Save contacts

If you visit events or talk to new people, you need to leave contacts. The most popular ways are to show a QR for LinkedIn or Instagram, tell a phone number, or give a business card. From my experience, When I write a phone number, I have only time to write the name and the name of the organization – it takes 1 minute to do the whole process, It may sound a little, but when you talk with 40 people on one event, these 40 minutes become tremendous.

I had a problem at a summit in St.Gallen with the LinkedIn QR code – I did not find how to open it. I spent 2 minutes with a person trying to understand where the QR code was – in the end, we just changed the phone numbers (we could also find the names on Linkedin, but we did not do it). And also, people have a thousand connections on Linkedin, so your contact will be one of the thousands of similar contacts. But I still think that LinkedIn is the best social business network.

Business cards are the easiest way to show leave contacts. Within 5 seconds, the business card is in your interlocutor’s hands (companion’s). Also, millennials and older people use business cards by default – they expect to get the business card from you. That is why I use business cards.

Old card

The first 100 business cards I made when I was 16, I was making a project coldcaller.ru. I wrote in Russian: “hello! I am Daniill Kovekh, a Founder of Coldcaller.ru”, my phone number and a corporate email. I put a QR code linked to a website on the other side. I used a white background and black text. I used capital letters without serifs (grotesques) that were tall and narrow. I used the mid-price matte paper so that I could write on it.

New card

In April, I made 150 business cards with a new design. These business cards are personal and for universal use. I pointed out the name of a blog as a header. This is the primary information because, in a blog, a person finds all the links he can be interested in – CV, Linkedin, Projects, and the art shop. I don’t need QR on a business card because Koveh.com is easy to write and remember.

I wrote my email daniil@koveh.com on one side. I didn’t add the telephone number – first, I have different phone numbers: 2 phone numbers in Russia and two phone numbers in Austria, and soon, 1 in America. So, mentioning any will not mean that I respond from the telephone. The email, as well as the domain koveh.com, remains unchanged forever. Moreover, I don’t want to give my telephone number to everyone, and it should remain private.

I mentioned skills: Art, Architecture, Finances, Investing, Data science. I also mentioned that I know 3 languages: English, Russian, and German. I am not planning to learn new languages to a high level, so the information will be actual for a long time. I also wrote consulting and projects, because I create my projects (AKA startups, but I don’t like this word, It is now a synonym for “looser”), and make consultations on Investments, Marketing in the real estate market, and I am planning to consult about Architecture, Construction, and Urban Planning, as well as investments in Art, Wine, and Real Estate.

To make a business card interesting, I made an infinite stripe of skills I offer. The idea is that these skills are infinite, but later I decided to end with the starting word so that it looks like a separate printing or a pattern.

The words in the middle are huge; the margin from the borders compensates for the size. I Increased the letter-spacing because the letter “V” has too much white space at the bottom. I chose the serif fonts – they are easy to read.
The letters also remind me of Russia, especially the letter “M” reminds me of Moscow. The letter is unique because it has two different serifs: Linear serif and curved serif.

Unfortunately, I ordered an American card size, that is longer than the standard credit-card size.

Capsule machine, automatic machine, or manual machine? I tried 3 types and asked an expert about the difference.

Manual machine

Manual machines are the most expensive and complicated to use. Manual machines help you to make the best coffee. You upgrade your skills while working with it. You experiment with the number of coffee beans, temperatures, and what is the coolest – you draw leaves and hearts on the foams.

I tried the €1899 “ECM Mechanika slim” machine and €450 “ECM S64 manuelle” grinder. It was easy to use: first, I attach a spoon (portafilter) to a grinder. The grinder grinds coffee beans into the spoon. Next, I attach a spoon to a table or to a special holder so that the spoon does not move. Then I tamp (or press) the dust inside of a spoon. Next, I attach the spoon to the coffee machine. I turn on the machine. The boiling water flows through the dust and flows out to a cup.

coffee-brewing-menthods.com

You get viscous (dense) coffee with intense dark-light brown foam. It is similar to café-class coffee or even better. If you have such a machine, you don’t need to go anywhere to drink great coffee.

