Tag: contract

Categories
Day Trading

The Best CFD Trading Books Available – Find the Top 3 Books to Learn About a Contract For Difference

I’m going to take a look at the best CFD trading books available on the market today so you can be an informed CFD trader instead of taking pot shots in your CFD trading.

I have read all the CFD trading books on the market and have listed what I believe are the top 3 available. Here they are in no particular order…

1. Real Traders 2 by Eva Diaz

2. SuperCharge Your Trading with CFDs by Jeff Cartridge

3. Making Money from CFD Trading by Cat Davey

Let’s have a look at each of the books in a little more detail.

1. Real Traders 2 by Eva Diaz

How would you like to learn the tips and tricks that enabled Australia’s most successful CFD trader (Dave Limburg) to make a staggering $110,000 or 441.79% in 9 weeks? Real Traders 2 by Eva Diaz takes us on a journey to uncover exactly how Dave Limburg managed to make those incredible returns with realatively small drawdowns.

Back in 2007 CMC Markets ran a trading competition which involved over 440 budding CFD traders for a winner take all $100,000 cash first prize. Unbelievable I know but Dave Limburg managed to pocket the $100,000 and during the 9 weeks that the competition was run he actually made $110,000 in his own account.

In Real Traders 2, Eva Diaz actually interviews 7 of the top 10 placegetters and uncovers the day by day strategies these gun traders employed to hit the top 10 in a nationwide trading competition. You’ll find a mixture of fundamental, technical, discretionary and mechanical trading systems employed to catapult each of them to the top including a husband and wife duo. Just for the record the wife came 2nd and the husband came 7th!

2. SuperCharge your Trading with CFDs by Jeff Cartridge

Jeff Cartridge has been educating traders for over a decade and has been actively involved in trading for longer than that. Further to this, Jeff started trading CFDs when they first launched in Australia back in 2002.

In his CFD book, Jeff runs through the most common uses for CFDs and outlines the key CFD trading strategies both himself and others employ. The types of strategies that Jeff goes into include: Day trading, short term trading, medium term investing, pairs trading, dividend plays, hedging, index stripping/tilting and seasonal patterns.

For those that want a well rounded, educational CFD book that uses everyday language that all new comers can understand, then this is the CFD book for you.

3. Making Money from CFD Trading by Cat Davey.

Whilst this isn’t considered your typical CFD instructional book, it rates very highly in my opinion for one reason. This is live trading at its best and Cat Davey takes us through the emotional roller coaster that full time trading offers as she turns her $13,000 stake into $30,000 in 3 months.

The key highlights in this book are the day by day round up of how Cat Davey makes her better than average returns plus she explains clearly the technical analysis methods she used to get there.

If you like the idea of learning from a real CFD trader and you understand how valuable it is to have a 3 month trading journal of a successful trader then grab this fantastic CFD book. You’ll be glad you did.

Categories
Taxes

Earn Big Bucks As a Contract Technical Writer

When you decide to become a freelance technical writer you could also get contract work. This means that you work for a client for a specified period of time. You could be a full time contractor working 40 hours a week or a part time contractor working 20 hours a week.

Don’t be deceived by the word full time contract. Even though you’re working 40 hours a week for the client you are not considered a full time employee. You won’t enjoy any company benefits like vacation, health insurance and 401K. And your contract could be terminated without any notice.

Contracts can vary in length from as little as three months to several years long. Some government contracts last for several years. The longer the length of the contract the better it is for you. You won’t have to worry about looking for another client or contract.

As a contractor you will make a lot more money compared to working as a full time employee. In fact you could easily make $15 – $20 more per hour as a contractor than a full time employee.

Why the big difference? Because the company employing you does not pay anything for your health insurance, pension and other benefits. This is a cost savings for them. And in today’s times of skyrocketing health costs, this is a big saving for the company. They’d much rather pay you extra money than pay for your health insurance costs. The extra money they pay you is nowhere close to what they would pay for your health insurance.

