I personally did this for over a year (Springfield, Missouri) in our kickass library downtown. Great coffee shop nearby, quiet, plenty of books (doh) and magazines to read as break entertainment and just fantastic.
I would say that Dropbox (being a really super company with a great product) has issues that are actually even larger than the storage cost.
Dropbox is based on Amazon S3, which means that not only do they have storage costs to a 3rd party that are so to speak 'out of their control' but they are also dealing with bandwidth and transaction costs.
I wish them all the best, however I can imagine this being quite expensive for them considering the amount of free users they have.
As the Dropbox clients talk to Dropbox servers instead of directly to S3, Dropbox can just transparently migrate their data to a storage facility of their own when they decide that that has become cheaper than S3.
Costs of storage are of course declining rapidly, however so far the massive increase in available bandwidth and storage needs for customers is simply growing MUCH faster.
Part of the catch-22 here is also that with decreased storage costs for online storage providers (that increasingly are building their clusters with consumer component hard drives) keeps an even pace with decrease in cost for home-storage and the amount of data users are wanting to upload.
This is why I'm really liking Crashplan as a storage service; they offer the ability to use their software to backup to your friends' drives (and vice versa). It perhaps doesn't work out well for everyone, but I have enough friends that keep up with the latest hardware that I am assured of finding someone with which I can trade backup storage. (My alternate plan was dropping off a disk / picking up the old disk whenever I visited my relatives every couple of weeks!)
How in the world would they be? Scraping web-content is pretty much Google's entire business model. Is 'slightly' hypocritical for them to even speak out on this in my opinion.
I think there is some truth in that. Markets in which HF trading occur are extremely efficient in the short term, but the information they act on in the short term is primarily about trading and not information which should affect the long term value of the stock.
The Efficient Market Hypothesis seems to break down over the long term when the market is efficient in the short-term, because bubbles can easily develop - and so genuine pricing information gets diluted by complex emergent effects, destabilising the market (in crop futures markets, for example, this has lead to artificial food shortages, and it probably played a role in the Financial Crisis).
I think a transaction tax is the best way to reduce excess short-term market efficiency; if you have to pay the government a small percentage of each trade, people will trade less frequently and only on better quality information.
Your opinion is unsupported by fact. But, you know, believe what you want. Some people enjoy believing in ghosts. Perhaps you should look into that too!
Well in my opinion and how it was founded, the stock market should be a place for 'speculation' based on the success of a company, analysis of the market, micro and macro economics etc.
Companies in need of capital and broader ownership 'go public' to secure funds and take in investors with a monetary and intellectual interest in their business model etc.
(I know this is a 'romantic' view of the stock market)
High Speed Trading does NOTHING for owners, investors, the company or anyone but the traders themselves. Essentially it works on the same principle as a the 'worm' in Office Space (geek reference) attempting to make very small amounts of money in mistakes, miscalculations and very short-time discrepancies in valuations of financial instrument.
I feel very old voicing this opinion but it just seems like the very edge of greed and 'money for nothing' attitude to create giant data clusters aimed at just nibbling away at the corners of financial markets for profit.
A very basic question: if you wanted to buy 100 shares of MSFT right now, who takes the other side of the trade?
High Speed Trading does NOTHING for owners, investors, the company or anyone but the traders themselves.
This is a false statement. Owners, long term investors, etc. value the option of immediacy. That is why options have intrinsic value. If there were no market makers (speculators), it would be almost infeasible to enter or exit a stock position without considerable cost. HFT market makers actually decrease the transaction costs of long term investors by tightening the bid-ask spread (for hundreds of stocks, the spread is as tight as legally possible: 1 penny).
A common misconception is that high frequency trading is like operating a money printing machine. This is also false. High frequency traders take on risk every time they take the other side of your trade. On average, if they're intelligent, they'll be compensated for that risk. In the end though, there is no such thing as a risk free trade. Even pure arbitrages have risk inherent in executing all legs of the trade at once. Pure arbs are very hard to build a business off of in practice.
One other point I'd like to make is: what is the point of this ridiculous speed? If you're confident in your ability to adjust the prices you're willing to buy/sell at very quickly in order to react to new information, then you can make tighter markets. Making tighter markets (if you're intelligent and fast) is desirable for the market maker because it allows him to capture more order flow at what he believes is a fair price. Tighter markets also lower transaction fees for end users of the market. In reality, all this HFT cuts profits away from all market makers (per unit), especially compared to when markets were insanely wide back before electronic trading.
Greed has nothing to do with it, and as I pointed out before, "money for nothing" is the complete opposite of what's going on. High frequency traders take on risk in the expectation of some small payoff. The compensation (on average) is the natural result of risk transfer. I don't think high frequency traders are greedier than people in any other business. Are they profit motivated? Of course. But so is Wal-Mart, GE, and almost every person doing a startup. I think "greedy" is an unfair assessment.
> it works on the same principle as a the 'worm' in Office Space (geek reference) attempting to make very small amounts of money in mistakes, miscalculations and very short-time discrepancies in valuations of financial instrument.
Just to continue this discussion a bit further, how are these mistakes supposed to be corrected otherwise? :)
I think HFT can actually serve to smooth out inefficiencies in the market.
That being said, it can, and almost certainly has, been abused. I am thinking mostly of 'quote stuffing'.
Also, there is the potential for a feedback loop between trading systems that can send prices to levels that are way undervalued or overvalued. I think overall these fears are probably way overblown but I suppose they do exist. Basically, I think it HFT fine but I hope the SEC is catching up technologically to prevent both catastrophic situations in time and bad actors from taking advantage of structural exploits.
Agreed. But you can't blame traders for greed, since all the owners, investors, and companies are also driven by their own kinds of greed, some of which benefit no one else but themselves.
100% this. The little interest/dividend you might be able to squeeze out of $200k is by no means worth any of the hassle when you should be focusing 24/7 on your business.
More time than I can count at my last startup, our personal relationship with an actual live human at the bank saved our bacon when stupid bank bullshit strikes (i.e. big check from client comes but the bank automatically freezes the money for some interminable time period, etc.) I highly recommend business banking with people who know you. You can do specialty stuff with specialty bank later, when it's warranted. Right now you just need a business checking account. (And it sounds like you could use payroll, too.)
I consider this to be a horrendous idea when it comes to funds with a 'burn rate'. Not to mention that I would personally be completely outraged as a VC/Angel if I invested in a start-up and they turned around and speculated on the stock market with the funds they received.
