Quick Tips to Stay Cool, Calm and Collected While Stock Trading

Quick Tips to Stay Cool, Calm and Collected While Stock Trading

Love it or hate it… the stock market is continually making (and losing) money for people on a daily basis. It’s not just about jumping in and out of stocks, or investing in a 401K for 20 or 30 years… it’s about coming up with an investment plan and strategy that works for you.

With all of that being said, stock market traders can lead one of the most highly charged and stressful careers imaginable. Full of non-stop action and major ups and downs, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed and become agitated by factors that are out of your control when riding the stock market wave.

Sound familiar? Are you new to trading?

Take a moment to read through our latest reference guide on how to stay cool, calm and collected, even when Pompei is burning around you. The stock market is a crazy place, so be sure to prepare yourself before you enter.

Over-preparation

There is a psychological phenomenon where some believe that over studying a subject can lead to a blank when it comes to putting the theory into practice.

For example, aspiring traders run around from book to classroom to teacher to try and find the best trading strategies but overthinking and second guessing takes over when the time comes to actually put in a buy or sell order with real money. In this situation, a trader has learned the theory over and over but that doesn’t do anything to prevent the body and mind from freezing over.

So, remember that while you do need to put hours into learning about the stock market and different strategies, don’t forget to dedicate some time to using a trading simulator where you can put what you learn into practice. This strategy is referred to as paper trading and the best part is you don’t have to risk a cent of your own money so it’s a win-win. 

Emotional Intelligence

Knowing how to react in a simulator can be a bit different to a real-life market as there are different scenarios to take into account. Making sure to give yourself allowance for emotional control is a good way of being able to keep yourself in check.

The first step to this is making sure you know what makes up an emotion: stimulation, feeling, motivation, belief and temperament. Once you have understood the concepts of what they mean, you can better understand how you can make your emotional state work for you as opposed to against you. 

Timing Your Trades

Market timing is used to maximize profits and balance the associated risks with high gains. It’s essential that you educate yourself on the importance of market timing and what that can mean for your own trading strategies.

What times of day see the greatest volume of action?

When does volatility spike and is there a way you can leverage that knowledge to set buy and sell orders? Is there a small window where you won’t be able to be online and ready for action? These are all questions you need to consider when it comes to timing your trades. 

Be Realistic

You are not going to win every single trade so be real with yourself. A successful trader will be right about 60% of the time (and sometimes less) so rather than dwelling on your defeats, you should focus on your wins.

Keeping this in mind or repeating it as a mantra is a good way of stopping yourself from over-stressing and being your own worst critic.

How to Keep It Together When Your Trading is in Chaos

At the end of the day, no one know what the stock market is going to do tomorrow. Some people might think they do, but it’s really all a toss up.

The important thing to remember is that you need to have a strategy in place. Know your limits, what your goals are, and when to enter and exit a trade.

With more attention on the stock market, cryptocurrency and investing than ever before, now is a great time to get started — but make sure you prepare yourself… as it might just end up being a wild ride!

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out my other stock market related articles by using the search box on the right side of the page. And of course… this is all just useful information and resources for you to read through. In no way am I a financial advisor, or recommending any trading advice.

A Quick Guide to the Best Zoom Alternatives

A Quick Guide to the Best Zoom Alternatives

Hi, I’m Tony! I’m the Community Program Manager at Team SPI. Since 2015, I’ve been hosting online video gatherings ranging from weekly mastermind groups to multi-hundred-person conferences over Zoom and other platforms. I’m always looking for the best possible tools to help people connect in meaningful ways.

When the pandemic hit, it seems that just about everything in life suddenly ended up on Zoom—and about five minutes later, we were already burned out on all of it. 

I’ve had the benefit of using Zoom for my work for several years before all this happened, so I was pretty comfortable with its strengths and weaknesses. 

There’s a good reason it became the pandemic go-to—it combines a powerful set of features with solid reliability and a (usually) clean user experience. 

But you’re not reading this because you’re totally satisfied with your Zoom experience. There has to be something better out there, right? 

The answer to that, of course, depends on you and what you’re looking to do. 

Here’s what to expect in this post!

And the Zoom alternatives, organized by category:

  1. I need something web-based.
  2. I just need to talk to my team and clients.
  3. I need something that supports my corporate needs.
  4. I need to produce events.
  5. I want to create a virtual space for my people to hang out in.
  6. I don’t actually need video.

