Factset: How You can Invest in Hedge Funds’ Biggest Investment
Tl;dr FactSet is the most undervalued widespread SaaS/IT solution stock that exists
If any of you have relevant experience or are friends with people in Investment Banking/other high finance, you know that Factset is the lifeblood of their financial analysis toolkit if and when it’s not Bloomberg, which isn’t even publicly traded. Factset has been around since 1978 and it’s considered a staple like Bloomberg in many wealth management firms, and it offers some of the easiest to access and understandable financial data so many newer firms focused less on trading are switching to Factset because it has a lot of the same data Bloomberg offers for half the cost. When it comes to modern financial data, Factset outcompetes Reuters and arguably Bloomberg as well due to their API services which makes Factset much more preferable for quantitative divisions of banks/hedge funds as API integration with Python/R is the most important factor for vast data lakes of financial data, this suggests Factset will be much more prepared for programming making its way into traditional finance fields. According to Factset, their mission for data delivery is to: “Integrate the data you need with your applications, web portals, and statistical packages. Whether you need market, company, or alternative data, FactSet flexible data delivery services give you normalized data through APIs and a direct delivery of local copies of standard data feeds. Our unique symbology links and aggregates a variety of content sources to ensure consistency, transparency, and data integrity across your business. Build financial models and power customized applications with FactSet APIs in our developer portal”. Their technical focus for their data delivery system alone should make it stand out compared to Bloomberg, whose UI is far more outdated and complex on top of not being as technically developed as Factset’s. Factset is the key provider of buy-side portfolio analysis for IBs, Hedge funds, and Private Equity firms, and it’s making its way into non-quantitative hedge funds as well because quantitative portfolio management makes automation of risk management and the application of portfolio theory so much easier, and to top it off, Factset’s scenario analysis and simulation is unique in its class. Factset also is able to automate trades based on individual manager risk tolerance and ML optimization for Forex trading as well. Not only does Factset provide solutions for financial companies, they are branching out to all corporations now and providing quantitative analytics for them in the areas of “corporate development, M&A, strategy, treasury, financial planning and analysis, and investor relations workflows”. Factset will eventually in my opinion reach out to Insurance Risk Management a lot more in the future as that’s a huge industry which has yet to see much automation of risk management yet, and with the field wide open, Factset will be the first to take advantage without a shadow of a doubt. So let’s dig into the company’s financials now:
Their latest 8k filing reported the following:
Revenue increased 2.6%, or $9.6 million, to $374.1 million compared with $364.5 million for the same period in fiscal 2019. The increase is primarily due to higher sales of analytics, content and technology solutions (CTS) and wealth management solutions.
Annual Subscription Value (ASV) plus professional services was $1.52 billion at May 31, 2020, compared with $1.45 billion at May 31, 2019. The organic growth rate, which excludes the effects of acquisitions, dispositions, and foreign currency movements, was 5.0%. The primary contributors to this growth rate were higher sales in FactSet's wealth and research workflow solutions and a price increase in the Company's international region
Adjusted operating margin improved to 35.5% compared with 34.0% in the prior year period primarily as a result of reduced employee-related operating expenses due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Diluted earnings per share (EPS) increased 11.0% to $2.63 compared with $2.37 for the same period in fiscal 2019.
Adjusted diluted EPS rose 9.2% to $2.86 compared with $2.62 in the prior year period primarily driven by an improvement in operating results.
The Company’s effective tax rate for the third quarter decreased to 15.0% compared with 18.6% a year ago, primarily due to an income tax expense in the prior year related to finalizing the Company's tax returns with no similar event for the three months ended May 31, 2020.
FactSet increased its quarterly dividend by $0.05 per share or 7% to $0.77 marking the fifteenth consecutive year the Company has increased dividends, highlighting its continued commitment to returning value to shareholders.
As you can see, there’s not much of a negative sign in sight here.
It makes sense considering how FactSet’s FCF has never slowed down:
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FactSet’s annual subscriptions and professional services have made its way to foreign and developing markets, and many of them are opting for FactSet’s cheaper services to reduce costs and still get copious amounts of data and models to work with.
Here’s what FactSet had to say regarding its competitive position within the market of providing financial data in its last 10k: “Despite competing products and services, we enjoy high barriers to entry and believe it would be difficult for another vendor to quickly replicate the extensive databases we currently offer. Through our in-depth analytics and client service, we believe we can offer clients a more comprehensive solution with one of the broadest sets of functionalities, through a desktop or mobile user interface or through a standardized or bespoke data feed.” And FactSet is confident that their ML services cannot be replaced by anybody else in the industry either: “In addition, our applications, including our client support and service offerings, are entrenched in the workflow of many financial professionals given the downloading functions and portfolio analysis/screening capabilities offered. We are entrusted with significant amounts of our clients' own proprietary data, including portfolio holdings. As a result, our products have become central to our clients’ investment analysis and decision-making.” (https://last10k.com/sec-filings/fds#link_fullReport), if you read the full report and compare it to the most recent 8K, you’ll find that the real expenses this quarter were far lower than expected by the last 10k as there was a lower than expected tax rate and a 3% increase in expected operating margin from the expected figure as well. The company also reports a 90% customer retention rate over 15 years, so you know that they’re not lying when they say the clients need them for all sorts of financial data whether it’s for M&A or wealth management and Equity analysis:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/factset.asp
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FactSet also has remarkably good cash conversion considering it’s a subscription based company, a company structure which usually takes on too much leverage. Speaking of leverage, FDS had taken on a lot of leverage in 2015:
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So what’s that about? Why were FactSet’s long term debts at 0 and all of a sudden why’d the spike up? Well usually for a company that’s non-cyclical and has a well-established product (like FactSet) leverage can actually be good at amplifying returns, so FDS used this to their advantage and this was able to help the share’s price during 2015. Also, as you can see debt/ebitda is beginning a rapid decline anyway. This only adds to my theory that FactSet is trying to expand into new playing fields. FactSet obviously didn’t need the leverage to cover their normal costs, because they have always had consistently growing margins and revenue so the debt financing was only for the sake of financing growth. And this debt can be considered covered and paid off, considering the net income growth of 32% between 2018 and 2019 alone and the EPS growth of 33%
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EBITDA has virtually been exponential for FactSet for a while because of the bang-for-buck for their well-known product, but now as FactSet ventures into algorithmic trading and corporate development the scope for growth is broadly expanded.
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P/E has declined in the past 2 years, making it a great time to buy.
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Increasing ROE despite lowering of leverage post 2016
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Mountains of cash have been piling up in the coffers increasing chances of increased dividends for shareholders (imo dividend is too low right now, but increasing it will tempt more investors into it), and on top of that in the last 10k a large buyback expansion program was implemented for $210m worth of shares, which shows how confident they are in the company itself.
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SGA expense/Gross profit has been declining despite expansion of offices
I’m a bit concerned about the skin in the game leadership has in this company, since very few executives/board members have significant holdings in the company, but the CEO himself is a FactSet veteran, and knows his way around the company. On top of that, Bloomberg remains king for trading and the fixed income security market, and Reuters beats out FactSet here as well. If FactSet really wants to increase cash flow sources, the expansion into insurance and corp dev has to be successful.
Summary: FactSet has a lot of growth still left in its industry which is already fast-growing in and of itself, and it only has more potential at its current valuation. Earnings September 24th should be a massive beat due to investment banking demand and growth plus Hedge fund requirements for data and portfolio management hasn’t gone anywhere and has likely increased due to more market opportunities to buy-in.
Calls have shitty greeks, but if you're ballsy October 450s LOL, I'm holding shares
I’d say it’s a great long term investment, and it should at least be on your watchlist.

