Richart Ruddie Entrepreneur - Expirement

For my latest experiment that I am going public about running I am testing something that we have successfully done for clients which is changing the suggested Google searches when a query is made.

Right now I am running a script with my name and the queries appearing in the title.

Richart Ruddie connected entrepreneur

Richart Ruddie Entrepreneur

Now this is the first post on the internet with that content so we will see if the combination from this post alone and my script will make a difference.

Time will tell.

Lessons from the Uber Wealthy and I

Certain attributes and Characteristics make up the bulk of successful people. While not all of these characteristics are essential I do find great truth in success, obtaining wealth, and the viewpoints described below:

1)"Being Smart is good, but being lucky is better."
Being incredibly lucky helps but..

Remember luck is what you make of it. In a lot of my lucrative business ventures I find that "LUCK" comes to you after you have created an opportunity and situation to become lucky in. “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.” If you are prepped, ready, and outgoing the world is yours to have. As Damon Jones said on the Shark Tank life is 20% about what happens to you and 80% how you react to it and thats the lucky part because you react to the plausible opportunity that others did not react to and thats where success comes into play.

2) Dream Big and Have even Bigger Goals

A succesfully Palm Beach lawyer once taught me that he did so well not because he was any smarter than the next guy nor did he work that much harder than a head chef or construction worker but his aspirations towards success were much greater. He believed in himself and made it come true.

“Amat victoria curam.“ Translation “Victory loves careful preparation.” Plan for success.

3) Being poor is no fun.
While they often say money can't buy you love nor can it ensure happiness but having a lot of money certainly helps you sleep and smile at night. With great wealth does come great responsibility but you also get to enjoy the finer things in life such as private jets, the nicest spas in the world, excellent food, and retirement without fear of having to go back to work.

4) Time is the biggest enemy of Man
This is the most true saying that I have come to realize over the last year as I get increasingly busier. I get offered at least 1-5 new jobs a week and if time was no factor I would give every single one of them a shot. However, you have to enjoy your freedom and life and labor is simply a barter of time for your $$$. What you buy with your money pales in comparison to the memories and time you get to spend with your family. If you are working so much to obtain wealth and you ignore your family, miss watching your kids grow up, you are actually poorer than you realize no matter how many zeros you have attached to your bank account.

Current Projects

While remaining incredibly busy I do have a lot of projects that are up and running and a few in the pipeline here is the brief list:

Profile Defenders
Coopers Pick
Spinners iPhone Application
Fat Loss Bands
SEO Time Inc.
3-D Modeled Sunglasses
State-o-rama
Country-o-rama
Accounting Classes

Map of the USA rearragned by Budget Gaps

What if the USA was Rearranged based on Budget Gaps?

Barry Ritholtz recently had an intriguing article he linked to that showed a world map that was depicted as the world's countries rearranged by population. Since I have moved from being strictly an equity trader to a Muni bond trader I have taken more interest in the budget gaps and deficits that U.S. states and cities have. From the research I have done outside of work I originally decided 3 maps would be appropriate of the United States re-arranged based on their budget gaps. In the end only two were feasible to be shown here and the other will live within the hard drive of the computer that is bringing you this post.

So what if the map of the United States were rearranged based on Budget Gaps? The result would be a semi-disconcerting map.

The first map is based off of total population. So the State with the highest budget gap aligned with the state with the largest population and so forth. So California with the biggest gap and largest population stayed the same and Texas with the second largest population became New York with their 21 billion dollar gap. The U.S. Capitol makes the biggest trek moving it's residents to Hawaii and the snow birds from New Jersey happen to stay in Florida year round. Click on the map below to see a bigger version.


Some interesting things I realized with this map Pennsylvania stayed in the same place as well as California. Ohio and Massachusetts swapped places with each other. Oregon moved right on up to Washington State, Utah moved just a tad further west to Nevada, Kansas moved one spot to the left, Nebraska moved just north, and Maryland and Wisconsin swapped places.

*Certain states had the same listed gaps such as Alabama, Colorado, and Oklahoma with 1.6 so in these cases for simplicities sake I went in alphabetical order for the correlated state because the data I used did not have exact figures. Both Montana and North Dakota have 0 dollars in budget gaps and therefore I marked them green and everything else black (in hindsight I should have made the other states red and these two black) (see excel sheet for some of the sample data)

The second map is based off of Budget gaps to total area. So California fell into Alaska and New York became Texas. The most interesting thing about this map is that both Vermont and Maine didn't move out of New England in fact they didn't move at all.

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this self serving project I did for fun over the weekend in which my friend said your doing this for fun??




A special thanks to The Big Think: http://bigthink.com/ideas/25109 for the inspiration and idea to re-arrange America. If you have any questions or comments I more than welcome them.

