months without medical insurance. However, you don’t need to have money to get treatment upfront. If someone happens, you will receive a treatment. Also, there are various options to apply for waiver if you can not afford the cost. These options vary greatly across different states and places and keep changing, so we do not want to provide any false information. You can consult with your friends or relatives who have been living in the United States for some time.

Find more American Slang Words and Phrases here
Education and career

Buy Hubspot (HUBS) : Stock Recommendations

At a time when automation and robotics are the buzz of Silicon Valley, HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) is betting there’s money in the commitment to be more human when it comes to marketing. “The heart of most marketing is interrupting people,” HubSpot CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan explained in a recent interview on the YouTube show Behind the Brand. “It’s interrupting people with an email while they’re at work, with a cold call on their phone, with an ad while they’re watching their favorite TV show, an ad on the radio. … It’s irritating.”

So he and Dharmesh Shah created HubSpot in 2006 to fix the problem. Their idea? Create a suite of tools for publishing and promoting highly useful content, and prospects will find you, no spam or cold-calling necessary. They call it inbound marketing: Instead of pitch materials going out, prospective customers come in. Over 25,000 small-to-medium sized businesses use HubSpot as of this writing. We expect that total to double and then some, which is why we’re urging you to buy shares today.

Looking Inward

Why do we expect such growth? Think about the last time you needed a particular product or service. What did you do first? I’ll bet you searched online for options. Maybe you had questions or wanted reviews. You were looking for answers, in other words. Inbound marketing is all about providing answers as a way to draw in customers. And it doesn’t require anyone on any side of the transaction to change the way they already use the Internet.

Odds are you’re already engaging with a fair amount of inbound marketing thanks not only to HubSpot but also blogging platforms such as WordPress and Weebly and marketing automation from Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) and privately owned Marketo. Blogs, social media posts, YouTube tutorials, podcasts … anything that teaches, offers insights, provides data, or expresses a potentially useful point of view can be considered inbound marketing (or its kissing cousin, content marketing). HubSpot’s marketing suite provides subscription access to every feature someone would need: page design, blogging, search optimization, social media tools, even hacks for automating follow-up with those who engage with content.

I’ve been a user of the software for years in other gigs, and its clean design and built-in metrics for measuring content success have always impressed me. I’m not alone. Over 3,500 design agencies employed by companies to create compelling Web pages and marketing campaigns use HubSpot to serve their clients. Not only is that a fascinating channel, it’s also an imprimatur of the software’s premium feel: It’s what the pros use, after all.

Prospecting for Gold

HubSpot’s stock has gone up about 25% in the past year and more than doubled since the company went public in 2014. Given its rich premium — it trades for about 8 times sales, more than the 7.4 multiple at which industry peer Marketo was taken private last year — it will probably take even more outsized growth from HubSpot’s core business to keep going. Specifically, I’m looking for marketing subscriptions to roughly double to 50,000 and for average revenue per marketing customer to rise from $12,773 annually today to $20,000 five years from now (though even HubSpot expects some choppiness in this figure as it introduces lower-priced services to accelerate and scale up subscription volume).

Maybe that sounds crazy, but HubSpot was already growing its subscription customer base between 28% and 34% annually over last three years. Companywide revenue is up between 48% and 57%  over the same period. Meanwhile, analysts polled by S&P Global Market Intelligence expect HubSpot’s profits to grow 35% annually over the next three to five years. Whether I’m right about the specifics — let’s be honest here, I won’t be — all signs still point to heady expansion that should at least double the market cap from today’s levels.

Because HubSpot has yet to achieve profitability by generally accepted accounting principles, we’re putting a lot of faith in management. That’s why I find it particularly encouraging that Halligan rates as one of Glassdoor’s top 10 CEOs, just ahead of Mark Zuckerberg and behind Elon Musk. You can’t get much better company when it comes to building companies creating entirely new industries, and enriching investors in the process.