Why You Might Want to Use Zoom (or Not)

While I’m a big fan of Zoom, I’ve also been searching hard for the best alternatives depending on the different needs of the various meetings and events I host online. 

Benefits of Zoom

Some of Zoom’s key strengths:

  • It’s established. So many people have learned how to use Zoom already, so you can build on that convenience. 
  • It’s (pretty) affordable. For ~$15 per month, you get an incredibly powerful platform with a lot of tools. 
  • It works well. Part of what fed Zoom’s success was its ability to do exactly what it sets out to do, as well as or better than just about everyone else. They thought through the user experience and removed barriers left and right, making quality video meetings dead easy to host. They’re tops for a reason! 
  • It’s got powerful features. When you get comfortable with Zoom’s capabilities, you can do some pretty sophisticated things. Breakout rooms, advanced screen sharing capabilities, polls, live streaming, and more allow you to go as far as hosting whole conferences.

Disadvantages of Zoom

Some reasons why you might not want to use Zoom:

  • Cost. The free level only lets you host meetings for 40 minutes at a time. 
  • Software requirements. Hosts requires software to be installed. 
  • No perpetual room. Each meeting has a start and end time. 
  • No P2P network. People join or leave meetings, but there’s no way to connect outside that. 
  • Wonky breakout rooms. While Zoom has powerful breakout room features, it’s easy for things to go haywire if you’re not careful.
  • Lack of event production features. Zoom is functional, but it doesn’t give you tools to produce a slick, professional looking event. 

With this in mind, I wanted to offer you an overview of some of the best platforms I’ve found, based on how your needs contrast with what Zoom has to offer. 

Note: This landscape is changing constantly. New platforms are coming out every single day, and existing ones are launching new features continuously. Consider this a snapshot of my subjective opinion!

1. I need something web-based.

No installation needed—just pop open a browser window and go!

Google Meet

Google’s approach to video meetings used to drive me crazy. For years, they struggled to nail down a consistent strategy, changing brands and rearranging their interfaces to the point where it was just all too confusing. 

Not long after the pandemic hit, however, they finally found a sweet spot—offering just enough functionality and a clean, sensible interface that put the tools I needed in just the right spots.

Forcing integration into Google Calendar, annoying as it may be to a non-Meet user, does make it that much more convenient to book a meeting with a handy link without having to leave the calendar app. 

My biggest caveat with Google Meet has been in its CPU usage. While in recent weeks I haven’t noticed as much of an issue, I have had months-long stretches when using Google Meet meant spiking my not-that-old computer’s CPU and slowing everything else to a crawl. 

If you decide to try it, keep an eye on how it operates on your machine!

Join.me

One of the early entrants into browser-based meeting, join.me differentiated themselves by their emphasis on being lightweight and easy. If you’re looking for something simple, especially for one-off meetings, join.me is here for you!

2. I just need to talk to my team and clients.

If you largely have a consistent team of trusted people you want to communicate with (and enable communications between), team-oriented platforms have been aggressively upgrading their video capabilities. 

Slack

If you’re already in a shared Slack channel with the people you talk to over video, you could cut Zoom out of the loop altogether and do your calls straight through Slack. The interface is relatively lightweight compared to Zoom’s features, but the convenience can’t be beat. 

Discord

Originally a hit with the gaming community, Discord pushed the envelope with chat-oriented team channel spaces to the point where businesses have started to take notice. While chat is the default mode of engagement, adding voice and video are easy, with customizations galore. 

Skype

Remember Skype? They’ve been in the game longer than anyone. While they’ve dealt with more than a fair share of Microsoft-imposed bloat, Skype haas remained a consistent, hardened option for people who need to communicate—especially when you might be mixing international calling with your team chats. 

3. I need something that supports my corporate needs.

Are you looking for something that supports the wider needs of a larger organization? Zoom’s been building out its enterprise offerings, but others live and breathe it. 

Microsoft Teams

Opinions may vary widely about the experience of Teams, but it’s clear Microsoft has invested heavily in becoming one of the heaviest hitters in enterprise communications. Teams offers many of the features other platforms have, but plays particularly nicely with Microsoft-oriented businesses. 

Webex, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, Adobe Connect

There are a wide array of corporate-oriented platforms. If you’re looking to make a decision that affects the wider business needs of your organization, I won’t try to tell you which way to go—research the platforms that are out there, define your feature needs, do the demos, and the best answer will emerge.

4. I need to produce events. 

Zoom is a powerful event production platform, but the onus is completely on the organizer to get the content right. Luckily, others are working on making the organizer’s job easier.  