I used good beans, similar to Passalacqua, that cost 19€ per kilogram – it is not too much – only €0.15 per portion, but the quality was excellent. I used 60% Arabica and 40% Robusta, which gave a more Italian taste. I like strong coffee, so I need more Robusta – up to 60% of it.

Passalaqua is roasted in Naples in Italy. The quality is high for the price of 19-24€.

If you want the same beans as in cafés, then better buy coffee for 50€+ per kilogram. You may also try coffee Luwak, a coffee fermented in the belly of small, squirrel-like animals, luwaks. It costs nearly 300€ per kilo. I was once on a plantation in Indonesia and have seen these cute animals. Unfortunately, I was too small to drink coffee, but my mother said it was pretty good.

Manual machines are durable and easy to repair compared with automatic machines. You may use such a coffee machine for a decade. That is why the selling price for the used machine is so high. If you have a spare 2000-2.500€, I recommend investing in a coffee machine and selling it in 5-6 years for 70% of its cost, e. g., 1700€.

Automatic machine

The automatic machine makes good coffee. You set the needed amount of coffee beans, water required, water temperature, and milk temperature. You also choose the pre-installed coffee varieties. It is easy and is great variant for home. The prices start from 400€ till 1500€. Depends on the options you need. I recommend looking at the material, especially the milk box and tubes – they must be made out of metal. Otherwise, your coffee machine will stink. I also think that all details should be made out of metal because plastic breaks fast.

The foam is also nice in most models; however, the quality is better with manual machines.

Nespresso

Nespresso is a cheap, easy-to-use machine. Nespresso is great if you want to try different tastes of coffee and choose the best one for yourself. The machine price varies 70€ to350€ for a metallic version with a steam tube. Each capsule costs 0.35-0.5€, which is too expensive. In the long run, you will lose much more money using Nespresso. For example, I have a mid-class version machine with a milk heater. I used the model for 4 months, but I gave it to my friend because coffee machines make cheaper espresso with better taste.

Better spend more money on a coffee machine; you will always be able to sell a good machine on willhaben or eBay. And also, if you want a good and relatively cheap manual coffee machine, try to find it on willhaben.

Thanks to my friend Lele who can always lend me a bike.

I love riding a bike. Bicycles are great – they are fast, faster than public transport. It is 20 minutes by bike to my University, rather than 40 minutes by bus and underground. Moreover, it is healthy to ride a bike, and I can keep fit and get to my destination. I can even take a bicycle to train or travel on a plane with the bike. Even though the bicycle emits carbon when being produced, it is still nature-friendly transport.

I make hundred-kilometer rides. I love traveling by bike. There are four variants of traveling – short trips, full-day trips, weekend trips, and long journeys. Long journeys last one, two weeks, or even a month – friends from Moscow state university bicyclist club have done it. They traveled by train to Karelia – a northern Russian region with picturesque forests, sixty thousand lakes, and beautiful Finnish architecture. They have been riding in Karelia for two weeks. Later, some participants of the journey went to St. Petersburg. They spend some days there, and then they have ridden to Moscow. The way from Moscow to St. Petersburg is at least 700km. In total, they made nearly 2000km.

I prefer rides from 80 to 150 km per day and 2-day rides. It is an excellent way to explore new places and not be exhausted. For example, we can go to Bratislava from Vienna or ride through Donau and observe hundreds of vineyards and apricot gardens, symbols of lower Austria. It is also great to go to Hallstatt, the most beautiful lake and an old town surrounded by old mountains. You may spend one day in the city, swimming on a lake with a SUP board and riding in the mountains the next day.

Plans

I invite you to my bicycle group in What’s App in case you live in Austria. You may also join if you live in Europe, because, maybe, we will make a trip to your country or you to ours.

The requirements are: you can make at least 80 km per day, and you need to be able to get a good bike. Also, it is important, that you are a responsible, friendly, helpful, and interesting person. And now, some information about cycling, routes and how the bikes work

Biking 101

There are two distinct routes: paved routes and trail routes. These routes require different bikes and ranges. For example, on paved asphalt roads, you may ride 25 kilometers per hour on average with a road bike and make 200km or even 250km in a one-day trip. But If you use a mountain bike, even 150km will be tough. This is due to the weight of mountain bikes, wide rough wheels, and less-powerful cranks.