Risks and When We’d Sell

And yet HubSpot’s had a challenging history. Last spring, well-known technology columnist Dan Lyons published a book about his short stint working for HubSpot, and his comments aren’t flattering. Here’s an excerpt of Disrupted that was published in the April 1, 2016 issue of Fortune:

“When someone quits or gets fired, the event will be referred to as ‘graduation.’ … Nobody ever talks about the people who graduate, and nobody ever mentions how weird it is to call it ‘graduation.’ For that matter I never hear anyone laugh about HEART [an acronym for the qualities HubSpot looks for in new hires] or make jokes about the culture code. Everyone acts as if all of these things are perfectly normal.”

Shah, the company’s chief technology officer, posted a response to LinkedIn that’s refreshingly short on takedown and long on specifics for how HubSpot is fixing legitimate problems Lyons surfaces in the book. On the need for more diversity, Shah writes: “Thank you Dan for the kick-in-the-pants. Honestly though, we would have been fine with a bit of a softer kick. :)” Skeptics will be tempted to treat Shah’s promises as a brush-off, and they may be. But if they are, both he and Halligan have plenty to lose. Between them they still hold 6.5% of HubSpot’s shares outstanding. 

The risk is that Lyons is right, the culture is more utopian than aspirational, and growth stops when the reality is revealed. I think we’ve already had ample time to see that thesis play out, yet HubSpot is still growing, and employees still love working there. Investors should continue to see strong returns as a result. Then again, if HubSpot takes a sudden dive in the Glassdoor ratings, or if approval of Halligan’s methods erodes significantly, we’ll know something is wrong and would reconsider our position in the stock — and ask that you do the same.

Must know things before investing $1 in stocks?

These are probably a few things you must have either read somewhere or heard from someone you know in the past 1-2 years

  • I made a lot of money in stocks.

  • My friend asked me to put all my money in stock, I am totally broke.

  • It will be cool to get rich and retire – looks like i need to invest in crypto.

  • You know, when this covid lockdown is over, stocks like Gamestop or AMC will make us rich. Put all the money there.

  • I put all my money in big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Apple s safe investment

  • No, I don’t want to take any risk. I put everything in Index funds. Even Warren Buffet says no one can beat the S & P index.

I don’t think any of the above statements are completely accurate or completely false. The main problem is that most of the people do not know the basics of investing and yet, all of them expect to grow their money very quickly. Well, in very simple and plain terms, that is known as “Being Greedy!”.  How can someone buy something without knowing or understanding what he or she is buying. When we buy something, don’t we ask simple questions like:

  • What does it do?

  • Is there a need to use it?

  • Does the price seem expensive?

  • How long does it last?

  • Do other people use it?

  • Is it a seasonal thing? E.g. is it relevant only during a particular season or holidays?

 And so on

 Unlike buying something from a store, investing is buying a piece of a business. Anyone who has an account (often called a brokerage account) can buy stocks of a publicly traded company. This means the individual just invested in a business. If the business (the company) does well, many more people would be interested to be part of and the stock price goes higher. If business does not do well, people do not want to be part of the business and sell the stock, then stock price goes down. Please keep in mind that stock price goes up and down on a daily basis based on how many buyers and sellers there are. Many times, even though the company does well, people may not be interested in the company because of various reasons such as the company may not have long term prospects, it may be seasonal, it may have too much debt etc. Based on this very first newsletter on this topic, we recommend that you consider the following before putting any money in stocks:

  • Make sure that you are investing (not trading, which is like gambling and mostly driven by luck). This means, you must know about the company, what it does and its products and services, leadership etc.

  • Business model – How does the company make money?

  • Stock fundamentals – Is this company already (or near future) profitable and returning money to investors? How does this compare with other companies in the same industry?

    • Price to sales

    • Price to Earning

    • Price to bookings

    • Market cap

    • Debt

    • Growth rate Y/Y

    • Growth, value, dividend, Spec

  • Long term prospects – Is this going to be a good business long term or not?

  • Trend and momentum – How much volume stock has been bought or sold? Is it going into a positive trend? 