Plus, as a contractor they don’t have an investment in you. You get the job done, get paid and say goodbye. That’s it.

As a contract technical writer you could make from $40 – $85 an hour. Depending on your experience and location in the country this number could be higher or lower. Different cities have different rates for technical writers. This depends on the local industries and companies, cost of living and income taxes.

For example, in a growing city like Houston in Texas, the average hourly rate for experienced contract technical writers is $45 – $50 per hour. Compare this to Detroit, Michigan where the hourly rate is $70 – $80 per hour.

The disadvantage of working as a contract technical writer is that you have to get your own health insurance. And if you need health insurance for your family you’ll be paying a lot every month. You’ll also have to set up your own Individual Retirement Account (IRA) account to save for your retirement.

Getting Paid by a Third Company

If you work as a contractor you may get paid by a third company that has a contract with the client. You will be an employee of this third company. Let me give you an example of this.

Say you’re hired by Company A and they’ll pay you $50 an hour to go and work at Company B’s office. Company B is a major Fortune 500 company. It’s a one year long contract. So for every week you work you make $2,000 in pre-tax dollars ($50 an hour multiplied by 40 hours a week).

But you get this money from Company A and not from Company B. Because Company A has placed you in this contract they’ll get their cut too. What you may not realize is that Company A may be billing Company B $80 an hour for you. Company A pays you $50 an hour and pockets the difference.

There are some advantages to being paid by a third party like this. They’ll take care of your payroll taxes so you don’t have to worry about paying Uncle Sam his dues. You’ll submit a W4 to them because they’ll be your employer. They may also have a 401K plan for you to invest in. Some companies also offer decent health insurance options.

Other Options

There are two other options you have as an independent contractor – doing a Corp to Corp or a 1099. A Corp to Corp involves setting up your own corporation and a 1099 is when you’re the sole proprietor of the business. If you ever get into a situation where these options are available to you then it’s best to consult an accountant.

Categories
Mortgage

How Do Contract Mortgage Processors Comply With the New State Licensing Requirements?

There are thousands of mortgage processors acting on a contract basis in the United States. The SAFE Mortgage License Act that passed in July 2008 requires contract mortgage processors to be licensed by July 2010. How does the new law affect contract mortgage processors? Obtaining mortgage loan originator (MLO) licenses in multiple states can be very costly. What can a contract mortgage processor do to comply and not break the bank?

Let’s first look at the definition of a contract mortgage processor under the SAFE Mortgage Licensing Act. The Act defines a mortgage processor as an individual that gathers documents from borrowers and submits the documents to a lender, but does not take residential loan applications. The Act then goes on to state that a mortgage processor is exempt from mortgage loan originator licensing as long as they are a w-2 employee of just one mortgage company. Thus a mortgage processor that is 1099 and/or processes loans for more than one mortgage company must be licensed as a mortgage loan originator (MLO) and is considered a contract mortgage processor. If you are defined as a contract processor, then what are your options for obtaining a license in each state you process loans?

Option 1

You can choose to become a w-2 employee of just one mortgage company and process mortgage loans for only that one company. This is probably not the ideal situation for most contract mortgage processors, but it may be the only option for some. The cost of licensing can be expensive and a license is required in each state you process loans. Also, as we will discuss shortly, you may need to obtain a mortgage company license too. This is even more costly than obtaining just the mortgage loan originator license.

The down side to this option is obvious. You can’t continue to process mortgage loans for your other customers. Also, it may be hard to find a company that will hire you on a full-time w-2 basis. Most smaller companies just do not have the resources to maintain a full-time processor on staff.