[M] This meme I made describes how I feel right now, why can’t my economy just be normal and just function, very upsetting. [/M]
The Russian economy is in freefall, which is quite an unfortunate problem to say the least. After experiencing minor growth for the past two years, the economy has decided to kill itself, which can be quite an issue when unemployment skyrockets to 22%, and the value of the rouble drops faster than Saudi Arabia’s chance of not being stuck in an eternal civil war. Taking experience from the 2008-2009 and the 2014-2017 Russian financial crises, we are well prepared to restore economic order to the country. This must be done quickly, as the longer we stall around, the more our people shall suffer, and the odds of escaping this pit of economic despair shrink. To escape this financial crisis, there are three main fields that need to be addressed extensively to prevent the economy from detonating on itself. The first field being social welfare and the lives of the people within Russia. With unemployment at 22%, the people of Russia will be suffering, and if we are to emerge from this crisis, we need to work with them and ensure their safety and wellbeing to recover faster. The second field is the rouble, and the general state of the economy. The value of the rouble has skyrocketed, and inflation is running rampant, which if this is allowed to continue, will decimate our economy even more, so this must be brought under control as soon as possible. Furthermore, many businesses and factories in the country have slashed employees and have almost gone out of business themself, so drastic action needs to be taken there. Finally, the final field being the roots of the crisis, corruption, and the sanctions on Russia from the west. The roots of the problem need to be pruned so that a disaster like this never happens again.
Russia is stuck between a rock and a hard place right now, but this is our trying moment. If we emerge from this disaster, we will come out stronger than ever before, and will become closer as a country, showing that Russia is the only way forward. Through cooperation between the people and the government, we will make it through this crisis.
Field One: Welfare
One of the key fields of this crisis that needs to be addressed is the welfare of the people. Unemployment is at a record 22%, and this must be addressed before anything else can be done. With this many people unemployed and not able to get jobs, this will cause havoc all across Russia as people will struggle to make ends meet in terms of living their lives. To counteract the immediate issues that this will cause, food, shelter, and other amenities for people need to be secured and guaranteed. First off, guaranteeing food for all people who are unable to afford it or acquire it while being unemployed. In recent years our production of all agricultural goods has skyrocketed due to the introduction of GMOs, so we can provide government “soup kitchens” for the unemployed to come and reliably get food. The government will provide the farmers with money for their crops, and in return the food can be placed into these free places for people to eat, therefore avoiding the concern of people starving. Housing will not be as critical of an issue, as there is state housing available, but it is limited in capacity, so something must still be done. This issue can be solved with the issue of unemployment, which I will elaborate on further. Essentially, new state housing will be built in all places that need housing for the unemployed, and this can provide temporary residences for the people to stay out of the elements when the time comes. As for things like health care and such, these are provided by the government, and due to the recession, funding for them will be raised to account for the inevitable rise in human needs.
To place a major dent in the issue of unemployment, much with what the United States did during the 1930s during the Great Depression, we will be taking a leaf out of their book and creating a plethora of new programs. The major program however, will be the program known as Rehabilitation Russia, which will revolve around infrastructure improvements all across Russia, and constructing new buildings as well. This ties into building new state housing, and draws inspiration from the programs from the American New Deal in the 1930s, namely the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Public Works Administration. All of these programs focused on providing work to unemployed people, and working on infrastructure around the country. This same principle can be applied in Russia, hopefully to the same degree of success. The temporary jobs granted through these programs can provide enough time for the factories that these people were laid off from to be up and running again. With all of this in place, this can grant additional benefit to Russia while also ensuring that these people do not go without jobs. While not everyone will get a job from these programs, it will stem the major flow of unemployment for the meantime, and hopefully grant enough time for the major sources of employment to reopen.
Additionally, for those who are unemployed, the current unemployment benefits are nowhere close to being enough to allow a person to survive. Per month currently, each person only gets around 12-80$ of unemployment money, which is insultingly low. In this recession, with a large number of people in unemployment, this number needs to be increased drastically. To aid the people who are unemployed, the minimum amount of money that can be granted per month will be raised to $150 USD, and the maximum will be raised to $960 USD, which depends on the lifestyle of each person. Someone who has a large family will receive the larger benefit, and someone who is alone will be granted the smaller funds. By raising the unemployment benefits for the recession, this will allow for the people of Russia to still be able to actually survive during these uncertain times.
The funding needed for this will come from slashing other budgets across the scale, and from loans from the Central Bank of Russia. These loans, of course, will be eventually repaid once the recession is over, but something must be done in the meantime to provide the people with a form of welfare and the means to survive.
Field Two: The Economy:
The rouble is in freefall, and the economy is about to be hit by a large train of shinkage, which is quite an issue to summarize. The first thing that must be done for the economy will be to stabilize the rouble. To stabilize the rouble, just like in 2014, the Central Bank of Russia will withdraw $5 billion USD to purchase roubles in the Russian economy to work on stabilizing the currency. Due to the large reserves of the Russian Federation, this can easily be accomplished, and should be more than enough towards stabilizing the rouble. This being done will go a long way towards climbing out the recession, as the stabilization of the rouble will bring back confidence in the economy. To help revive the economy, a government bailout program will be the way that the economy is saved. Russia has extensive reserves of foreign currencies (henceforth referred to as forex reserves) that we have been saving for an event like this for sometime, and now is the time to use them. While $5 billion USD from our forex reserves is being spent to prop up the rouble, this will not be enough to stabilize the economy totally. Therefore a bailout program on a massive scale is required, and the estimated total cost of the government program is $200 billion USD. Around $100-150 billion of this can be gained domestically through raising the VAT and other taxes, while also dipping into our forex reserves and slashing the budget of other ministries. The rest of this money, however, will be given as a bailout loan from the IMF, depending on how much they are willing to give us. This government bailout will be critical to prevent the entire country from entering further economic collapse, and will give us a swift rebound. Where the money goes for the bailouts, however, will be very important as the money is limited as to where it will go. Therefore the money will mainly be focused on reopening factories and bringing back old job positions before the recession. Furthermore, money will also be needed to bailout other important companies that went under in the recession, so focusing on other businesses other than manufacturing is also important, as more places other than that went under. Small businesses in particular are quite important as large numbers of them went under during the crisis, so further bailouts for them are needed. The money will be divided as follows, $100 billion towards manufacturing bailouts as this sector of the economy was the hardest hit from the recession, $50 billion for small businesses, as they were also hit particularly hard, and $50 billion for other sectors of the economy that were hit, but not as hard as the previously mentioned ones. Through these targeted bailouts and financial measures, this should stem the flow from the recession. These measures emanate those from both the 2008-2009 and the 2014-2017 financial crises, and things that worked then will work now.
Acquiring the funding for the bailouts domestically, however, will be difficult, and drastic measures must be taken to ensure this. The value added tax in Russia in particular will be raised from 20% up to 27% for the foreseeable future until the financial crisis has passed, and then past then it will be restored to the normal levels. In particular, the taxes on natural resource extracting will be raised up 2% from whichever level it was previously (this is done because the rates fluctuate for each resource and I don’t want to spend 3 hours writing down each and every one). Through both of these specific taxes being raised, the money from this will be enough to enable the bailout measure to be mostly be funded domestically, rather than through IMF loans. The raising of these taxes is only a temporary measure, and once the recession is over, they will go back to their standard levels so as not to make our citizens' lives even more difficult.
Field Three: The Roots of the Crisis
Despite having extensive measures to stop a crisis like this from even happening, they were not enough to escape the roots of the problems that led to this happening. Corruption and sanctions from the EU were the drivers of this entire recession, and something must be done to combat each and every one of them. No more measures to just delay the inevitable, these issues all right here stop this year, or the next year, Russia will no longer play victim towards the whims of the roots. Action will be taken, and these issues will cease to exist.
Corruption is something that Vladimir Putin has already touched upon at an earlier time, but this time more must be done. Anti-corruption courts were already empowered, and corruption in various different sectors of the government was dealt with to remove the epidemic of bribery that existed within the country. However, one part of corruption that has not been dealt with was tax fraud and tax evasion, which now more than ever is something that needs to be clamped down on. Following the model of the United State’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS), we can mimic their actions to catch those who attempt to deprive the government of their taxes. Russia has a right rate of tax evasion and tax fraud, and by checking over reports sent by their employers and other third parties, and comparing it to their taxes, we can catch people who commit tax fraud. This is an issue that Vladmir Putin feels strongly about, so he will be personally expecting results from this now, and in the future. By attacking those who commit tax fraud and tax evasion, we can also provide the government with more revenue that is sorely needed at this time.
Sanctions from the EU, however, have already been lifted significantly, and this will serve as the rallying cause for our economy. With the aid of European trade coming in, this can serve to assist our economy in climbing out of the recession. While this is not agreeable for our policy, this is something that must be done to ensure the economy does not suffer anymore than it has to. In the future, once the recession is over however, Russia will return to its former strength and prosper once again.
Government interventions into the recession that are swift and precise can help bring about an end to this recession sooner and better. Following methods that worked during the last recessions and financial crises, Russia can escape this calamity stronger than before.

