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Fc Barcelona Vs. Real Madrid Matches Through A Cules Eyes

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Fondly called the “El Classico”, the matches between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona in Spain is one of the fiercest clashes between rivals. To understand the importance of these matches, one should understand the history behind both these clubs. It is not simply a clash between two of the biggest clubs in Spain; but to many it is still a clash between the oppressor and the suppressor. FC Barcelona is iconic for every Catalan. Barcelona might be in Spain but the Catalans prefer to be out of the fold. If you ever visit Barcelona you would be surprised to see a higher status to the Catalan language than Spanish.

The rivalry between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid grew to unimaginable proportion during the era of Dictator Franco. Franco banned the use of Catalan language and hence the matches at Barcelona became the perfect place for Catalans to take their protest to international level. FC Barcelona became true to their identity “More Than A Club” with its progressive ideas. Real Madrid was considered the hot bed of power and was associated with Franco. The rivalry was intensified during the 1950s when the clubs disputed the signing of Alfredo Di Stefano. Di Stefano had impressed both Barcelona and Real Madrid whilst playing for Club Deportivo Los Millonarios in Bogota, during a players’ strike in his native Argentina. Both Madrid and Barcelona attempted to sign him and, due to confusion had emerged due to the di Stefano moving to Millonarios from River Plate due to the strike, as both clubs claimed to own his registration. Subsequently, both FC Barcelona and Real Madrid believed that they had signed him. After intervention from the Spanish FA Barcelona backed down and di Stefano moved to Madrid; rumour remains that Barca were forced to act by Franco, but Madrid maintained that they acted voluntarily. Di Stefano became integral in the subsequent success achieved by the Madrid, scoring twice in his first game against Barcelona. With him, Madrid won the initial five European Champions Cup competitions. The 1960s saw the rivalry reach the European stage when they met twice at the European Cup, Real Madrid winning in 1960 and FC Barcelona winning in 1961.

Head on head Real Madrid leads FC Barcelona by 68 to 59. There has been 30 draws in the El Classico till date. The El classico were made fiercer with players defecting from FC Barcelona to Real Madrid. The reception got for Figo when he visited Camp Nou is a prime example. El Classico is a prime business strategy for both these clubs – FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. At the current time, El Classico is nothing more than a marketing strategy for both the team. But still tempers rises with the approach of an El Classico. The Catalan and Madrid based media trumps up the adrenaline every time an El Classico approaches. May be a clash between Pakistan and India could match the match between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. But no rivalry at Club level especially in Europe matches this mega event.

Nike’s Core Values And Business

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A company”s core philosophy has the power to influence, inspire, and challenge employees on a daily basis. Nike, being the progressive company they are, employs an emergent strategy, “one that originates in the interaction of an organization with its environment.” Our CEO Les Kollegian and President Charlie Van Vechten both believe strongly in Nike”s philosophy not only because of the great success it has garnered Nike and their products, but also because of the continuous call to creativity and innovation it facilitates. In fact, Les often quotes the Nike core purpose “experiencing the emotion of winning and crushing your competition” when educating businesses on the importance of a business core purpose to develop the foundation of a brand promise and value proposition. Also, we”re not sure if Nike”s talented creative agency Weiden Kennedy was a part of developing these principles, but we wouldn”t be surprised. Anyway”I digress. Here are the 11 Nike Maxims.

1. “It is our nature to innovate.” The company sees innovation as one of its core organizational competencies.

2. “Nike is a company.”

3. “Nike is a brand.” The “swoosh” logo is instantly recognizable around the world. Nike sees this as the symbol of its global leadership. It will enter only those markets that it thinks it can dominate. It says: “lf we can”t lead it, we don”t need it.”

4. “Simplify and go.” Nike products have short life-cycles in terms both of technology and fashion. The company believes that making quick yet skilful decisions is key to its success. This aspect of Nike”s vision, together with the seventh maxim, is particularly powerful in articulating the company”s hugely successful use of emergent strategy.

5. “The consumer decides.” The company is keenly aware of the sophistication of its customers and it treats them as its key stakeholder.

6. “Be a sponge.” Employees at Nike are encouraged to be curious and open to new ideas, whatever their source.

7. “Evolve immediately.” Nike sees itself as being in perpetual motion””viewing change as a key source of innovation. This attitude can easily be observed in the wide range of products that Nike offers its consumers. It is another example of the company”s use of emergent strategy to good effect.

8. “Do the right thing.” Nike thinks of itself as a responsible global citizen, embracing the stakeholder view of corporate social responsibility. It encourages its people to be honest and transparent and to promote diversity and sustainability.

9. “Master the fundamentals.” All the innovation in the world is useless if you can”t put it into action. A crucial part of Nike”s success is its ability to refine its performance””the recent growth in profits suggests that it”s achieving this.

10. “We are on the offense””always.” To stay ahead in an extremely competitive environment, Nike urges its people to act like leaders in their field to achieve victory.

11. “Remember the Man.” The late Bill Bowerman is still held in high esteem throughout Nike, both for his understanding of athletes” needs and for his innovative spirit. (Jerome Payne, www.cbsmoneywatch.com).”

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A Safe Simple Successful Etf Investment Strategy

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Let’s get started by concentrating on the S&P 500 – it is intrinsically an index of the 500 largest companies in America. Indeed, it is more. Contrary to popular misconception, the S&P 500 is not a simple list of the largest 500 companies by market capitalization or by revenues.

Rather, it is 500 of the most widely held U.S.-based common stocks, chosen by the S&P Index Committee for market size, liquidity, and sector representation. “Leading companies in leading industries” is the guiding principal for S&P 500 inclusion. We are starting here to achieve safety and diversity.