Gatheround (formerly Icebreaker)

I’m as excited about Gatheround as I am about any meeting software platform I’ve seen. They clearly designed the experience specifically to make it easy for people to connect and cultivate meaningful relationships—you can create time-based breakout rooms where people are presented with card-based discussion prompts in either small groups or 1:1 rooms. 

A lobby area offers a great transitional space between breakouts, where a combination of chat and stage area (that others can join with permission) encourages social interaction that just feels different.

HeySummit

If you need a more complete conference-level experience, where each talk can have its own landing page, HeySummit has you covered. You still need another provider to handle the video (Zoom, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), but HeySummit wraps it in a nice user-friendly shell.

(Disclosure: The folks at HeySummit are good friends of ours.)

5. I want to create a virtual space for my people to hang out in.

The world of “proximity chat” has come a long way—from niche community of super-online escapists to mainstream tool for virtual conferences and more. These video game-like environments allow you to create a sense of place, where people can explore and bump into each other. 

On these platforms, when people’s avatars come into close proximity to one another, their videos come into focus, so you can talk to only those who are “near” you at any given moment. It’s kind of like real life! 

Topia

Topia’s hand-drawn style is incredibly appealing to me, personally, because it stands in such contrast to everything else I’m used to seeing. It feels a little more nature-oriented. It helps me feel like I’m entering a special little world. 

Its administrative interface is not for the faint of heart—you need to be willing to poke around and take your time to get to know how things work, and work around some of its features’ more maddening constraints—but your patience will be rewarded with an experience unlike anything most people have seen. 

You can create a custom environment or use one of their templates, which I highly recommend—starting from scratch can be incredibly time consuming, while their templates offer a great insight into the features they offer. 

Gather.town

My other favorite proximity chat app is gather.town. It’s a bit further along in terms of its development, but still have a lot of quirks when it comes to setup and administration. This world isn’t for the established corporate player just yet, but I expect some of these platforms will get there some time soon!

Gather.town has a simplified, Legend of Zelda-like overhead view with a little digital avatar for each person. You can draw rooms, set up walls and floors and decor, and install interactive points where people can view videos, web pages, presentations, or even play a game together. 

Workfrom

In Workfrom, you can create a perpetual “room” where people can come to hang out and work alongside one another. It’s explicitly not a space to hold a scheduled meeting: while cameras will be on, microphones are disabled. You can only talk to each other over chat, leaving your ears free to focus on the admin-chosen musical playlist while you do other things. 

Custom wallpaper and simple discussion prompts in the chat round out an incredibly simple but truly powerful tool for creating a sense of shared presence among a team or small community. 

Go wild

Try everything! There are dozens of these platforms. Check out a giant list here

6. I don’t actually need video.

Video is a powerful tool when you’re gathering people remotely—it’s about as close as we can get to being together, even if it’s not nearly the same. 

How many video meetings, however, actually need to be on video? There are a lot of reasons why someone might not want to be on video at a given time: physical comfort, being on the go, insecurity about their appearance or their environment, internet issues, slow computers, and more. If you can gather people without asking them to turn on their cameras, you can get greater turnout and offer a more accessible experience. 

What tools do you already have, or which could you use for non-video related needs?

Chat apps

We already covered the usual suspects above—chat apps and other asynchronous social spaces are powerful tools when used right. 

Free Conference Call

Along with Mumble, Free Conference Call does exactly what it says it does—with just a few hoops to jump through, you can have a dial-in number set up in no time.

Zoom!

That’s right—Zoom itself is actually a pretty powerful platform for facilitating audio-only phone conversations. If you’ve ever seen one of those big complicated boilerplate Zoom invitations, you’ve seen that Zoom offers call-in numbers for people to easily dial from their phones, without having to memorize and punch in meeting IDs and passcodes. 

Once in the meeting, phone participants actually have a few useful controls available to them just through use of the number pad—even allowing participants to move in and out of breakout rooms. 

Just pick up the phone!

Regular old phone calls—remember them? They might just be the refreshing alternative to being stuck behind your desk looking into a camera. 

To Zoom or Not to Zoom

In the end, Zoom is often the best answer, if not because of its quality execution and affordable price then simply because it’s the one people tend to be the most familiar with. 

If you’re looking for something better, however, a whole lot of people are out there working hard to create products that offer you something different. Try different approaches using different platforms and invite friends or colleagues to experiment with you!