Hello, dummies
It's your old pal, Fuzzy.
As I'm sure you've all noticed, a lot of the stuff that gets posted here is - to put it delicately - fucking ridiculous. More backwards-ass shit gets posted to wallstreetbets than you'd see on a Westboro Baptist community message board. I mean, I had a look at the daily thread yesterday and..... yeesh. I know, I know. We all make like the divine Laura Dern circa 1992 on the daily and stick our hands deep into this steaming heap of shit to find the nuggets of valuable and/or hilarious information within (thanks for reading, BTW). I agree. I love it just the way it is too. That's what makes WSB great.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of the stuff that gets posted here - notwithstanding it being funny or interesting - is just... wrong. Like, fucking your cousin wrong. And to be clear, I mean the fucking your *first* cousin kinda wrong, before my Southerners in the back get all het up (simmer down, Billy Ray - I know Mabel's twice removed on your grand-sister's side). Truly, I try to let it slide. I do my bit to try and put you on the right path. Most of the time, I sleep easy no matter how badly I've seen someone explain what a bank liquidity crisis is. But out of all of those tens of thousands of misguided, autistic attempts at understanding the world of high finance, one thing gets so consistently - so *emphatically* - fucked up and misunderstood by you retards that last night I felt obligated at the end of a long work day to pull together this edition of Finance with Fuzzy just for you. It's so serious I'm not even going to make a u/pokimane gag. Have you guessed what it is yet? Here's a clue. It's in the title of the post.
That's right, friends. Today in the neighborhood we're going to talk all about hedging in financial markets - spots, swaps, collars, forwards, CDS, synthetic CDOs, all that fun shit. Don't worry; I'm going to explain what all the scary words mean and how they impact your OTM RH positions along the way.
We're going to break it down like this. (1) "What's a hedge, Fuzzy?" (2) Common Hedging Strategies and (3) All About ISDAs and Credit Default Swaps.
Before we begin. For the nerds and JV traders in the back (and anyone else who needs to hear this up front) - I am simplifying these descriptions for the purposes of this post. I am also obviously not going to try and cover every exotic form of hedge under the sun or give a detailed summation of what caused the financial crisis. If you are interested in something specific ask a question, but don't try and impress me with your Investopedia skills or technical points I didn't cover; I will just be forced to flex my years of IRL experience on you in the comments and you'll look like a big dummy.
TL;DR? Fuck you. There is no TL;DR. You've come this far already. What's a few more paragraphs? Put down the Cheetos and try to concentrate for the next 5-7 minutes. You'll learn something, and I promise I'll be gentle.
Ready? Let's get started.
1. The Tao of Risk: Hedging as a Way of Life
The simplest way to characterize what a hedge 'is' is to imagine every action having a binary outcome. One is bad, one is good. Red lines, green lines; uppie, downie. With me so far? Good. A 'hedge' is simply the employment of a strategy to mitigate the effect of your action having the wrong binary outcome. You wanted X, but you got Z! Frowny face. A hedge strategy introduces a third outcome. If you hedged against the possibility of Z happening, then you can wind up with Y instead. Not as good as X, but not as bad as Z. The technical definition I like to give my idiot juniors is as follows:
Utilization of a defensive strategy to mitigate risk, at a fraction of the cost to capital of the risk itself.
Congratulations. You just finished Hedging 101. "But Fuzzy, that's easy! I just sold a naked call against my 95% OTM put! I'm adequately hedged!". Spoiler alert: you're not (although good work on executing a collar, which I describe below). What I'm talking about here is what would be referred to as a 'perfect hedge'; a binary outcome where downside is totally mitigated by a risk management strategy. That's not how it works IRL. Pay attention; this is the tricky part.
You can't take a single position and conclude that you're adequately hedged because risks are fluid, not static. So you need to constantly adjust your position in order to maximize the value of the hedge and insure your position. You also need to consider exposure to more than one category of risk. There are micro (specific exposure) risks, and macro (trend exposure) risks, and both need to factor into the hedge calculus.
That's why, in the real world, the value of hedging depends entirely on the design of the hedging strategy itself. Here, when we say "value" of the hedge, we're not talking about cash money - we're talking about the intrinsic value of the hedge relative to the the risk profile of your underlying exposure. To achieve this, people hedge dynamically. In wallstreetbets terms, this means that as the value of your position changes, you need to change your hedges too. The idea is to efficiently and continuously distribute and rebalance risk across different states and periods, taking value from states in which the marginal cost of the hedge is low and putting it back into states where marginal cost of the hedge is high, until the shadow value of your underlying exposure is equalized across your positions. The punchline, I guess, is that one static position is a hedge in the same way that the finger paintings you make for your wife's boyfriend are art - it's technically correct, but you're only playing yourself by believing it.
Anyway. Obviously doing this as a small potatoes trader is hard but it's worth taking into account. Enough basic shit. So how does this work in markets?
2. A Hedging Taxonomy
The best place to start here is a practical question. What does a business need to hedge against? Think about the specific risk that an individual business faces. These are legion, so I'm just going to list a few of the key ones that apply to most corporates. (1) You have commodity risk for the shit you buy or the shit you use. (2) You have currency risk for the money you borrow. (3) You have rate risk on the debt you carry. (4) You have offtake risk for the shit you sell. Complicated, right? To help address the many and varied ways that shit can go wrong in a sophisticated market, smart operators like yours truly have devised a whole bundle of different instruments which can help you manage the risk. I might write about some of the more complicated ones in a later post if people are interested (CDO/CLOs, strip/stack hedges and bond swaps with option toggles come to mind) but let's stick to the basics for now.
(i) Swaps
A swap is one of the most common forms of hedge instrument, and they're used by pretty much everyone that can afford them. The language is complicated but the concept isn't, so pay attention and you'll be fine. This is the most important part of this section so it'll be the longest one.
Swaps are derivative contracts with two counterparties (before you ask, you can't trade 'em on an exchange - they're OTC instruments only). They're used to exchange one cash flow for another cash flow of equal expected value; doing this allows you to take speculative positions on certain financial prices or to alter the cash flows of existing assets or liabilities within a business. "Wait, Fuzz; slow down! What do you mean sets of cash flows?". Fear not, little autist. Ol' Fuzz has you covered.
The cash flows I'm talking about are referred to in swap-land as 'legs'. One leg is fixed - a set payment that's the same every time it gets paid - and the other is variable - it fluctuates (typically indexed off the price of the underlying risk that you are speculating on / protecting against). You set it up at the start so that they're notionally equal and the two legs net off; so at open, the swap is a zero NPV instrument. Here's where the fun starts. If the price that you based the variable leg of the swap on changes, the value of the swap will shift; the party on the wrong side of the move ponies up via the variable payment. It's a zero sum game.
I'll give you an example using the most vanilla swap around; an interest rate trade. Here's how it works. You borrow money from a bank, and they charge you a rate of interest. You lock the rate up front, because you're smart like that. But then - quelle surprise! - the rate gets better after you borrow. Now you're bagholding to the tune of, I don't know, 5 bps. Doesn't sound like much but on a billion dollar loan that's a lot of money (a classic example of the kind of 'small, deep hole' that's terrible for profits). Now, if you had a swap contract on the rate before you entered the trade, you're set; if the rate goes down, you get a payment under the swap. If it goes up, whatever payment you're making to the bank is netted off by the fact that you're borrowing at a sub-market rate. Win-win! Or, at least, Lose Less / Lose Less. That's the name of the game in hedging.
There are many different kinds of swaps, some of which are pretty exotic; but they're all different variations on the same theme. If your business has exposure to something which fluctuates in price, you trade swaps to hedge against the fluctuation. The valuation of swaps is also super interesting but I guarantee you that 99% of you won't understand it so I'm not going to try and explain it here although I encourage you to google it if you're interested.
Because they're OTC, none of them are filed publicly. Someeeeeetimes you see an ISDA (dsicussed below) but the confirms themselves (the individual swaps) are not filed. You can usually read about the hedging strategy in a 10-K, though. For what it's worth, most modern credit agreements ban speculative hedging. Top tip: This is occasionally something worth checking in credit agreements when you invest in businesses that are debt issuers - being able to do this increases the risk profile significantly and is particularly important in times of economic volatility (ctrl+f "non-speculative" in the credit agreement to be sure).
(ii) Forwards
A forward is a contract made today for the future delivery of an asset at a pre-agreed price. That's it. "But Fuzzy! That sounds just like a futures contract!". I know. Confusing, right? Just like a futures trade, forwards are generally used in commodity or forex land to protect against price fluctuations. The differences between forwards and futures are small but significant. I'm not going to go into super boring detail because I don't think many of you are commodities traders but it is still an important thing to understand even if you're just an RH jockey, so stick with me.
Just like swaps, forwards are OTC contracts - they're not publicly traded. This is distinct from futures, which are traded on exchanges (see The Ballad Of Big Dick Vick for some more color on this). In a forward, no money changes hands until the maturity date of the contract when delivery and receipt are carried out; price and quantity are locked in from day 1. As you now know having read about BDV, futures are marked to market daily, and normally people close them out with synthetic settlement using an inverse position. They're also liquid, and that makes them easier to unwind or close out in case shit goes sideways.
People use forwards when they absolutely have to get rid of the thing they made (or take delivery of the thing they need). If you're a miner, or a farmer, you use this shit to make sure that at the end of the production cycle, you can get rid of the shit you made (and you won't get fucked by someone taking cash settlement over delivery). If you're a buyer, you use them to guarantee that you'll get whatever the shit is that you'll need at a price agreed in advance. Because they're OTC, you can also exactly tailor them to the requirements of your particular circumstances.
These contracts are incredibly byzantine (and there are even crazier synthetic forwards you can see in money markets for the true degenerate fund managers). In my experience, only Texan oilfield magnates, commodities traders, and the weirdo forex crowd fuck with them. I (i) do not own a 10 gallon hat or a novelty size belt buckle (ii) do not wake up in the middle of the night freaking out about the price of pork fat and (iii) love greenbacks too much to care about other countries' monopoly money, so I don't fuck with them.
(iii) Collars
No, not the kind your wife is encouraging you to wear try out to 'spice things up' in the bedroom during quarantine. Collars are actually the hedging strategy most applicable to WSB. Collars deal with options! Hooray!
To execute a basic collar (also called a wrapper by tea-drinking Brits and people from the Antipodes), you buy an out of the money put while simultaneously writing a covered call on the same equity. The put protects your position against price drops and writing the call produces income that offsets the put premium. Doing this limits your tendies (you can only profit up to the strike price of the call) but also writes down your risk. If you screen large volume trades with a VOL/OI of more than 3 or 4x (and they're not bullshit biotech stocks), you can sometimes see these being constructed in real time as hedge funds protect themselves on their shorts.
(3) All About ISDAs, CDS and Synthetic CDOs
You may have heard about the mythical ISDA. Much like an indenture (discussed in my post on $F), it's a magic legal machine that lets you build swaps via trade confirms with a willing counterparty. They are very complicated legal documents and you need to be a true expert to fuck with them. Fortunately, I am, so I do. They're made of two parts; a Master (which is a form agreement that's always the same) and a Schedule (which amends the Master to include your specific terms). They are also the engine behind just about every major credit crunch of the last 10+ years.
First - a brief explainer. An ISDA is a not in and of itself a hedge - it's an umbrella contract that governs the terms of your swaps, which you use to construct your hedge position. You can trade commodities, forex, rates, whatever, all under the same ISDA.
Let me explain. Remember when we talked about swaps? Right. So. You can trade swaps on just about anything. In the late 90s and early 2000s, people had the smart idea of using other people's debt and or credit ratings as the variable leg of swap documentation. These are called credit default swaps. I was actually starting out at a bank during this time and, I gotta tell you, the only thing I can compare people's enthusiasm for this shit to was that moment in your early teens when you discover jerking off. Except, unlike your bathroom bound shame sessions to Mom's Sears catalogue, every single person you know felt that way too; and they're all doing it at once. It was a fiscal circlejerk of epic proportions, and the financial crisis was the inevitable bukkake finish. WSB autism is absolutely no comparison for the enthusiasm people had during this time for lighting each other's money on fire.
Here's how it works. You pick a company. Any company. Maybe even your own! And then you write a swap. In the swap, you define "Credit Event" with respect to that company's debt as the variable leg . And you write in... whatever you want. A ratings downgrade, default under the docs, failure to meet a leverage ratio or FCCR for a certain testing period... whatever. Now, this started out as a hedge position, just like we discussed above. The purest of intentions, of course. But then people realized - if bad shit happens, you make money. And banks... don't like calling in loans or forcing bankruptcies. Can you smell what the moral hazard is cooking?
Enter synthetic CDOs. CDOs are basically pools of asset backed securities that invest in debt (loans or bonds). They've been around for a minute but they got famous in the 2000s because a shitload of them containing subprime mortgage debt went belly up in 2008. This got a lot of publicity because a lot of sad looking rednecks got foreclosed on and were interviewed on CNBC. "OH!", the people cried. "Look at those big bad bankers buying up subprime loans! They caused this!". Wrong answer, America. The debt wasn't the problem. What a lot of people don't realize is that the real meat of the problem was not in regular way CDOs investing in bundles of shit mortgage debts in synthetic CDOs investing in CDS predicated on that debt. They're synthetic because they don't have a stake in the actual underlying debt; just the instruments riding on the coattails. The reason these are so popular (and remain so) is that smart structured attorneys and bankers like your faithful correspondent realized that an even more profitable and efficient way of building high yield products with limited downside was investing in instruments that profit from failure of debt and in instruments that rely on that debt and then hedging that exposure with other CDS instruments in paired trades, and on and on up the chain. The problem with doing this was that everyone wound up exposed to everybody else's books as a result, and when one went tits up, everybody did. Hence, recession, Basel III, etc. Thanks, Obama.
Heavy investment in CDS can also have a warping effect on the price of debt (something else that happened during the pre-financial crisis years and is starting to happen again now). This happens in three different ways. (1) Investors who previously were long on the debt hedge their position by selling CDS protection on the underlying, putting downward pressure on the debt price. (2) Investors who previously shorted the debt switch to buying CDS protection because the relatively illiquid debt (partic. when its a bond) trades at a discount below par compared to the CDS. The resulting reduction in short selling puts upward pressure on the bond price. (3) The delta in price and actual value of the debt tempts some investors to become NBTs (neg basis traders) who long the debt and purchase CDS protection. If traders can't take leverage, nothing happens to the price of the debt. If basis traders can take leverage (which is nearly always the case because they're holding a hedged position), they can push up or depress the debt price, goosing swap premiums etc. Anyway. Enough technical details.
I could keep going. This is a fascinating topic that is very poorly understood and explained, mainly because the people that caused it all still work on the street and use the same tactics today (it's also terribly taught at business schools because none of the teachers were actually around to see how this played out live). But it relates to the topic of today's lesson, so I thought I'd include it here.
Work depending, I'll be back next week with a covenant breakdown. Most upvoted ticker gets the post.
*EDIT 1\* In a total blowout, $PLAY won. So it's D&B time next week. Post will drop Monday at market open.