Option 2

You can choose to obtain a mortgage loan originator (MLO) license in each state you want to process loans in. Then you can have your primary customer sponsor those mortgage loan originator licenses. To get a mortgage loan originator license, you will need to complete 20 hours of education, two tests, fingerprinting, credit check, and pay an application fee between $100 and $400 per state. Then you can have your primary customer sponsor your mortgage loan originator license. This will allow you to process loans for your primary customer on a 1099 contract basis. The problem is that if you want to have other customers, you would have to set up your contract between your sponsoring primary employer and the other customers. So when you want to get paid by your other customers, the other customers would have to pay your primary customer and then your primary customer could pay you. This obviously poses a huge problem for most contract processors since it is very unlikely you will find a primary customer that will be willing to sign processing contracts with your other customers. However, this is how the states are saying it must be done. Some states may be implementing this slightly differently, so I recommend contacting the state or a licensing service to determine how the state is interpreting these requirements.

Option 3

You can choose to obtain a mortgage company license and a mortgage loan originator (MLO) license in each state you want to process loans in. This is the ideal situation, because then you do not have to be limited to just one employer as in option 1 and you do not have to have a primary customer sponsor you and pay you for your other customers work as in option 2. However, this is the most costly option. It usually costs about $1,000 to $3,000 to apply for a mortgage company license per state. And some states have net worth requirements, experience requirements, and bonding requirements that can be difficult barriers to overcome.

If you are able to go this option, you will actually be able to avoid the mortgage loan originator licensing in many of the states by paying yourself as a w-2 employee of your contract processing company, but the costs will still be much higher. If you are thinking of going this way, you will want to get licensed only in states you plan on processing ten or more loans in each month. In fact, most people that go this route will benefit from having a few contract processors work with them to offset the costs.

Conclusion

There are really no good answers to this dilemma. In fact, this may be one of the worst problems facing the mortgage industry right now that most people are not even aware of. Plan for the business of contract processing to change dramatically starting August 2010. And make sure to be prepared to fall under one of these 3 options or you could be out of business.

Categories
Mortgage

Mortgage Underwriting Services – Four Things Considered By Contract Underwriters

Many banks and lenders cannot do without mortgage underwriting services. They need these services to reduce their overall time and cost for processing house loans. If you are looking to save money, you should also buy these services. They will surely bring changes to your current mortgage processing system. Mortgage underwriters offer very crucial and expensive services. They cannot agree to be paid low hourly rates even if your business is small. To lay a strong foundation for your small lending company, buy mortgage underwriting services. They are provided by expert underwriters who have decided to employ themselves.

The process of buying an underwriter’s service is called outsourcing. This simply means delegation of work that could otherwise be done by your staff to an outsider. One major reason why entrepreneurs outsource is to save money and time. When a third party does a task from a far away office, you do not have to provide anything to facilitate their work. They will give you their mortgage underwriting services in a stress-free manner. Because of the fact that they do not use your company’s properties, you can automatically reduce office overheads. If your business has been failing because of high staffing costs, you could dismiss some employees.

Reliable mortgage underwriting services will include the following four things. The first thing is the capacity. It refers to the technique of comparing a borrower’s income to their debts. This is done to see if a borrower is eligible for a loan. If their income is more than their debts, they are approved for a loan because of their ability to repay it. Providers of mortgage underwriting services divide a borrower’s total mortgage payment with their gross income. Mortgage payment includes principle, interest, homeowners insurance and housing taxes. They call the result of this computation a Housing Ratio or front end ratio.

A housing ratio is considered strong if it is twenty-eight percent or less. They as well compute what they call the back end ratio or debt ratio. They add recurring debts incurred because of other loans to the mortgage payment. These debts do not include personal expenses like electricity bills. A solid back end ratio must be forty percent or less. Credit is the next big consideration. It is the statistical prediction of a borrower’s ability to repay a loan in the future. A good underwriter uses a customer’s past factors like payment history to assign a credit score.

Borrowers who are given the highest score are thought to put a lender at a lower risk than those who obtain the lowest.Cash is the third factor considered by providers of mortgage underwriting services. A home loan borrower can either have more cash in the reserve or cash in the deal. If a borrower contributes a higher down payment, they are automatically a lower risk to the lender. If they store more cash in their reserve, they put a lender at a higher risk of loss in the future. Collateral is the last thing considered by sellers of mortgage underwriting services. It is the appraisal of a home and is discovered by considering many factors.