The Quick Guide to SOI Offers in Affiliate Marketing

The Quick Guide to SOI Offers in Affiliate Marketing

New affiliates have to learn a great amount of industry-specific terms to understand the basics of the business. SOI is usually among the first such terms you‘ll encounter. Affie firmly believes you should take the time to learn the basics so you don‘t get overwhelmed and give up before you have even really started. Hence, we are here to teach you all about SOI offers in affiliate marketing.

What is SOI?

Single opt-in offers, or SOI for short, is a type of affiliate offers especially suitable for beginners. This is true since the affiliate gets paid after a single user action – most often submitting their email address or filling out a form. This is the only step needed to complete conversion in this type of offer. In other words, this is the easiest method of getting your visitors to complete a conversion and become leads.

On the other hand, there are DOI (double opt-in) offers that require the user first to do one action, and then confirm it, again usually via email. DOI evolved from SOI to prevent affiliates from using bots and entering fake email addresses themselves to profit. Since there are some ways to cheat this system, we recommend you to learn how to detect bot traffic in a few easy steps first.

Illustration of a hand holding a cellphone with an email.
The goal is to get visitors to give you their email addresses-

SOI Offers in Affiliate Marketing: SOI method

SOI offers are the easiest way to generate leads and grow a mailing list. However, it is no secret that getting someone to give you their email address isn‘t easy. People do not like reading through tons of spam. Hence, they often resort to giving a fake email address which is impossible to track if you don‘t send out a confirmation link in an email. In other words – you will have to give your visitors a strong incentive to trust you with their emails before you get them. The more popular methods include

  • Temporary free memberships
  • Coupons and codes
  • Free ebooks on the topic at hand
  • Tickets to an online lottery

After the visitor submits their email address, they will start receiving promotional emails from the company or the affiliate. The goal of these emails is to turn the visitor into a customer by getting them to purchase something – a different type of conversion. Hence, it is important for your site to look as enticing as possible, and be easy to use. This especially applies to your landing pages. A good SOI landing page focuses on the benefits of submitting your data, has a layout that frames it as a logical next step, and contains a compelling call to action.

There can be a reason for concern, especially if you are only starting your affiliate business. Some companies and affiliates alike will sell the user‘s information to other companies offering similar products or services, as it is an easy profit. This can, in turn, affect the reputation and visitor satisfaction, and overall experience. Hence, we implore you to check affiliate forums and find out if anyone has had a bad experience before you accept the offer.

SOI marketing

As we have stated previously, SOI is a way to generate leads. The next step is SOI marketing, or, in other words – using the email addresses to advertise products and services. This means crafting a compelling newsletter that will offer valuable content and opportunities. Again, if you spam your visitors, or offer nothing of value, it is very likely your emails will end up in the recycle bin. Hence, it is important to use other forms of advertising as well, such as social media. Consider the leads you get through SOI offers to be just the baseline you need to improve upon and give even more incentives to.

Illustration of lead generation.
SOI is a great way to generate leads.

SOI Offers in Affiliate Marketing: How can affiliates use SOI?

Affiliate publishers themselves can use SOI for lead generation on their own websites. This way you can include your promotional links into email newsletters, and see if that raises your conversion rate. The truth of the matter is – you will need to remind visitors of your offers and get them excited to view your content as well.

The most important piece of advice we can give you is to use your emails to instill trust. Don’t abuse the fact someone gave you their email address, but offer some value after the fact instead. Present your offers truthfully and in a timely manner, so you don‘t fill their inboxes with a bunch of unnecessary emails. When it comes to email marketing – less truly is more.

How SOI relates to your content

As you probably can guess, getting many leads through SOI campaigns means nothing if those users opt-out before actually completing a conversion. In that case, you have gone through the hassle of planning the campaign, creating a landing page, and getting new leads – all in vain.

Illustration of money.
SOI + great content = success

That is why you should take the time to make sure you have done everything in your power to make going through with purchasing the logical thing to do. You should see SOI lead generation as a jumping-off point for your campaigns. You must make sure to bring your audience content with actual substance. Them being on your mailing list is what makes it easier to spread this content, and it has to be good enough to capture your audience‘s attention. In other words, getting the leads is only the start, and the work continues with you crafting compelling articles, videos, podcasts, or a combination of all three. If your voice is new and interesting, you have some expertise or look at a familiar topic from a new angle, your leads will turn into paying customers in no time.

As you can see, an SOI campaign isn‘t difficult to execute and can open a lot of doors for you if you combine it with great content and enticing products.