Currently there are 250,000 people in Las Vegas, NV that will not be able to pay their rent for September. Let's say a total of $125,000 million dollars would take care of their rent situation. I came up with that number by dividing $125,000 by $500. I know rents are higher. This is for illustrative purposes.
This is a very difficult time for just about everyone at the moment. We are looking for answers that we just don’t have. Now is the time to come together as a unit and take part in something bigger than it’s individual parts. I am talking about a new way of financial thinking that creates a win, win, win, situation. Renters make up forty percent of households and thirty eight percent of renters are estimated to be unemployed right now. Eviction notices could be mailed as soon as next month. This is a crisis that will affect the entire country. But there is something that we can do about it, but it takes all of our voices in unity to make it happen. This is a collective action that can be implemented immediately. Now is the time to go beyond thinking out of the box and thinking out of our universe.
Big banks and financial institutions were responsible for the 2007 housing collapse which devastated the entire world economy. In 2008, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act was signed into law, creating a $700 billion program to purchase devalued assets from banks. This was called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Later, President Obama would direct $75 billion in funds from TARP to help reduce interest payments for homeowners. That means homeowners received around 10% of the direct relief that banks and corporations did, according to Business Insider. It’s now time for the financial institutions to do their share and make up for the last financial debacle.
The financial markets are experiencing all time highs and billionaires got $637 billion dollars richer in the last few months. Somethings definitely out of whack here and I will show you how we fix this. I said we, meaning the millions of people around the world with one voice helping to implement The One Cent More Plan. For any financial movement to be sustainable it must be transparent for all to see where the money is being used and not exploited by a few. That’s why no one organization is responsible for the money involved and each transaction is in the block-chain ledger for all to see at anytime.
This is how it works for renters, landlords and the banks. For the purpose of this example let’s use Cindy as a renter who lives in Las Vegas and lost her job and can’t pay next months rent. She has notified her landlord and he is trying to be as courteous as possible, but he also has a mortgage to pay on his apartment building which has ten units. Some of the other tenants have lost their jobs as well. As you can see this is a common occurrence in Las Vegas at the moment. This is where the bank steps in as the lovable George Bailey types which they will become. I know what you are thinking. Their more like Mr. Potter than George in it’s a Wonderful Life. But you will soon see that it’s in their best interest to be more like George in the long run. If you haven’t seen the movie, I suggest you do. It’s one of my favorites.
I will start with the New York Stock Exchange. The average daily volume for the last three months was 1,123,989,426 shares which equates to a staggering 22,479,788,520 shares per month. What if for each share an additional fee of one cent were added. This would result in $11,239,894.26 dollars per day going into the The One Cent More Plan Fund. You know at the end of each day the total amount that the fund should have simply by looking at the end of day total volume for the market. Multiply that by the number of trading days in the month and it equals 224,797,885.20 dollars. This is just one market. Now let’s say Cindy is a beneficiary of The One Cent More Plan Fund which is setup for the sole purpose of assisting with rent for those who can’t pay. Her rent was 750 dollars she would receive 500 dollars for rent and nothing out of her pocket. But Cindy wouldn’t get a direct payment. She would receive a receipt contract from her bank with a block-chain transaction number which she can look up on the internet to verify that it had been paid. Her landlord would also receive from his bank a receipt contract only because he owes the bank his mortgage payment. If he had no mortgage the payment would go directly to him. His payment would also be on the block-chain. So, Cindy’s rent is paid for the month of September. Her landlord is happy although he doesn’t get his normal amount of 750 dollars, it’s still better than having to go through the hassle of evicting a good tenant and ending up with no rent at all!! And the landlords bank is happy that the mortgage is being paid.
Here is the Ethereum Blockchain Ledger
So how much would it cost to do the same for the other people who can’t pay their rent. This is just one example with one market. As you can see there are no real losers in this equation. A one cent transaction fee on every stock sold is not a lot to fight over. Once Cindy finds a job she would not receive the entire $500 for rent only $300. The remaining $200 would stay in the fund to sustain it. And by the way this is a temporary transaction fee until more people get back to work and the economy starts to recover. It is estimated that $21 trillion dollars is hidden in offshore accounts by the wealthy. Companies in the United States have an estimated $2.1 trillion. If companies just brought back that money and donated the interest alone from it this would have a huge impact on the economy and not increase the national debt at all! When you don’t have customers with money to buy your product it will really begin to feel like 1929 again in a hurry. This could snowball quickly. We don’t have time for negotiations over a stimulus package. Big banks and corporations could really turn their image around and be the true heroes if they wanted to be. The money is there folks we just have to make them accountable with our voices. We have seen how social change can happen all around the world. Let’s not miss this opportunity today right now. I haven’t even spoken about the largest market in the world and that is Forex. If we just took a small portion each day from the six trillion that is traded each day it would help us stop evictions around the world and give people hope.
Banks are already using block-chain technology as we speak. This doesn’t require building brand new infrastructure. As I just showed you this can be done with existing bank accounts. Payments can be made in seconds. I can send my sister money through Zelle in minutes. Their should be no lag time as to when payments can be made. So who is going to foot the bill for making this happen. The banks of course and without any transaction fee whatsoever.
I look forward to all your comments and suggestions with an open mind.
​
Thanks,,
chronus80

Putting business online is one of the crucial things in today’s world. But just going online isn’t enough to reach your target audience; you also need to preserve all sorts of website expertise. You should also concentrate on sophisticated SEO strategies and properly apply them for better productivity.
In this technology-prone age, Forex SEO strategies will change the entire forex market scenario to yield better returns. The SEO tactics will change anytime, and the worst thing is that sometimes you have no clue. Search engine optimization research is great to boost the forex platform rankings.
Which Forex SEO tactics should you implement in 2018? Review the Top 8 SEO strategies chart below:

1. Make Your Website Super-Fast Looking at the last five years ‘ forex website design, you will remember how sluggish they were. And now, the situation has changed significantly, focusing more on the speed of mobile browsing relative to desktops and laptops. Forex SEO can be best applied with a super-fast Forex website, as it is also a key factor in rankings.
   