Categories
World

GM execs gloat over new UAW contract in call with Wall Street investors

GM execs gloat over new UAW contract in call with Wall Street investors

The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter urges call workers to attend the call-in meeting Thursday, 7pm Eastern Time to discuss the lessons of the GM strike. To register, go to: wsws.org/autocall

In a conference call with Wall Street analysts Tuesday morning, General Motors CEO Mary Barra and the company’s chief financial officer boasted that the new four-year agreement with the United Auto Workers would allow GM to slash billions in manufacturing costs and give it the “flexibility” to replace higher-paid veteran workers with temps.

Although the walkout cost the company an estimated $3 billion in profits for 2019 and 2020, the savings from the contract will lead to far larger long-term gains, Barra and CFO Dhivya Suryadevara told the analysts. The new agreement, Barra said, would maintain the “competitiveness” of GM, “strengthen the future of this company and create shareholder value.”

Despite the 40-day strike, the longest national auto strike in half a century, GM made $3 billion in third-quarter profits in North America. This is up $200 million from last year, with an 8.4 percent profit margin. GM International reported a $65 million loss on slowing sales in China and elsewhere.

Mary Barra (Source: GM Media)

The large North American profits were largely due to sales of the highly profitable Silverado and Sierra pickup trucks, which the UAW helped the company stockpile by sanctioning forced overtime and speedup before the strike.

GM’s stock rose 4.3 percent on Tuesday. Since the UAW announced the contract was ratified last Friday, GM shares have risen by eight percent.

Barra, who made $22 million last year, said workers and management would go forward as “one team” after the strike. In fact, GM has responded to the UAW’s shutdown of the strike with a campaign of retaliation aimed at intimidating workers who widely opposed the UAW-backed sellout.

The UAW claimed the contract passed by a narrow 57-43 percent margin, but there are widespread charges that the vote was rigged. In any case, workers knew that if they rejected the deal, the UAW would leave them on the picket lines for weeks or months and would not bring back anything better.

Over the weekend and on Monday, at least three Flint Truck Assembly workers, including 19-year veteran Juan Gonzales, were fired due to comments posted on workers’ Facebook pages, which GM Global Security regularly spies on. In addition to this flagrant violation of free speech, the company has also refused to rehire nine GM workers at the Silao, Mexico plant who were fired for defying demands by the company and the union that they increase output and undermine the impact of the US strike.

Inside the plants and distribution warehouses, workers are reporting a virtual reign of terror, with management harassing and disciplining workers. The UAW is enforcing speed up and mandatory overtime to make up for the loss of 300,000 vehicles during the strike.

With the plants already running at “max overtime,” Barra told investors, it would take “discipline” to boost production and get profits rolling again by the second quarter of 2020.

In her comments, CFO Dhivya Suryadevara said, “The new labor agreement preserves our competitiveness, manufacturing flexibility and balance sheet strength, without sacrificing our earnings power.

Gloating over the terms of the contract, she added, “We have maintained our ability to adjust our workforce in response to changing industry levels, protected the balance sheet with no increases to defined benefit pension obligations and no payments or increased obligations to retirees. We maintained our breakeven point of 10-11 million units in the US and therefore maintained our ability to navigate through a downturn. It is important to note that while this labor agreement is inflationary, we expect to offset incremental economics over the course of the contract period with productivity in our system.”

The UAW agreed to the closure of the Lordstown, Ohio plant, which once employed nearly 5,000 workers, along with transmission plants in Michigan and Maryland and a parts distribution center in Fontana, California. The plant closures would allow the company to move ahead with plans to cut $4.5 billion in annual labor costs, the GM’s executives said.

The unrestricted expansion of temps, which will be overseen by the UAW, will provide GM with a disposable workforce that can be expanded or reduced depending on market conditions without incurring the costs of laying off traditional workers, like supplemental unemployment pay or buyouts.

When a Bank of America/Merrill Lynch analyst complained that the deal only rid the company of 2,000 higher-paid “legacy” workers, Barra reassured him that the Special Attrition Program backed by the UAW would likely lead to more workers leaving over the course of the contract.