  • Volatility – How much stock has been up and down recently and this past year? What are 52 weeks high and low?

  • Risks – Are there any major red flags in a company’s business from any publicly available information?

  • Overall conviction – Do you strongly believe this company’s business will do well in future without any major red flags?

 Yes, this is a lot of information to digest and it can be very stressful to put your money on something that you don’t understand well. While there are many financial advisors and investment managers to do this for you or guide you through investment decisions, they charge you a lot of money, as a percentage of your investment irrespective of your profit or loss. So, we would like to take a different approach by equipping you with the information that you need to make your own decision. We will develop a training course with a nominal fee in the future with all the useful information you need to make critical investment decisions. Until then, we will continue to send you these free newsletters. Hope you are able to get as much information from these and grow your wealth! 

Well, you might be thinking – can you then suggest what is a good company to invest in now? 

Here is the stock that you can consider investing in now.

Amazon (Ticker: AMZN)

What is Amazon? 

Products and Services

E-commerce and Cloud computing

 
Business model: Collect revenue per unit

 Stock fundamentals: Good

Long term prospects : Good
Advertising business

Trend and momentum: Good 

Volatility: Low

 
Conviction : Very High

Very important tip: if you are a beginner and just encouraged to try, you will probably invest into 1-2 companies which is very risky. It is entirely possible that you may lose a considerable amount of money even in the best companies short term because stock market depends on the overall economy such as employment data, inflation, political stability, new economic policies etc. So, we recommend that you invest in at least 5 companies that have good business and stock fundamentals, with less volatility and highest conviction.

Children can practice sports early

Most of us (adults) wonder how some kids can play sports very well in early age. Well, some of them may be gifted ones but for most of them, it is all about practice. It is important to understand that it may not be easy to introduce children to every sport and we do not know which sport your child would be interested to play for long. We all know this by giving them exposure to as many sports we can and encouraging them everyday.

Buy Square (SQ) : Stock Recommendations

Buy Now (March 2021)
Square (SQ)

Company overview
Many people recognize the company Square with a small credit card reader attached to a mobile phone. Square’s mission is to allow businesses to accept any form of payment a customer wants to use, and thanks to its array of user-friendly card readers, it’s become one of the top payment processing players in less than a decade. Square’s long term vision is much further than that. It wants to enable every small business to thrive. This company is led by founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, who is also the CEO of other innovative company Twitter.

Stock fundamentals
Square’s forward PE ratio is 190 and market cap is $110B.  Square’s stock valuation is quite rich. Its stock price has come down a lot this past week. It is a high growth company and these companies are valued higher than typical companies with slower growth. Square also has added bitcoin asset in its balance sheet and allows its customers to transact crypto assets through its popular mobile application CashApp.

Long term potential
Square is a disrupting company. Starting with a portable credit card reader, it has just announced the opening of its first physical bank. So, we can see this company being one of the largest banks in future. Though short term fundamentals are also looking good, stock can be more volatile (go up and down) in the short term. However, long term potential for Square looks very promising. 

Why buy now?
Square has been delivering robust results every quarter for the past two years and analysts predict that it will continue to deliver consistently in future. Most of these companies have stock priced for much long term growth. Stock price, though a little pricey, is not very expensive when considering where it will be after five years. Also, price has come down 20% from its recent high. Square’s business model has proved during the COVID crisis that it has potential to grow during adverse economic conditions as well. If you do not already have this in your list, we strongly recommend to add this now. 

In 5-10 years, Square has a potential to return your investment at least 2-3 times.  

Risks and when to sell?
Fintech is a very competitive field and it is getting crowded all the time. There are so many other players like Paypal, Affirm and other banks like JPMC and Bank of America also are trying to transform to become more modern FinTech organizations. Though we do not expect to happen in the next 2-3 years, we should continue to watch the growth of Square. If growth stalls or decelerates, it may start losing its market share and we as investors will have to assess the risk of owning the stock at that time.