2. Maintain Your Website Mobile Friendliness Once combined with mobile optimization, Forex SEO helps build stable links and allows the search process easier and faster. Customers are more familiar with the smartphone, so after Google prioritizes, they see those forex sites that are faster and ranked in top position.
   
3. Produce High-Quality Content Forex SEO service continues to be quite spectacular when combined with the appealing, error-free content that contains the targeted keywords. Well-researched quality content is now highly in demand and helps build good, long-term customer relationships.
   
4. Update Your Blog It’s important to match the existing content with successful and appropriate improvements to boost organic traffic on your respective forex website. Edit your old content and try adding new posts to your site for improved discussions and results. A blog lets maintain your website and reach your community.
   
5. Use of Voice Search Is Impressive Voice search is now in demand, and one of the town’s popular buzzwords. Optimize your forex website with conversational keywords, and use the voice search option to attract a wide audience to your forex website.
   
6. A strong social interaction is beneficial Social media helps develop a strong online presence among millions of users. Sharing and handling useful content on social media channels could be beneficial in gaining users ‘ interest, as well as increasing the chances of quality connections.
   
7. Switch To Bing and Yahoo Too Google may be called the king of the search engine for your respective Forex SEO. However, at the same time, don’t worry about Bing and Yahoo, which are also considered the top search engines that deliver consumers to your forex page and place you on the list.
   
8. Analyze Your User Experience Improving user experience is one of the latest industry phenomena. Therefore, you can improve it by giving users reliable access and assistance that can raise your score.
   

Creating a blog couldn’t be easier and yet more complicated in 2020.
There are so many different things to think about, and yet so many different platforms you can use to streamline the process.
Understandably you’ll already have an idea of what you want to write about, I, unfortunately, can’t help you with that, but what I can do is show you how you can set up a killer blog that will drive readers to your website.
We’ll take you through what you’ll need to get started, our five steps to setting your blog up, the best blogging platforms to use, how to get your blog discovered, and the do’s and don’ts of blogging.
But first, we need to establish what type of blog you want to set up.

What type of blog?

Firstly you’ll want to have a goal in mind. What are you aiming to achieve through your blog?
Do you want to pull in more users to your sales pages by writing about your brand, to increase its publicity?
Do you want to build a blog that promotes brands and products from other companies?
Or do you just want to set up a blog documenting your travels around the world?
In order to pick the right software for you, you’ll want to have a grasp before you start of how big this blog is going to be, whether you’re going to monetize it, and what type of blog it’s going to become.
For example, if you’re planning on building an affiliate blogging programme, where you promote other brand’s products and call readers to action to but the products, you’ll be writing a lot of content and will benefit from having a more comprehensive blogging system with lots of plugins to promote sales.
But if you’re looking to just set up a personal, or a personal brand blog talking about yourself and your brand, you may not perhaps need as many comprehensive features as you would if you were building an affiliate blog.
You may also want to build an online portfolio of your work, which could require an entirely different piece of blogging kit, as opposed to the traditional blog that hosts articles and journals.

What you’ll need to get started.

There are 3 key things you’ll need to get up and running.

1. A blogging platform.

After you’ve identified the type of blog you want to set up, plus whether you’re going to make money from it, you’ll then need to pick a blogging platform tailored to your needs. Many people chose to operate on WordPress as it is one of the most comprehensive blogging systems going, but they forget platforms like Wix and Squarespace that are great for both helping you save and make money and are great options for those who are less tech-savvy and are new to the blogging game. Plus if you’re blogging for business, you might want to think about using LinkedIn for your business blog.
We’ll go into more detail on what blogging platforms are best for your needs shortly, but make sure to keep in mind your objectives and technical experience when choosing the right platform for you.

1. A hosting platform.

Every website needs a web host to store their website’s information on the internet. A web host is an online service provider that will store your website’s information on one of its online servers. This will put your blog out there to the world. The best web hosts will perform a variety of functions for you, for example, Wix is an all-in-one package that will host your website for you, allow you to register a domain name, and has easy to use website design tools to help you start your blog.
Web hosting can be expensive though so make sure you pick the best value for money host that can cater to the amount of traffic you have running through your website. Check out our post on the 11 best hosting providers. [Insert blog link here]

1. A domain name.

I’m sure by now you already know what sort of blog you want to set up, whether that’s a travel, blog, a blog accompanying your online store, or perhaps an affiliate marketing product review blog. You’ll have a niche and an idea and now all you need is a name. Every website online has what’s called a domain name. It’s included in the website address at the top of your search bar, for example, our domain name is www.digitalsupermarket.com.
You’ll need to register a domain name after you purchase a hosting plan, to enable customers to find your site quickly and easily. One good tip is to find a hosting platform like Bluehost or GoDaddy that will provide you with a free domain name when you register for one of their web hosting plans as domain registration can be fairly pricey. Pick a great domain name that is easy for customers to read and type into Google so they can find it easier online.
TOP TIP: To increase your blog’s search engine ranking, and to help more people find you on Google, try to pick a domain name that has either a .com or .co.uk ending. These domains often rank a lot higher in Google searches than .org’s, .net’s, and .info’s, and for that reason can be slightly more expensive, yet can help boost your site’s reach and credibility.

The Best Blogging Platforms For You.

There are a wealth of platforms out there catering to all your blogging or online portfolio needs. We have listed some of the main ones below shedding some light on what needs they service and why they might be a great option for you.

WordPress - The best software to give you full customisation.

WordPress is perhaps one of the most renowned blogging platforms in the world, running approximately 35% of the internet. It’s favoured highly by professional bloggers because it gives you total freedom to do whatever you want with your blog. WordPress can help you build your blog using one if its search engine optimised themes, you can customise using its drag and drop website builder tool to create a stunning blog.
What’s more, is you’ll be able to use its professional blogging service to post your content online and take advantage of the hundreds of third party app plugins, you can integrate into your blog, to improve automation, add new features, and drive traffic to your site. The only downside of WordPress is that it can be quite technical and can take some time getting used to, but once you’ve got the hang of things, you’ll have great control over everything on your webpage.
Pros:
Cons:

• Full customisation
• Domain name registration
• Fully scalable
• Tons of third-party plugins and apps
• Technical and can take some getting used to
• Not the best if you’re not tech-savvy or are just starting out.

Wix - Best for monetizing your site.

Wix is probably the most streamlined and easiest blog providers. It’s so simple and easy to use, it’s therefore great for anyone just starting out in the blogging world. You can customise one of its stunning templates with Wix’s drag and drop editor, and then upload blog posts to your site by slotting in pictures, gifs, social media buttons, sidebars, and other widgets that will help your blog stand out.
One of the coolest features about Wix is its marketplace integration, where you can install a whole variety of third-party applications to your blog to provide your users with greater features and usability. Wix is the perfect all-in-one blogging solution to help you easily build a platform to amplify your business to the world, helping you to make more money, but it can also save you a lot of money as it’s cost-efficient plans roll up, web hosting, blog posting, and domain registration all into one product!
Check out our Wix review and our comparison of Wix and Squarespace for a deep dive into Wix’s main blogging features. [Insert link here]
Pros:
Cons:

• Streamlined and easy to use blogging software
• Includes as a package, web building tools, domain registration, and web hosting
• Tons of third-party plugins and apps on the Wix marketplace
• Great platform to help make money and save money on its reasonably priced subscription plans
• Don’t get the same full control as you see with WordPress
• Locked into using Wix’s templates.

Squarespace - Best for creating visually stunning blogs.

Squarespace is very similar to Wix, in that it is an all-in-one web building and blogging platform that can help you build a blog you can monetize efficiently. It sets itself aside though through its better design and customisation features, making it one of the best platforms on the marketing if you’re looking to design a visually aesthetic blog. I’d recommend using this platform if you are a business operating in some sort of design, arts, or culinary industry.
Although it offers minimal template options, Squarespace’s templates are works of art and offer you great customization when building your blog. Plus Squarespace offers a great blogging tool that lets you schedule posts and customize your blog to suit more mobile audiences.
Pros:
Cons:

• Streamlined and easy to use blogging software
• Can build a visually stunning blog on Squarespace with its streamlined tools
• Excellent blogging features
• All-in-one web host, domain registrar, and web builder
• Can’t add third-party applications on Squarespace

LinkedIn - Best for blogging businesses.

Aside from setting up a blog on your own site, corporate entities can use LinkedIn to enhance and amplify their presence online. LinkedIn has more than 575 million users, most of whom are professionals and members of corporate conglomerates, and you can use this social platform to target some of the most influential people in the world.
If you’re blogging about business this is the perfect platform to use a pre-existing community of people to enhance your social standing. You’ll then be able to build connections and followers on your profile who can easily share your blog on their platform through a couple of simple clicks.
Pros:
Cons:

• Utilise LinkedIn’s pre-existing community of business people to amplify your brand
• Target corporate directors and influential people directly through LinkedIn
• Check out what people are looking at on LinkedIn and tailor your content to that market
• Again you are confined within what LinkedIn’s platform will let you do, it’s not your site and you don’t have full customisation

Instagram - Best for the Artists.