References:
Data Used
U.S. Blank Map
Budget Deficits

11 Greatest Trades of All Time

The 11 Greatest Trades of All Time

There have been enormous gains and losses over the last millennium but some of the trades are truly astounding for both their precision, research, conviction, and most importantly the profits that the trades brought in. Since anybody can go ahead and do a top 10 list I decided to do the 11 greatest trades of all time followed by a 11 of the worst trades of all time so be on the look out for that at the end of February.

11) Richard Rainwater and Peak Oil
Rainwater called peak oil at a time when many thought $100.00 crude oil was not possible. Now we know better to doubt him and those who say that the S & P 500 will cross Gold Comex in 2008.....Rainwater put the bets in and even wrote books about it in the late 90's (beyond the limits and limits to growth). In the end King Rainwater took home over a billion dollars come mid 2000's.


10) George Soros Short of the GBP
This trade is all so talked about the British pound short for a billion dollar payday in a single day that I feel I shouldn't have to elaborate on it.

9) John Henry trend following Short on Barrings Bank
Billions of dollars were lost by infamous trader Nick Lesson who ultimately lost Barrings Bank $1.4 billion dollars but playing the trend JWH rode the wave on the opposite side of the Rogue Trader. He also repeated a great trade on the other side of LTCM's collapse.

8) Mark Spitznagel and Nassim Taleeb
The Black Swan trade profiting on volatility on both the financial crisis, tech bust, and of course the Flash Crash. I always laugh when girls come over and see my book the Black swan and say OMG I love the movie the "black swan" to which I politely say oh no it's a different kind of black swan. Perhaps a black swan event for me will be when the girl actually realizes it's not the Natalie Portman film adaptation.


7) Dougie Kass's 666 bottom call
He was live on television on CNBC's Fast Money and said out loud this is it this is "The Bottom" stocks are going up from here "This is a Generational Market Low". Maybe a fluke but a great trade as markets have rallied over 70% since than.

6) John Arnolds Natural Gas Play
For the years he spent at Enron as their best trader and having Ken Lay take the bulk of his pay, he certainly has made up for it with Centaurus Advisors and his 1 Billion dollar payday when he took the other side of declining natural gas plays, took the other side of Amaranth's Blow up trade (this is certainly making the 11 worst trades, sorry Brian Hunter) and a hedge against Royal Dutch Shell before hurricane Katrina.

5) Subprime short by Dr. Michael Burry of Scion Capital
This is perhaps the most known trade of the financial crisis because it was than piggypbacked by Sid Bass, John Paulson, and Jeff Greene. While it's great to see writers who don't know anything about trading and finance list and talk about Paulson as the mastermind of the biggest trade of all time so many seem to leave out a man with aspergers disease who studied everything about the housing market and went to wall street with an idea to purchase credit default swaps to which the banks laughed at first and said please be my guest purchase more....(you can guess who laughed in the end. The Big Short by: Michael Lewis talks about Dr. Burry)

4) Kenneth Griffins
Citadels purchase of the Amaranth portfolio and Sowood Capital. Amaranth Advisors in CT. suffered $6.6 billion in losses on natural gas trades thanks to Brian Hunters bad bets so the brilliant Harvard Statisical Arbitrage fund owner in Chicago studied the books diligently and in short time purchased their trades for pennies on the dollar. Than Sowood ran by Jeff Larson hit some financial problems with his books and yet another home run in short time was hit by the Daytona Beach whiz kid of Chicago.

3) Jim Simmons
Quant realizes that Bernie Maddoffs returns weren't possible statistically and since his guys couldnt do it, it was obvious it wasn't possible. Sometimes the best trades are the ones you stay away from. Credit to also Newport Princeton founder Edward Thorpe who also noticed this years earlier.

2) Target and General Growth Properties Investment by Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital. After reading over 110,000 pages of documents according to Fast Money reports Bill Ackman saw the value at pennies on the dollar for a company that had properties worth greater than it's net book value. One of the greatest value investment plays of all time.


1) Homma Munehisa rice trades. As a proprietor of todays candlestick charts he started trading rice with unconventional methods profiting in todays dollars as much as $10 billion dollars a year (that trumps John Paulsons subprime take home and he did it year in and year out)

Note: Certain famous people were left off this list and for good reason. Warren Buffett and Seth Klarman while the greatest two value investors living today is still an investor and not a trader so his plays we're not really trades rather long term value plays if I make a list for the best investments of all time surely his Washington Post and Geico investments would show up. Jesse Livermore perhaps one of the most influential individuals in my trading career had a few astonishingly brilliant trades but yet he died broke when he committed suicide so unfortunately his trades had no longevity.

Honorable Mentions: Have to go to all of the traders that I admire and would love to meet one day. David Einhorns call on the bankruptcy of the 4th largest investment bank a year and 2 months prior. Jim Chanos short on Enron was as described in Malcolm Gladwells book what the Dog Saw a short that he started looking into once he read an article about their accounting and profits.