ilike

The same could be said for stock market regulation trying to protect outsiders from insiders. Do you think that is stupid as well?

Thanks both Gio and frommi for your input. @giofranschi Your post makes me realise I am probably not the right person to for building a consulting firm. I have absolutely no interest in living the "country club life" and even if that might take a different form in my line of work it is nothing I like too much. If I go into this it is by myself with the intention of profiting as much as possible while this opportunity lasts. On the other hand I am a bit surprised by that you say the price competition is so high. I guess that it is largely dependant on the field and scale of your business. I can see that when you are selling bigger projects with many consultants involved in a formal procurement situation this is extremely important. @frommi I am a bit confused on your plan. I think it would be pretty unlikely I could get my current employer as a first customer given that would make anyone currently working in my position to want the same deal. I think it would not be impossible as a second or third gig but i think some time must pass first. I am also a bit unsure what you mean by building a product? You mean a case study? I agree though that opportunities should not be wasted. What I meant with the 6 month a year was that even if I could only have 50% utilisation I would be not worse off then before and I can always take a job again.

Mostly about the lifestyle. Sweden, where I live, have a really progressive tax system on earned income making it not that interesting to increase your salary over the amount where I am. Being a permanent employee working less than full time is usually a hard sell so if I could contract for double my salary being booked half of the year I would be about in the same situations. This time I could use to improve my investing (surprisingly a very low taxed kind of income), starting a business or do something else. That said if the market is good building a "real" business of it could be interesting but I realise that is totally another game. Execution at the moment but I think I could improve in the sales side if I could learn from someone. Great tips! I get regularly contacted by recruiters looking to fill permanent positions. How do you suggest to play this. Ask them straight away if they would be interesting in presenting me as a contractor to their clients for a cut? I think these people are generally quite low level and working for an external recruiting company. The more sneaky way would be to try to figure out who they represent and then contact them directly.

I know there are some successful consultants on this board such as Gio so I thought I could ask for some advice. Currently I am working as a pretty technical business intelligence analyst at a mobile app company. In this work I get exposure to trendy fields such as "big data"-analytics as well as knowledge in building products on the fremium business model. Lately I have been thinking about striking out on my own since i realised contractors get paid twice of what I do and in many ways actually seems to have an easier life. Some questions. - Is there any book on starting out you can highly recommend? - Any ideas on getting clients and how to sell myself with little consulting/contracting experience? Most say start with your network and I intend to do that but since a large part of my network is at my current company that might be hard to land as a first gig. Other ideas? - In general there are multiple angles I could take when selling myself but I am unsure what direction to go. I guess this to a large extend depend on the market. But in general I feel I either have to either sell myself as a technical person that will get you the information you need about your product from your systems or more as a business person who will interpret that information for you and tell you how to improve your product. In reality this probably could be the same person but I have noticed a skepticism here from most managers on taking advice from a tech person. Any thoughts about this? - Some other things I should know of? Thanks in advance.

But will supply ever become tight? I consume way less paper, magazines and books both at home and at my job than even one year ago. Still consume a lot of packaging though.

I played poker semi professionally while at University and most of my investment stake is from that period. As Alwaysinvert wrote I think the analogy is somewhat overused but a few concepts I like to think are similar are, - Second and third level thinking, and when it its useful In poker against very weak players you only play your cards, with weak players second level thinking is important, with good players third level thinking is important and with really good players it is all game theory. Investing it somewhat similar. For markets with little competition valuation is everything, with strong competition second level thinking gets more important and with really strong competition it is probably not much that can be done to get an edge other than to accept that you can't get an edge. - Using you opponents psychological pain as an opportunity Especially in tournament poker situations arise when weaker players get scared and do not want to take risks after putting in a long time at the tables. A good player takes advantage of this bluffing into situations and forcing players to commit or fold. Similar things happens in cash games were situations were a player might look like an idiot for calling are nice bluffing opportunities. The investing version of this is buying things that are to painful to hold or that institutions will look like idiots for having. - and the most important one, shun competition It is much more profitable to be an average player playing bad players that to be a good player playing average ones. This is similar to what Buffet says about when a good management team meets a bad business the reputation of the business stays intact.

Exactly, the discount comparing NAV to the price the closed end fund is trading at.

This is a hypothetical example but I am trying to get an idea on how to value this kind of situation. We have a closed end fund trading at a discount to NAV. The company has all of its assets into a liquid open ended fund holding a major stock index like S&P500. Total fund management fees and cost of running the closed end fund is 2.5% per year. The closed end fund is controlled by the management company so there is no possibility of an activist situation. However it looks kind of bad for the management company to have a big discount so they have committed to rebuying 5% of outstanding stock at NAV if the rebate is >25% at the end of every year. What rebate would you require to invest in this situation? What rebate would make it a neutral proposition?