Instagram is one of the biggest blogging sites in the world and without realising it, we are all technically bloggers in some way with our Instagram accounts, right? Ultimately for professional use, it is great for building a portfolio that has some form of visual or graphic eye-catching media around it. Instagram lets you post videos, photos, boomerangs, even write a blog in the photo’s caption if you wanted to!
Best of all, Instagram is free, and you can use its business software to link up your online store, to drag users away from your profile, using its product tagging features, and land them in your online checkouts. Our top tip for using Instagram is to post regularly and keep on the theme of your blog. Don’t go off-piste as you’re followers will catch on quickly and unfollow you. And with 1 billion people using the platform each day, it is a great way to gain people’s attention and build your brand’s presence online.
Pros:
Cons:

• Best for the creatives.
• Totally free and easy to use interface.
• Access to a pre-existing community of people.
• Online selling capabilities.
• Again you are confined within what Instagram’s platform will let you do, it’s not your site and you don’t have full customisation

The Do’s And Don’ts Of Blogging

Here are a couple of top tips to bear in mind when building your blog to help you create an awesome, lead driven platform.

The Don’ts

Don’t use complicated language too soon.

With that in mind, do include language that your target audience will understand. But remember they are still here to learn, so don’t drop people in at the deep end right away by using complex jargon off the bat. Define terms and spell it out in layman’s terms for people at the outset, and as the post goes on, then introduce more complex writing. Introducing technical jargon at the start of your posts is an instant turn off for most readers.

Don’t waffle - Keep it succinct.

People want to get to the punchline now. 43% of people admit to skimming through blogs to get to the information they need, meaning to get your blogging site converting leads, you need to engage the reader early on and offer information succinctly throughout your post.
Plus don’t make your blog too long. Depending on what you’re writing, a lot of people will see large volumes of text and will switch off immediately. There is no set limit for what a good and bad amount of text is, that’s something you’ll have to figure out per your industry, but from my experience, the shorter, the better.

Don’t make headlines too long.

Also ensure that your headline is not more than 60 characters long. If it gets too long it won’t rank well in search engines and people just won’t want to read it. Check out this headline analysis tool which will analyse the effectiveness of your proposed headlines.

Don’t plagiarise or use credited images.

Copying other people’s work is lazy and can land you in a lot of hot water in extreme cases if you breach a copyright regulation. But it’s also just unfair on the person who has worked hard or been creative to write that work. The same goes for images, people need to make a living from the content and photos they’re taking so don’t steal that off them.

The Do’s

Do write killer headlines.

People are like goldfish. You only have about 3 seconds to get their attention. That’s why it is important to write catchy, funny, and enticing headlines to draw your reader in. One good way to do it is to use the “How To” and “10 Best” strategies. These sorts of titles telling people ‘How to set up a blog’ or ‘the ten best web hosting platforms’ are search engine optimised, lead winning titles that rank highly in Google searches. Try them out and see!

Do post regularly.

The key to creating a great blog that builds leads is posting regularly. Although it is not the best idea to post regularly. Ideally, you want to post 3-4 times a week to get the best influx of traffic to your site. You’ll also want to check out when’s best to post for your target audience, for example, if you’re in the FOREX market, you’ll want to post your blogs perhaps at 8 AM, before the markets open when city workers are on their staring at their phones on their morning commuter trains to the city.

Do share on social media.

Share your content far and wide on your social platforms. Everyone is on social media these days and its outreach is simply phenomenal. That’s why you should always share your posts to your social channels to get greater traffic on your website, and include share buttons all-around your blog to invite your readers to share your articles too!

Do use SEO keywords to drive more traffic.

In a nutshell, SEO keywords are the phrases people put into search engines when they are looking for information on a certain subject. They are how you get found on your website. Depending on what you are writing about, there is always a set of keywords relating to that topic that you can implement, to help you show up higher in people’s google searches. For example, people might regularly search in google, ‘what is the best compost for growing sunflowers?’ When you come to writing about growing sunflowers in your blog, you might want to use these words or incorporate this question into your blog somewhere, to help you rank higher on Google.

Do use call’s to action to take your readers to the next step.

If you don’t challenge your reader at the end of your blog to follow you on Instagram, or check out your sales pages, you’ll never get the leads or sales you are looking for. With that in mind, build compelling calls to action at the end of each of your posts, to pull readers into taking the next step. Check out our post on landing pages to see a couple of cool ways on how to implement calls to action on your site [insert link here].

Do identify a target audience.

People will often tell you to write as though you were in the shoes of the person you’re looking to bring to your website, but it’s true! Identify what type of people you’re writing to, for instance, if you’re writing a business blog about FOREX trading, you’ll write with potential traders in mind who have one eye on the stock market and the other on your blog. Or if you’re a wedding florist, you’ll set your portfolio up to target those people looking to get married in the next year.

Leads, Sales, Results.

Blogging is one of the most influential marketing strategies in the world and the best bloggers can reap some awesome rewards for producing some truly awesome content.
It is fairly straightforward to get started and we advise if you’re a small business, or someone with minimal blogging experience, to try out Wix or Squarespace first before you jump into using more technical platforms like WordPress. Once you’re up and running remember our top tips on what to do and what to avoid when writing your blog. Plus don’t forget to think about optimising and adding useful applications to your site to help you build and grow your content. Check out these 39 awesome blogging tools you can use to drive greater traffic to your site!
Found this article useful? Make sure you share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter and let us know in the comments if you have any other useful blogging tips.

Factset: How You can Invest in Hedge Funds’ Biggest Investment
Tl;dr FactSet is the most undervalued widespread SaaS/IT solution stock that exists
If any of you have relevant experience or are friends with people in Investment Banking/other high finance, you know that Factset is the lifeblood of their financial analysis toolkit if and when it’s not Bloomberg, which isn’t even publicly traded. Factset has been around since 1978 and it’s considered a staple like Bloomberg in many wealth management firms, and it offers some of the easiest to access and understandable financial data so many newer firms focused less on trading are switching to Factset because it has a lot of the same data Bloomberg offers for half the cost. When it comes to modern financial data, Factset outcompetes Reuters and arguably Bloomberg as well due to their API services which makes Factset much more preferable for quantitative divisions of banks/hedge funds as API integration with Python/R is the most important factor for vast data lakes of financial data, this suggests Factset will be much more prepared for programming making its way into traditional finance fields. According to Factset, their mission for data delivery is to: “Integrate the data you need with your applications, web portals, and statistical packages. Whether you need market, company, or alternative data, FactSet flexible data delivery services give you normalized data through APIs and a direct delivery of local copies of standard data feeds. Our unique symbology links and aggregates a variety of content sources to ensure consistency, transparency, and data integrity across your business. Build financial models and power customized applications with FactSet APIs in our developer portal”. Their technical focus for their data delivery system alone should make it stand out compared to Bloomberg, whose UI is far more outdated and complex on top of not being as technically developed as Factset’s. Factset is the key provider of buy-side portfolio analysis for IBs, Hedge funds, and Private Equity firms, and it’s making its way into non-quantitative hedge funds as well because quantitative portfolio management makes automation of risk management and the application of portfolio theory so much easier, and to top it off, Factset’s scenario analysis and simulation is unique in its class. Factset also is able to automate trades based on individual manager risk tolerance and ML optimization for Forex trading as well. Not only does Factset provide solutions for financial companies, they are branching out to all corporations now and providing quantitative analytics for them in the areas of “corporate development, M&A, strategy, treasury, financial planning and analysis, and investor relations workflows”. Factset will eventually in my opinion reach out to Insurance Risk Management a lot more in the future as that’s a huge industry which has yet to see much automation of risk management yet, and with the field wide open, Factset will be the first to take advantage without a shadow of a doubt. So let’s dig into the company’s financials now:
Their latest 8k filing reported the following:
Revenue increased 2.6%, or $9.6 million, to $374.1 million compared with $364.5 million for the same period in fiscal 2019. The increase is primarily due to higher sales of analytics, content and technology solutions (CTS) and wealth management solutions.
Annual Subscription Value (ASV) plus professional services was $1.52 billion at May 31, 2020, compared with $1.45 billion at May 31, 2019. The organic growth rate, which excludes the effects of acquisitions, dispositions, and foreign currency movements, was 5.0%. The primary contributors to this growth rate were higher sales in FactSet's wealth and research workflow solutions and a price increase in the Company's international region
Adjusted operating margin improved to 35.5% compared with 34.0% in the prior year period primarily as a result of reduced employee-related operating expenses due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Diluted earnings per share (EPS) increased 11.0% to $2.63 compared with $2.37 for the same period in fiscal 2019.
Adjusted diluted EPS rose 9.2% to $2.86 compared with $2.62 in the prior year period primarily driven by an improvement in operating results.
The Company’s effective tax rate for the third quarter decreased to 15.0% compared with 18.6% a year ago, primarily due to an income tax expense in the prior year related to finalizing the Company's tax returns with no similar event for the three months ended May 31, 2020.
FactSet increased its quarterly dividend by $0.05 per share or 7% to $0.77 marking the fifteenth consecutive year the Company has increased dividends, highlighting its continued commitment to returning value to shareholders.
As you can see, there’s not much of a negative sign in sight here.
It makes sense considering how FactSet’s FCF has never slowed down
FactSet’s annual subscriptions and professional services have made its way to foreign and developing markets, and many of them are opting for FactSet’s cheaper services to reduce costs and still get copious amounts of data and models to work with.
Here’s what FactSet had to say regarding its competitive position within the market of providing financial data in its last 10k: “Despite competing products and services, we enjoy high barriers to entry and believe it would be difficult for another vendor to quickly replicate the extensive databases we currently offer. Through our in-depth analytics and client service, we believe we can offer clients a more comprehensive solution with one of the broadest sets of functionalities, through a desktop or mobile user interface or through a standardized or bespoke data feed.” And FactSet is confident that their ML services cannot be replaced by anybody else in the industry either: “In addition, our applications, including our client support and service offerings, are entrenched in the workflow of many financial professionals given the downloading functions and portfolio analysis/screening capabilities offered. We are entrusted with significant amounts of our clients' own proprietary data, including portfolio holdings. As a result, our products have become central to our clients’ investment analysis and decision-making.” (https://last10k.com/sec-filings/fds#link_fullReport), if you read the full report and compare it to the most recent 8K, you’ll find that the real expenses this quarter were far lower than expected by the last 10k as there was a lower than expected tax rate and a 3% increase in expected operating margin from the expected figure as well. The company also reports a 90% customer retention rate over 15 years, so you know that they’re not lying when they say the clients need them for all sorts of financial data whether it’s for M&A or wealth management and Equity analysis:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/factset.asp
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FactSet also has remarkably good cash conversion considering it’s a subscription based company, a company structure which usually takes on too much leverage. Speaking of leverage, FDS had taken on a lot of leverage in 2015:
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So what’s that about? Why were FactSet’s long term debts at 0 and all of a sudden why’d the spike up? Well usually for a company that’s non-cyclical and has a well-established product (like FactSet) leverage can actually be good at amplifying returns, so FDS used this to their advantage and this was able to help the share’s price during 2015. Also, as you can see debt/ebitda is beginning a rapid decline anyway. This only adds to my theory that FactSet is trying to expand into new playing fields. FactSet obviously didn’t need the leverage to cover their normal costs, because they have always had consistently growing margins and revenue so the debt financing was only for the sake of financing growth. And this debt can be considered covered and paid off, considering the net income growth of 32% between 2018 and 2019 alone and the EPS growth of 33%
​
EBITDA has virtually been exponential for FactSet for a while because of the bang-for-buck for their well-known product, but now as FactSet ventures into algorithmic trading and corporate development the scope for growth is broadly expanded.
​
P/E has declined in the past 2 years, making it a great time to buy.
​
Increasing ROE despite lowering of leverage post 2016
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Mountains of cash have been piling up in the coffers increasing chances of increased dividends for shareholders (imo dividend is too low right now, but increasing it will tempt more investors into it), and on top of that in the last 10k a large buyback expansion program was implemented for $210m worth of shares, which shows how confident they are in the company itself.
​
SGA expense/Gross profit has been declining despite expansion of offices
I’m a bit concerned about the skin in the game leadership has in this company, since very few executives/board members have significant holdings in the company, but the CEO himself is a FactSet veteran, and knows his way around the company. On top of that, Bloomberg remains king for trading and the fixed income security market, and Reuters beats out FactSet here as well. If FactSet really wants to increase cash flow sources, the expansion into insurance and corp dev has to be successful.
Summary: FactSet has a lot of growth still left in its industry which is already fast-growing in and of itself, and it only has more potential at its current valuation. Earnings September 24th should be a massive beat due to investment banking demand and growth plus Hedge fund requirements for data and portfolio management hasn’t gone anywhere and has likely increased due to more market opportunities to buy-in.