Mountain bikes are universal, but road bikes are faster. Road bikes are fast. My highest speed on a road bike was 64 km per hour, and I scored it in Mallorca when I was going on a highway with a small slope. Usually, I gain 50 km per hour. Professionals have a maximum speed of 112 km per hour. Interestingly, most riders named this number as the maximum they did. Such high speeds are gained due to the lightness of the bike and rider. Expensive carbon road bikes weigh nearly 7.5 kilograms.

The tires are important. There are tires for roads, trails, downhill, cross country, winter variations, etc. All of them have different forms and widths and, therefore, frictions. That is why downhill tires will stop faster and will be easier to control, but you will not score even 40 km per hour on the road.

Cranks help you to use the optimal force. Cranks make your rear wheel move. The bigger the front crank and the lower the rear is, the more force you will apply to a wheel. Why is that? To move the wheel, you need to trigger the rear crank. All the cranks are attached – therefore, all the cranks are constantly spinning together. We need to spin one of these cranks, but which one will be easier to spin?

Let’s experiment: put your phone or notebook on a table and spin it around the center of a device. Try first to do it on a point further from a center and closer to a center which is easier – further from the center. But check the distance your finger made to make one 360 degrees spin. The closer to a center made a much smaller distance. What does it mean? The shorter length, the harder it is to spin, to apply a force. That Is why the smaller rear crank gives more force. We have an opposite situation on the front wheel – try to explain it yourself.

The bigger front crank or lower real crank does not mean, that you will be faster – you need to apply much more force (or Power, in Watts), and you can be fastly exhausted, and you may damage your cranks. Friction of tires and a road and the friction of chain and the cranks are also reasons for lower speed and damaging a bike. You have to control the forces to get a higher speed.

But there are limits. Road bikes give you the possibility to apply a lot of force, or power, Watts. That helps gain huge speed on a road. But, when you want to ascend a mountain, you need much smaller power, otherwise, you will be tired in seconds. Road bike does not have such a small front or such big rear cranks. That is why it is too hard to ascend with a road bike, even with lower weight, and thinner tires.

I learned an interesting thing about my productivity – each year, I perform better and worse in precisely the same months as in previous ones. I have checked this dependency since 2019. I add my performance (good, average, bad) to the google sheets to see the pattern.

March-April is the most effective time, April-June is a high-performance time, July is less effective or random, August-September is effective, October-November is a bad-performance time, and December-January is the worst-performance time, February is a random time.

What to do in the bad-performance months? I think it is time to relax and make trips, learn or practice new stuff. For example, I am drawing and playing the piano in such months (I’ve been playing since 2021). I also made some mistakes: I played some computer games during the bad-performance times because games don’t involve responsibility, and games have no deadlines so that I can stick to my tempo.

One of the ideas to spend November and December is to travel to some countries, like Thailand, Indonesia, Dominican republic. You may just relax and spend a little time working. It is not bad to make progress slowly and spend less time at work. We are people – we live for emotions and fun. Ask an entrepreneur whether he spends all his time working. An entrepreneur is calm; he delegates work to others and makes the company work sustainably without the involvement of the entrepreneur himself. Otherwise, it is not a business.

What does it mean for you? First, also analyze your productivity cycles, find your patterns, and think about how to respond to them. And, you may expect a lot of new content on my blog and youtube channel. The blog theme, by the way, will be slightly changed: there will be content about traveling, architecture, business, and finances. In April I start a project on alternative investments. I will tell a lot about creating a business in Austria and why alternative investments are important for any investor.

The Stock market is a place of gambling and investing. You don’t get rich without risks, but you may save money for your future and get passive income. But how to invest effectively and what mistakes you should not do? Let’s read:

You won’t get more than 10% in $ per year in the long run. Even s&p500 grows 6-8% p.a. on average. Once Warren Buffet said that just a few funds will be more effective than s&p500. To prove it, he argued with fund managers that they will not gain more than S&P500 in 10 years. At a point in time, the funds had higher returns. But there was a crisis, and most of the funds lost all the profit that they made in previous years. Only 2 funds, as i remembered, outperformed S&500.

Don’t panic. We are all people: we have emotions and biases. When the stock falls, we start a panic, we think that it continues falling or that we must buy more because the stock is cheaper. That is our human nature. We think that the status quo, the one which was before the current events, will stay forever, but it does not always work this way.