The stated aim of the auto bosses and the UAW is to drive out older, more experienced workers, referred to as “surplus,” and convert the entire workforce into lower-paid full-time workers, temps and third-party contract workers.

Asked by the analyst if GM planned to replace one-for-one the 2,000 workers being pushed out in the UAW contract, Barra said the company planned to “optimize the workforce” by getting more productivity out of the existing workers.

At the same time, she said, under the new contract, “As we need to hire additional workers we will utilize those temps, and I am very proud that we provided an appropriate path to permanent employment to our temporary workforce, and maintained the in-progression flow, so we will utilize both of those depending on the situation.”

Barra told investors that the company would invest more in electric vehicle technology over the next four years than traditional vehicles. As part of the new contract, the company and the UAW will establish a new joint body to oversee new technologies. Barra said 1,000 new jobs would be created at a battery manufacturing plant near the shuttered Lordstown facility. The workers hired at the joint venture are expected to top out at $17 an hour under a separate UAW contract.

During the course of the strike, Wall Street investors made it clear they were willing to ride out a long walkout as long as GM defeated the strikers and achieved its aim of establishing “21st Century labor relations,” i.e., bringing to the auto industry the type of exploitation and precarious employment prevalent at Amazon, Uber and other “gig economy” companies.

GM has achieved this with the collusion of the UAW, which deliberately isolated striking GM workers by keeping Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers on the job, while working to starve workers into submission with $250-275 a week in strike pay.

The UAW is now targeting 56,000 Ford workers for its next pro-company contract. Wall Street has been punishing Ford stocks for not moving fast enough on its multi-billion cost-cutting program. The company has already indicated that it will not accept the pattern set by the UAW-GM contract but wants far deeper concessions, particularly on health care.

Ford workers are livid over the GM deal and determined to fight. A Louisville, Kentucky worker with two decades at Ford, told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “There are 800 temps at Kentucky Truck, and it keeps going up because Ford is not hiring permanent employees.

“Many have been here two-and-a-half years. Can you imagine working that long, and you can’t miss a day without being fired? They pay union dues, and it’s not right! The company doesn’t care if they get hurt. The medical department gives you Tylenol and sends you back to the line. If you’re a temp, you can get fired for getting hurt.

“Workers have given up much for Ford to succeed with the promise that once the company was profitable, we would get it back. We didn’t receive any of it back in the last contract. Ford didn’t take any money from the government, but it took it from their employees.

“I’ve been with Ford for over 20 years, and I make $10,000 less now per year than I did 10 years ago because they got rid of most of our overtime and our COLA. The union is not fighting for us. If this contract is not better than GM, people will pull out of the union,” he said.

Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers must draw the lessons of the GM strike and form rank-and-file factory committees to take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the corrupt UAW. These committees should reach out to and mobilize workers throughout the auto and auto parts industry to launch national and cross-border strikes to oppose the drive by Wall Street to return autoworkers to conditions of industrial slavery not seen in a century.

Categories
World

Chicago Teachers Union preparing the betrayal of teachers’ strike

Classes remain canceled on Wednesday, the 10th day of the strike of about 25,000 teachers in Chicago, the third-largest school district in the US.

The central issues in the strike for teachers are significantly reducing class sizes and substantially increasing staffing at all levels to relieve overwork and overcrowding. Conditions in the schools have reached a crisis point, with classrooms of upwards of 45 children, crumbling and filthy buildings, and lack of basic resources.

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) House of Delegates met at CTU Headquarters Tuesday evening to hear an update on negotiations with Chicago Public Schools (CPS). The delegates meeting was called after CTU President Jesse Sharkey met with Mayor Lori Lightfoot for 45 minutes Tuesday afternoon. Despite conflicting press reports, no tentative agreement was announced at the meeting, though the CTU is clearly preparing to announce a sellout agreement as early as today.