Factset: How You can Invest in Hedge Funds’ Biggest Investment
Tl;dr FactSet is the most undervalued widespread SaaS/IT solution stock that exists
If any of you have relevant experience or are friends with people in Investment Banking/other high finance, you know that Factset is the lifeblood of their financial analysis toolkit if and when it’s not Bloomberg, which isn’t even publicly traded. Factset has been around since 1978 and it’s considered a staple like Bloomberg in many wealth management firms, and it offers some of the easiest to access and understandable financial data so many newer firms focused less on trading are switching to Factset because it has a lot of the same data Bloomberg offers for half the cost. When it comes to modern financial data, Factset outcompetes Reuters and arguably Bloomberg as well due to their API services which makes Factset much more preferable for quantitative divisions of banks/hedge funds as API integration with Python/R is the most important factor for vast data lakes of financial data, this suggests Factset will be much more prepared for programming making its way into traditional finance fields. According to Factset, their mission for data delivery is to: “Integrate the data you need with your applications, web portals, and statistical packages. Whether you need market, company, or alternative data, FactSet flexible data delivery services give you normalized data through APIs and a direct delivery of local copies of standard data feeds. Our unique symbology links and aggregates a variety of content sources to ensure consistency, transparency, and data integrity across your business. Build financial models and power customized applications with FactSet APIs in our developer portal”. Their technical focus for their data delivery system alone should make it stand out compared to Bloomberg, whose UI is far more outdated and complex on top of not being as technically developed as Factset’s. Factset is the key provider of buy-side portfolio analysis for IBs, Hedge funds, and Private Equity firms, and it’s making its way into non-quantitative hedge funds as well because quantitative portfolio management makes automation of risk management and the application of portfolio theory so much easier, and to top it off, Factset’s scenario analysis and simulation is unique in its class. Factset also is able to automate trades based on individual manager risk tolerance and ML optimization for Forex trading as well. Not only does Factset provide solutions for financial companies, they are branching out to all corporations now and providing quantitative analytics for them in the areas of “corporate development, M&A, strategy, treasury, financial planning and analysis, and investor relations workflows”. Factset will eventually in my opinion reach out to Insurance Risk Management a lot more in the future as that’s a huge industry which has yet to see much automation of risk management yet, and with the field wide open, Factset will be the first to take advantage without a shadow of a doubt. So let’s dig into the company’s financials now:
Their latest 8k filing reported the following:
Revenue increased 2.6%, or $9.6 million, to $374.1 million compared with $364.5 million for the same period in fiscal 2019. The increase is primarily due to higher sales of analytics, content and technology solutions (CTS) and wealth management solutions.
Annual Subscription Value (ASV) plus professional services was $1.52 billion at May 31, 2020, compared with $1.45 billion at May 31, 2019. The organic growth rate, which excludes the effects of acquisitions, dispositions, and foreign currency movements, was 5.0%. The primary contributors to this growth rate were higher sales in FactSet's wealth and research workflow solutions and a price increase in the Company's international region
Adjusted operating margin improved to 35.5% compared with 34.0% in the prior year period primarily as a result of reduced employee-related operating expenses due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Diluted earnings per share (EPS) increased 11.0% to $2.63 compared with $2.37 for the same period in fiscal 2019.
Adjusted diluted EPS rose 9.2% to $2.86 compared with $2.62 in the prior year period primarily driven by an improvement in operating results.
The Company’s effective tax rate for the third quarter decreased to 15.0% compared with 18.6% a year ago, primarily due to an income tax expense in the prior year related to finalizing the Company's tax returns with no similar event for the three months ended May 31, 2020.
FactSet increased its quarterly dividend by $0.05 per share or 7% to $0.77 marking the fifteenth consecutive year the Company has increased dividends, highlighting its continued commitment to returning value to shareholders.
As you can see, there’s not much of a negative sign in sight here.
It makes sense considering how FactSet’s FCF has never slowed down
​
FactSet’s annual subscriptions and professional services have made its way to foreign and developing markets, and many of them are opting for FactSet’s cheaper services to reduce costs and still get copious amounts of data and models to work with.
Here’s what FactSet had to say regarding its competitive position within the market of providing financial data in its last 10k: “Despite competing products and services, we enjoy high barriers to entry and believe it would be difficult for another vendor to quickly replicate the extensive databases we currently offer. Through our in-depth analytics and client service, we believe we can offer clients a more comprehensive solution with one of the broadest sets of functionalities, through a desktop or mobile user interface or through a standardized or bespoke data feed.” And FactSet is confident that their ML services cannot be replaced by anybody else in the industry either: “In addition, our applications, including our client support and service offerings, are entrenched in the workflow of many financial professionals given the downloading functions and portfolio analysis/screening capabilities offered. We are entrusted with significant amounts of our clients' own proprietary data, including portfolio holdings. As a result, our products have become central to our clients’ investment analysis and decision-making.” (https://last10k.com/sec-filings/fds#link_fullReport), if you read the full report and compare it to the most recent 8K, you’ll find that the real expenses this quarter were far lower than expected by the last 10k as there was a lower than expected tax rate and a 3% increase in expected operating margin from the expected figure as well. The company also reports a 90% customer retention rate over 15 years, so you know that they’re not lying when they say the clients need them for all sorts of financial data whether it’s for M&A or wealth management and Equity analysis:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/factset.asp
FactSet also has remarkably good cash conversion considering it’s a subscription based company, a company structure which usually takes on too much leverage. Speaking of leverage, FDS had taken on a lot of leverage in 2015:
So what’s that about? Why were FactSet’s long term debts at 0 and all of a sudden why’d the spike up? Well usually for a company that’s non-cyclical and has a well-established product (like FactSet) leverage can actually be good at amplifying returns, so FDS used this to their advantage and this was able to help the share’s price during 2015. Also, as you can see debt/ebitda is beginning a rapid decline anyway. This only adds to my theory that FactSet is trying to expand into new playing fields. FactSet obviously didn’t need the leverage to cover their normal costs, because they have always had consistently growing margins and revenue so the debt financing was only for the sake of financing growth. And this debt can be considered covered and paid off, considering the net income growth of 32% between 2018 and 2019 alone and the EPS growth of 33%
EBITDA has virtually been exponential for FactSet for a while because of the bang-for-buck for their well-known product, but now as FactSet ventures into algorithmic trading and corporate development the scope for growth is broadly expanded.
P/E has declined in the past 2 years, making it a great time to buy.
Increasing ROE despite lowering of leverage post 2016
Mountains of cash have been piling up in the coffers increasing chances of increased dividends for shareholders (imo dividend is too low right now, but increasing it will tempt more investors into it), and on top of that in the last 10k a large buyback expansion program was implemented for $210m worth of shares, which shows how confident they are in the company itself.
SGA expense/Gross profit has been declining despite expansion of offices
I’m a bit concerned about the skin in the game leadership has in this company, since very few executives/board members have significant holdings in the company, but the CEO himself is a FactSet veteran, and knows his way around the company. On top of that, Bloomberg remains king for trading and the fixed income security market, and Reuters beats out FactSet here as well. If FactSet really wants to increase cash flow sources, the expansion into insurance and corp dev has to be successful.
Summary: FactSet has a lot of growth still left in its industry which is already fast-growing in and of itself, and it only has more potential at its current valuation. Earnings September 24th should be a massive beat due to investment banking demand and growth plus Hedge fund requirements for data and portfolio management hasn’t gone anywhere and has likely increased due to more market opportunities to buy-in.
Calls have shitty greeks, but if you're ballsy October 450s LOL, I'm holding shares
I’d say it’s a great long term investment, and it should at least be on your watchlist.