There were nearly two hundred large companies that became bankrupt after the 2008-2009th crash, and if it was true for the index that time, then nowadays, with the risk of recession, the index may fall for a decade, who knows.

Buy when there is uncertainty and sell when there is euphoria. It works, but mostly if you stick to 2 types of assets: index or shares of stable companies that are not seriously affected. When you invest in an index, you lower the risk of bankruptcy of a given company. If the index is on historical (or 10 years) minimum or maximum, that is too different from reality, or if the

Markets fall every 6-8 years. Charles Kindleberger analyzed 400 years of the stock market. He found that each 6-8 years there was a crisis, with only some exceptions. Interestingly, each time people were sure that this time the situation is different from previous ones: new technologies or that people already learned previous mistakes. No, there is always a new problem, that leads to that. Did we have a market crash in 2020? No, we didn’t, but it will be soon – thanks to the Russian government, EU, and American politicians. The supply chains are broken, and the prices for production rise. Then the final prices rise. The demand falls. How can then companies generate huge profits? Think rational.

Don’t care about your losses. You will lose money on some stock, no one knows when, but you will. When you lose e. g., 10% of your portfolio, you would like to get money back, usually, you want it fast. As you may imagine, getting 10% of your portfolio fast, e. g., in one week is extremely risky:

weekly_rate = 100%/90% # 11.1% weekly  to cover losses  
annual_rate = (weekly_rate)^(365/7)*100
# it is 24317% annually

As you remember, the average annual rate of s&p 500 is 6-8% annually, and not a lot of investment houses can outperform S&P500 in a long run.

Macroeconomics first. The political situation in a country affects all of the companies. Look at Russia in February-March 2022. All companies, that had huge potential crashed in one day 30% to 70%. Russian addressed depository receipts have dropped to 0.01$. All of that happened not because of bad business decisions, but politics. When you invest in a developing country, you buy shares and bonds with discounts. These discounts are given because of such risks, as in the Russian case (I can’t say the word “War” by a law).

Political factors are harder than economic. Economic processes are well explained, for example in Pearsons’ books. We have enough data to expect prices for grains, raw materials inc the calm times. Therefore, in such times, the stock market trades not today’s value, but future value. Usually 6 months in advance. So, market lives in the future, that can be accurately predicted.

When unexpected things happen, the stock market players are uncertain about the future. Usually, players need 2-3 days to understand the future situation. Within these 3 days, there is uncertainty and the volatility (standard deviation, or simply, range of prices) is high. After, the market finds a fair price and predicts the future just 1 week in advance. Why 1 week? On Saturdays (or rarely on weekdays after market closing), politicians make speeches and announce new information and plans. Market players try to predict the announcements and set a fair price. So, if e. g., If J. Powell says that the inflation will be 10% (dramatic for the IT sector), but market players predicted that, then American IT companies will not lose too much equity after the speech. The chance of this event was already discounted.

Politicians are people and sometimes their decisions are not optimal, unpredictable. Let’s take the Russian president. He made the worst, unlogical decision – he attacked Ukraine. After, he lost connections with developed countries. Moreover, the Central Bank of Russia lost access to gold and dollar reserves worth $500bn. Only a few people could predict such an event.

Always have cash. You must have cash for at least some months to live (in my case, 6 months). Liquid instruments (EUR, USD, for example) are easy to withdraw, and you can buy whatever you need without a premium (commission).
When the war in Ukraine started, I had 25% of the cash. The following day I sold some shares and ETFs with a loss of 20-40% and withdrew all my cash (50% of a portfolio) to my Austrian account. Later, Moscow Stock Exchange stopped the trades. All my bonds and shares became untradable. If I did not withdraw money, I would have lost much more and would not have had any money to live in Austria.

both technical and fundamental analyses are important.

Most of the risks and opportunities are already in a share price. You may think that some companies have a bad future, based on something that you have read in some articles. But investors already know about this risk and have lowered the fair value even before reading the article. You may win in this strategy if you use your thoughts and calculations, or if you know insider information or any kind of information that only a few people know. Imagine, you are a telecommunications engineer and you know that Nokia makes good 5g transmitters, that are easy to use, and you know that Qualcomm (i just made up the assumption) makes worse 5g transmitters. Then, you, as an engineer assume that Nokia will take over the market. You look at newspapers and you see that there are just a few unpopular articles about that. Here you have a jackpot, and with a high probability, you will earn some money.

