While everyone is still quarantined, it’s a good time to go ahead and look into the future. This is not an exciting time as many readers will likely know a victim of the corona virus and will be personally impacted by it. That aside, we have to remain forward looking as it relates to this website as it’s not the best time to sit around hoping that someone else will “come to the rescue”. As usual, no one is going to come to the rescue and your future is entirely in your hands. There will be a lot of new opportunities: software, physical security, real estate on fire sales and niche products will continue to thrive. Online sales will be more important as millions (yes millions) of Americans learn how to operate and order things online. While this website targets young people, there is a large number of americans who really do not bother with learning new technology (this virus has changed that).
New Demographic Opportuntiy: We’re currently gathering information on recent online sales trends and you’ll find that there is a new group of people to sell to. Who? Primarily people in the age 50-70 band. People in their 40s are generally online aware but the late 40s all the way up to 70s is opening up. While it will sound crazy to a millennial, many of these people did not need to use Amazon, Netflix and other internet based solutions for delivery of goods/services/entertainment. While many will return to their old ways, a lot will stick as they realize it can save them time and even energy if they don’t need to leave the house for the delivery of essential items.
Broadly, what you’re seeing is young people move back home (temporarily and perhaps permanently due to unemployment) and they help the older generation ramp up the use of new technology. In addition, the older generation is being forced to learn how to utilize VMware, VPNs, Citrix etc. Otherwise… they cannot “work from home”. Everyone is getting a crash course on connectivity technology and Zoom is the current poster child for this movement. Video conferencing, conference calls and eventually virtual reality will become more valuable as a result.
What does this mean for you? It means there are a lot of opportunities here. You could offer crash courses on how to use new technology, in fact there are not any good education resources where someone can go sign up and say “i now know how to use 10-20 different items effectively”. Most of them tailor to one specific niche such as a type of coding or even excel classes. It also means that these individuals are going to realize how much more effective high-tech is. Everything has shifted ahead. Instead of being forced to wait another decade for people in the 50 year old band to understand high-tech, everyone in this band is forced to understand it. Think through the ramifications here and there will also be product niches that target this niche group (previously ignored as their addressable market was small).
Big Move in Real Estate: Stock markets don’t reflect the economy at all. If the market recovers with unemployment at 20% or so, this is not a good thing for anyone except the ultra rich (and people who grew up upper middle class and never had to worry about normal living). It takes 120 days for a home to go into foreclosure so you won’t see much for at least three months or so. The payment will be “deferred” in many cases, but it just results in a larger balloon payment (fancy word for being forced to pay all of it in a single payment later on). These payments will be missed as well since it’s unlikely that employment snaps back for large sections of the economy. If you believe that the current situation will be a “blip” with a sudden return to normal… We don’t know what to say except we’re happy to bet against you. Businesses cannot simply bring everyone back immediately as there is a lot of cash flow risk associated with that (you’d have to assume demand is exactly as it was prior to the virus).
Where will the opportunities show up? As usual, it depends. In real estate, the market is determined by a lot of factors. Nevada and Texas are hurting even more than other states since the casinos are shut down on the strip and low oil prices make large companies in Texas unprofitable. While it is true that people will go back to major events in Vegas… Oil likely gets resolved at some point… the result is still the same. Unemployment goes up. The economies do not suddenly go back to normal as citizens need to see how their finances look before booking that next fun trip to Vegas.
Funny enough, this sets up almost perfectly with our recent book “Spending for Maximum Return”. In there you’ll see a recommendation for your average reader in terms of what to do. The only problem is that you need to be sure. What this means is that the market you enter needs to be a 10-year commitment. If you’re going to buy something and not use it or ditch it in a few years, it’s tough to wait for the recovery. It will likely take 6-12 months for an official bottom in real estate (since defaults have not started) and by then anyone taking RE seriously will have a decision on if they are buying in XYZ location.
Dead Horse Crypto: From January 1 of 2017 to present, the average price of Bitcoin has been in the $6,000-$7,000 band. Even if you want to look at different exchanges and want to adjust for leveraged blow ups (sudden pumps and dumps)… the point remains the same. You have 1,800 coins sold every day for 365 days out of the year. This is approximately $350M a month. After the halving occurs around May 13 or so, the amount of coins sold every month will drop to $175M (notice we didn’t even bother getting the exact average since it defeats the primary message).
First… it does *not* mean the price will immediately go up on the halving. This is because some speculators may pump up the price into the event and it may mean some people are looking to sell right after the halving event. Any “day to day” trading answer is never going to work (never has and never will for retail investors – yes we’re sure there are a few guys who made it but 99.999% of the population will fail and go broke). This is called “technical analysis” and there are hundreds of hilarious videos of TA traders simply changing the lines on the chart when they are wrong and say ridiculous things like “new support or new resistance is here”.