I would just like to share my experience with veganism and diet in general.. Before December 2018, I was in a very unconscious state of being. In 2016 my parents divorced after 20 years, I was sexually assaulted 2 different times when I was 16 and one of those times was in a horrific accident in the same night. Long story short, I had plenty of healing to do on my plate. Leading up to December 2018 I had done acid many times and never had any crazy breakthroughs OTHER than the fact I truly saw the universal energy all around and wasn’t able to depict what it even was till years later. It was fun, opened my mind a bit and taught me some little lessons regardless. Summer 2018 right when I graduated high school I ate mushrooms for my first time by my self because I was desperate, suicidal, self destructive as fuck... Deep down I knew there was nothing left to lose. This first mushroom trip I remembered the ecstasy of what it is to be alive, I cried tears of gratitude and joy for even existing for hours. Internally I began forgiving myself and others for all of the pain... It was life altering to say the least in the best way possible. This experience was in July 2018ish, I still had so much unraveling of all my traumas to do that I wasn’t fully aware of yet... From July 2018- Dec 2018 I still lived out my self destructive ways of being; drinking till I was blacked out, not eating the best, sleeping around with whomever would give me the slightest bit of acknowledgment. Mind you, I had everything I could’ve needed materialistically my entire life.. Both my parents were still alive, I just graduated, I had food water and shelter and clothes and many other nice things that would appear on the outside like I was set and had all I needed. I ate pretty balanced my entire life, my mom cooked great and I’ve always been what I would consider healthy and vibrant even when I ate an omnivorous diet all of my life. I’ve always struggled with dairy my entire life and that was it really so it was exempt from my overall intake anyways. Come December 2018 I was in what felt like the densest, darkest hole in my entire existence. I was extremely suicidal, I thought about it every day and how I was going to be successful with it.. I was truly living out some of the most self destructive behaviors I could ever imagine now. A few weeks into Dec 2018 I started hanging out with someone I went to school with and briefly knew. His name was Dan. Dan and I ate acid one of the first nights him and I hung out and he informed me about all of the things about the Matrix and how it was created to keep us trapped and how all of the things that exist within it; tv, food, media, work did it. I already had a little background on 9/11 and flat earth and stuff so I already had a basis on which I was skeptical on quite a few things already but nothing like what was presented to me by Dan. This same night I found myself being attracted to Dan and what he was sharing with me despite me truly understanding any of it at the time. He looked at me with disgust and informed me that he could see in my energy I had a lot of things to go “deal with”... I did not understand what this meant for some time. I was very attracted to Dan from the jump meanwhile he repelled me and did not show any interest. This same night Dan advised me to stop eating any and all animal products, get rid of TV, social media, start trading Forex and learn how to work for myself... This night I stopped consuming any and all animal products, gave up alcohol that I had so heavily relied on- cold turkey, got rid of my TV, bought a desk and started investing in my self and books... Weeks go by from this night and I spent every day from this night pondering all the information I’d been given from Dan. I was doing a lot of research on the matrix and a lot of things started making sense. On December 31st 2018 I decided to eat mushrooms alone, again. I was still feeling very suicidal. Once again, feeling like there was absolutely nothing to lose. This experience was truly one of the most ineffable out of the ones I’ve had. It started great feeling good and it took a very unexpected turn... The walls started melting, I was soaked in sweat, I was crying so hard, my ego was in the midst of a death that saved my life... During the crying, sweating and walls melting a voice said to me “are you sure you’re ready to leave? have you really done all that you feel like you came here to do? because you can but the choice is yours” and from there I exclaimed out loud “No I am not ready to die. I have so much to do still” My soul seriously felt like it was going to leave my body right then and there if I said yes I was ready..... And from here..... My life completely changed. Dan and I started hanging out everyday. He tried teaching my how to trade forex and everything he could about breaking out of the Matrix. Our entire lives revolves around this for awhile.... I was vegan for 6+ months. I felt great for a while, I felt light and clear. I was breaking out so bad frequently which I felt like was either from kissing Dan who had acne which spread to me, or all of the vegan alternatives that were wrecking havoc on my system, the constant state of stress I was in.. It was probably a mix of things. I apprentice plumber and live in New England so by the time winter came around I was starting to feel fatigue and brain fog.. So I started eating meat again and felt back to my balanced, healthy self. During all the time I was vegan I became intolerant of almost all food it felt like... Couldn’t do any gluten or sugar and any time I did resulted in bloat and discomfort for hours on end... Because of Veganism I tried soooooooo many different variations of diets. I juice fasted for weeks, ate nothing but raw fruits and veggies for a while... Fasted a lot I’m general. I was farming for a while so while I was I felt amazing even without meat... And then like I said winter came and my body started taking a turn for the worst it seemed.. My bile was basically water every single time. It seemed like I had a reaction to every single thing I ate until I started eating meat again... And not every day either- it was a very intuitive thing and I ate it when I felt like I needed it. I do not support animal cruelty whatsoever which is why veganism was so appealing to me. I never ate meat because I wanted to hurt animals in the first place. I ate what I was raised by my entire life.. and looking back the way I ate never seemed to be the cause of issues in my life.. It always genuinely came down to lack of emotional support from my caregivers and those around me even myself, traumas that had happened to me.. etc etc. During my 6+ months of no animal products- I binged regularly, I had incessant cravings all day every day for any and everything it seemed like... I was extremely emotionally unstable... Meanwhile on the outside it was ALL “LOVE & LIGHT :D”.... Inside I was suffering so deeply and just didn’t feel balanced. I was supplementing with Cymbiotika and a bunch of other vegan replacements. The more I heal my wounds and become more of what feels like my true self the more I feel like I am able to listen to what my body and Self truly needs to feel healthy and that comes down to my body truly thriving better when I implement strictly local and grass fed beef.. I ritualize this process as much as I am able to. I still think about all of the vegan ideologies and animal suffering which is why I try to be as mindful as possible about all of my consumption. One part of me says “eating meat will interfere with spiritual channel within”, there is no justifying killing any and all animals, live for the animals meanwhile restricting Self of that which it knows it wants and needs to have healthy life... The other part says “what about the plants? Why aren’t they acknowledged for their sentient intelligence?”, why is all the focus just on animals and how they feel? Why don’t vegans or plant based individuals consider the suffering that may be caused by a plant being disconnected from its network (family) + roots? Why isn’t ripping a plant out of the ground to be consumed considered to be just as cruel as raising animals to be consumed? I don’t have all the answers... But vegan, plant based, carnivorous, omnivorous all share one thing in common which is considering the energy and place of that which you may be getting any of these things come from.. Plants and animals come from the Earth, therefore they are natural.. Especially when grown and raised with awareness and given their best lives possible... If we are all one and all interconnected why are plants and animals given such a distinct separation that one is more valuable than the other? Or one feels more than the other? There is no justifying animal cruelty but that also just goes back to the energy and place of that which you are getting your products to consume from... Getting ANY thing whether it’s plant based or not from any where that you don’t know where it comes from seems to be the real issue.. Being disconnected from our source... You can buy all the plant based sources from the grocer you want, but if it’s not local or grown to the best of abilities, given proper tlc, coming from any place that you don’t know- it’s exactly the equivalent of buying meat off the shelf at any grocer having the same disconnect from both sources... Life and death are inevitable. We are mortal beings here on Earth and for some reason I feel there is a lot of premonition that if you are Vegan you are more spiritual, will be healthier, live longer.. Why do I feel more balanced and grounded when I consume meat then? Why do I have more concentration when I consume meat? Why does my body seem to thrive when I consume meat? The answer comes down to individuality at the end of the day... & the quality of that which you use as a source of consumption for ANYthing.... not just meat. When you eat a plant, you interrupted it’s life for your survival. When you eat an animal, you also interrupted its life for your survival. For what? So we can live... & continue the eternal cycles of life and death... When we die, Mother Earth eats at our decay for food for herself... & it appears to be a never ending cycle... I’m doing what appears to be working for me. But I can’t seem to rid myself of the very low level of guilt I’ve programmed into myself from the times I’ve not consumed any animal products.. Just seeking some perspectives If anyone has any to share. I don’t think I am right and anyone else is wrong.. I just feel like there’s so much information along the lines of these things that it can cause confusion if one doesn’t know themselves or their bodies... So any discussion to distinguish some clarity amongst all of it is very much welcomed... I send you so much love, I truly do. I hope we are all eventually able to radically accept and integrate what it means to be healthy and human and do whatever it takes to be humane about doing that in whatever fashion best suits each individual...