Bonds are good, even if they don’t cover inflation

Don’t use futures, options, and other instruments if you have not read books about that.

Never gamble. The stock market is not a place to try your luck. I, an investor, will be very pleased if you will gamble because you lose your capital, and probably I will own the money you lost.

Instead of Casino, in the stock market, you can lower your risks without losing returns. In the long run you will be profitable

The stock market is about psychology in the short run, and about numbers in the long run. It is hard to predict the stock price within a quarter or half of a year. You don’t know what happens in such a period of time. You may learn about the situation in a company by reading the company’s reports or news. Reports are usually shown each quarter and annuity. they represent the real situation in a company with all numbers etc. I recommend reading Global financial accounting and reporting to be a pro in analyzing the company’s reports.

News show the situation in a company in real-time, and each information affects the cost of a share. I used before this short-term strategy, and I was always stressed:

Invest for the long-time and don’t read news. You don’t want to spend your time

10% change in the company’s cost is not important. Don’t care about fluctuations of the stock. It can rise, fall tens of times per annuity. If you will take each fall into account, you will be stressed. You will get a habit to check the news about the market and each company all day long. And you have tens of companies in a portfolio. You will loose the ability to analyze the stocks and will only rely on news and graphs. If don’t want to have such problems, invest in ETF.

Invest in ETF. Exchange-Traded Funds are managing the capital, that investors bring to them. They decide on which stock (or other instruments) to hold, buy, sell. The Funds take a commission for the service in exchange for you patience. The Funds don’t guarantee a profit, therefore you need to know to whom to give your money. You may do it the same way as with companies, by analyzing their reports. Don’t forget, that the huge returns in the past don’t guarantee profit in future. Take an example of Cathie Wood, the manager of Ark Innovation ETF. She went from 50 in 2019, to 100 in 2020, to 130 in 2021, and to 60 in 2022. As you see, if you invested even in 2020, you would have lost 40% of investments, even though she had 30-100% of annual returns in the past.

Expect an unexpected. Humans make decisions in politics and business. Sometimes, people take wrong decisions and do stuff that they were not supposed to. Even a small thought or event, like a traffic jam, may affect the final decision. You cannot predict such events. But they happen often. That is why the even the algorithms can’t get huge profit

Power and information are compensated with a size. Big investment funds and banks know much more about investing: they have educated employees, networking, fast processors, and data. However, the investment banks are huge and they invest billions of dollars. But how do they invest?

As you know, on the stock market, people put their request to buy or sell a defined amount of stock for the exact price. If the requests to buy and sell are identical, the exchange happens. You see all of the available requests for exact stock in a “bucket”.

As you see, there are not so many offers, it is rarely bigger than 1 million dollars. If you are a small investor, it is easy to buy stock for the market price. But what if you are a big company and you need to invest 100 million dollars for that price? Obviously, the demand will be so huge, and the supply will be low, so the price must go up. A dumb manager will try to sell the stock for higher and higher prices because he has to invest fast. That is why price

What services to use

SimplyWall.St gives basic information of any company from reports. SimplyWall.St also compares a company with competitors and the market. It even shows the fair value of a company, that I don’t recommend to take seriously into account.

Wolfstreet.pro is similar to SimplyWall.St, but provides more information with beautiful minimalist design.

Yahoo Finance provides all the graphs of the cost of companies. I download CSV file with prices of stocks to use it with my code, that I write on R or Python.

Statista provides statistics about anything you want. It is free for students as far as I know.

Bloomberg terminal is a powerful tool to analyze companies that cost nearly 5000€ per year. But if you a student, you may ask your university whether they have this subscription. For example, the Vienna University of Economics has such a subscription.

Stomp It Tutorials explains every movement you have to learn to obtain a skill. This channel also has excellent video quality. The great thing is that the instruction is not just showing how to do jumps himself, he also teaches his snowboarder friend how to ski. Check out his video about jumps.