What does it mean? Conceptually, it means you believe that the amount of demand for Bitcoin will remain as high as it has been over the last three years. If that statement is true the price would need to double to $12,000-$14,000 on average. So it’s a pretty good risk reward in our opinion (not to be deemed as legal investment advice). If you don’t think that it will have the same amount of demand then the amount of demand has to decrease. This can be caused by 1) long-term holders selling or 2) sudden consistent drop in regular demand.
We’ve already covered this for a couple of years, and fortunately it has been right. If you’ve followed the advice here you’re actually up from January 1, 2019 to present while everyone else is getting slammed (down 20% or more in many cases). For fun we were even correct in having a fair market value at around 2,190 which surprisingly represented the market bottom and are back to saying its a bit over bought (unless inflation kicks in like Venezuela).
Long Live Copy Writing: Since the above sounded a bit too arrogant, we can recommend an extremely easy way to make money. Learn copywriting right now. You’re in quarantine. You might even be unemployed (which is not a fun feeling). The only thing you can do that will certainly be needed? Learn sales. When we go back to normal we’ll find out who the good sales people are. If you were simply getting the sale since the economy is good, you’ll find out quickly. If you were getting the sale because you were amazing, you’re going to have job offers like there is no tomorrow.
Hopefully, we can all agree that *some* demand will permanently move online. If we can agree on that one piece while other parts go back to normal, it means that demand for copywriting will go up by definition. As ad spend takes a breather, we get to see which ads were run by geniuses and which ones were really just a by product of a burning hot economy.
To end on a little bit of tough love, we already recommended many sales books in Efficiency. If someone doesn’t want to read it (that is also fine), they can go ahead and google the best copy writing books on google and get to reading (10 books is not difficult in 10 days if you’re out of work). The reality is that someone who is unwilling to google and find good resources won’t be a good copywriter anyway. Copywriting requires meticulous tracking of ads and learning what works (what doesn’t) and keeping up with new trends like any other living breathing industry. The good news? Practically every book on copywriting will teach you something. It just isn’t possible to make money in sales and not have anything useful to say. Otherwise you wouldn’t have been making sales!
Tech Tech Tech: Interest rates are at zero percent. Not a typo it really happened. We’re printing money like crazy. The world is simply going mad. What does this mean? It means that standard financial services will be under pressure. Layoffs will eventually happen especially as many banks realize a lot of their employees were just dead weight. The politics will hopefully die down a bit as performance becomes more important in a more virtual environment. That said? Of the big three career options: Finance, Tech and Enterprise sales. Tech wins by a long shot and enterprise sales is now significantly better than finance. While M&A will still be around and is still the best segment within high finance, we can’t recommend anyone choose that direction with a clear conscience. Tech and enterprise sales are now the better routes as they offer more stability, a closer skill fit to online sales and have a much healthier long-term outlook.
Restaurants: This is an area that is extremely interesting. Many restaurants will go bankrupt. This will leave a lot of open space for you to either start one yourself or reinvent the restaurant concept. It’s one we’re mulling on now (as a hobby) and one we will monitor. It’s unclear if the entire experience will change or not. In fact it is something hotly debated on twitter as well. Will people simply go back to hook up culture and cram into small places like nothing happened or will change take place?
The good news? You don’t even need to know the answer. Since a lot of businesses will go under, you can wait and decide if you want to enter the market sometime in 2021. Behaviors will reveal themselves and you can start up the popular trend in your area. Our guess is that the changes will depend on the city. For now we doubt that things go back to normal for quite some time as Americas will slowly know someone who died from the disease. Until it hits home, most won’t change their patterns. By the end of this thing it will have hit home for a large number of people.
In Summary: To put it together, some of the key items are: 1) monitor demographic changes now, for those that contacted us privately this is exactly why the back end and tracking needed to be optimized! There are new customers coming online every single second, 2) think about solutions you can sell immediately after the pandemic is done – particularly if it is software/educational in nature, 3) find new ways to sell to the growing niche markets, 4) take a look at real estate in exactly 120 days, this is where a lot of the blood will show up, 5) same old necessary education on crypto for the younger generation – no need to go nuts as we’ve mentioned even $20-40K is enough for a millionaire unless well versed/educated, 6) learn sales learn sales learn sales… 7) Tech and enterprise sales now clearly way ahead of financial services and 8) track the brick and mortars, we’re primarily looking at restaurants and bars to see if they change much from the past.