Teachers marching on Tuesday

At an evening press conference, CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates said, “The things that were discussed at the table are not concretely on paper.” Sharkey added, “If we can achieve a tentative agreement [Wednesday] morning, we would bring our delegates in in the afternoon.”

CPS released a one-page summary of a five-year tentative agreement on Tuesday night that fails to commit to even the most basic demands of teachers. The city offers paltry staffing increases of 250 nurses and 209 social workers over five years. No class size limits are indicated. Instead, the lowering of class sizes is to be “phased in,” in partnership with the CTU.

These are promises teachers have heard before. CPS is also offering a 16 percent pay increase over five years, which has been repeatedly used by CPS and the corporate media to try to portray the teachers as “greedy” and discredit their fight for the most basic resources in schools.

The Democratic leadership in Chicago is staking out an aggressive position, imposing austerity that has been its policy for decades. While insisting there is no more than $500 million for schools before and during the teachers strike, Lightfoot’s 2020 budget proposal increases spending for police by 7 percent, or $100 million.

Lightfoot and CPS are giving the CTU nothing that they can try to sell to teachers to force through an agreement. This is why the CTU has not moved to shut down the strike quickly, as it pledged to do before it began.

The Democratic administration is applying financial pressure to teachers to try to force an end to the strike. On November 1, teachers may lose their health insurance for the duration of the strike and be shifted onto the federal COBRA insurance, known for its high cost.

For its part, the CTU is not paying teachers any strike pay, contributing to the financial pressure on educators to end the strike.

According to the CTU, the negotiations have come down to three issues: additional elementary school teacher preparation time, and two items of legislation, one for an elected school board and another for expanding the number of issues that the union can bargain over.

Even if these demands were met, they would do nothing to resolve the basic issues teachers are striking over.

Over the weekend, the CTU declared that it was only $38 million away from striking a deal with CPS. The school board claims that the CTU’s demands are closer to $100 million. Both figures are grossly inadequate to fund the city’s public schools, amounting to less than one-half of a percent of the school district’s $7.7 billion operating budget.

As vice president of the CTU during the 2012 Chicago teachers strike, Sharkey was instrumental in negotiating the concessions deal with then Mayor Rahm Emanuel that eroded tenure and enforced standardized testing for teacher evaluations. The shutdown of the strike paved the way for the closure of 49 public schools, thousands of teacher layoffs and the expansion of several networks of privately run charter schools.

The CTU has engaged in political theatre throughout the strike, posturing as an opponent of Lightfoot’s proposals while simultaneously working out a deal with the mayor.

Teachers and school staff face the threat of a repeat of the 2012 betrayal, in which they will be forced to swallow a concessions contract branded as a “victory” without adequate time to read and discuss it before voting.

A section of the striking teachers

To defend public education, teachers must expand the strike and break through the isolation imposed by CTU, which is aimed at pressuring teachers to accept the concessions demanded by CPS.

Teachers are determined to fight back against any concessions that the city attempts to impose with the aid of the CTU.

One teacher outside of the House of Delegates meeting told the World Socialist Web Site Teachers Newsletter: “I am willing to fight for as long as it takes. I definitely think this strike needs to be expanded. The whole city should be on strike.”

Addressing the CTU’s betrayal of the 2012 teachers’ strike, the teacher continued: “It did nothing. Today we’re fighting for the same things we were fighting for then.”

Several thousand teachers, students and supporters marched in the city early Tuesday morning, targeting the city’s planned Lincoln Yards development, a former industrial corridor that the city has committed public funds to transform into a luxury business district. Nine teachers were arrested occupying a lobby of a company receiving public funds for private development. They were later released.

The WSWS calls on teachers and school staff to vote “no” to any concessions contract imposed by the CTU and to take the initiative for their struggle into their own hands by forming rank-and-file committees to discuss and democratically decide on their own demands.

These committees must link up with hotel workers, logistics workers, autoworkers, and others across the city to prepare for a general strike and expand the fight to defend the right of public education to the working class worldwide in a global offense against the capitalist system.