If you use the S&P 500 as your investment base you won’t have to worry if the CEO has resigned, the CFO has just been indicted, the stock has missed its forecast or any number of things that make stock prices flagellate unsuspecting investors and traders.

You ask: How can you make money investing on the S&P 500?

Consider its graph, the white, bottom most curve on the chart. As you can see, the S&P 500 goes up and down similar to stocks and hasn’t done so well over the past 3 years.

Wouldn’t we do better with a mutual fund? [Actually, you’re getting warmer.]

According to the Motley Fool, “During the 1990s, the S&P 500 has provided an annualized return of 17.3%, compared with just 13.9% for the average diversified mutual fund.” Over the past 3 years only 10 mutual funds had more than a 12% total return [data through 6/4/2010 from 12,392 funds, Morningstar]. You can see that the S&P 500 has not done well, but you would have actually done worse using mutual funds.

Instead of considering mutual funds I’m going to restrict our consideration to just two ETFs, i.e., SSO and SDS. I said simple; this is simple.

We’re going to invest in SSO when the market is rising and SDS when it’s falling. Both SSO and SDS are based on the S&P 500. They track its traded index, SPX. [You have to trade SPX because the S&P 500 is an index that isn’t traded.] The SPX is among the most traded equities and is also one of the most liquid. As an investment it brings diversification.

SSO and SDS are mirrors of each other. Whenever SSO rises the SDS falls, and vice versa. This allows us to trade in rising and falling markets. Simply, pick the correct ETF.

These ETFs have one other unusual property. They move twice the speed of the SPX; they are leveraged 2 to 1. [Proshares has a number of similarly behaving ETFs. They are called Ultra ETFs.]

You said: This would be a safe investment strategy! These are leveraged! Isn’t it safer to invest in sound American stocks?

Rather than give a large list of recently failed stocks, I decided to find if there were any stocks among the current S&P 500 that I would like to have held over the past 3 years. Only 2 emerged, Family Dollar and Autozone. More than 15% of the S&P 500 had more than a 75% draw-down and an additional 35% had losses over 50% at some time during the 3 years. These statistics do not include companies like Enron and Lehman that are no longer included. If they were included these statistics would be much higher.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not much of a stock picker. I want something truly safe. If you are comfortable with your results trading stocks, don’t bother reading further.

What about investing in utilities?

When I began investing, my Dad told me that utilities were always a safe investment. They paid a good dividend that never went down. Their customer base is locked in. Their rates are determined by the states and these always increase. What could be safer?

During the last 3 years, Duke Energy fell over 40% from a high of 20.66 to a low of 12.39. Over the same period, the index of gas utilities had a high of 33.84 and a low of 20.11. Electric utilities fared worse falling from a high of 40.01 to a low of 20.85. Even utilities don’t look safe anymore.

From my point of view, it’s the story of the turtle and the hare. Stocks behave like the hare. You cannot predict in which direction they are going to run.

These two ETFs, SSO and SDS, in comparison are turtles; admittedly turtles with racing stripes. At this point we do not have anything more than a rough plan for investing in the S&P 500. This is not enough to qualify as an investment strategy.

We shall begin to upgrade this plan into a practical trading strategy. First, we need an unbiased indicator to determine on which ETF we should place our money, SSO or SDS. Any day, the majority of pundits on CNBC will tell you the market is going to rise. But on the same day, many of their pundits will provide reasons why it will fall. So, you cannot rely on them. Also, the Futures, prior to the Open, seem no more reliable for choosing either SSO or SDS.

After many years of trying, I developed a market timer that combines the market movement of the SPX with market sentiment. I call this the SPXTimer. There are many market timers available. I’ll let you be the judge which to choose.

They are invaluable for making a well guided decision about which ETF to select. Mine gives you three choices. When it’s bullish take SSO; bearish SDS and when it’s neutral stay in cash. What could be simpler?

The red curve, third from the top judging from the right hand side of the chart, shows the results of trading SSO and SDS from 9/12/2007 until 5/5/2010 only using the SPXTimer. $10,000 invested on 9/12/2007 grew to $13,737. Most investors and funds didn’t do that well over this difficult period.

I think you will agree, these results are not very good in terms of what you would hope to achieve. Look at the yellow oval in the middle the graph. During that interval of time, the investment fell from a high of $14,469 down to $11,158. That’s a big hit. We would like to sleep well at night; that fall would make sleep very difficult.

Sometimes these ETFs do not move in sync with the market timer. A little patience is required before charging into the market. I added a mild momentum constraint to the strategy to ensure the entry is in sync with the timer. The ETF’s momentum, not necessarily the price, is required to be rising over 2 days. [A service bureau provides me with this information.] Sometimes this constrains delays entry for several days.

The blue curve provides the results of adding this constraint. Here, based solely on the S&P 500, my market timer and an entry constraint, the $10,000 investment grew smoothly to 16,525. That’s over 20% per year! There were pull backs, but you could sleep soundly.

I was still concerned with giving back profits. After each big run-up in profit, it seemed there was a comparably big pull back. Many investment managers recommend adding to a position as it is rising in value.

I decided to try subtracting from the position size as the profit rises. If timed properly, this might reduce the amount of profit given back. Plus, it would reduce the risk while adding some of the profit to the bank. To do this, I decided to incorporate the following Money Management with the two strategies that were in place.

Say you started with $10,000. The idea is to keep the money at risk between $9,000 and $11,000 [+/- 10% of the initial investment].

Whenever your equity grows over $11,000 sell enough shares to withdraw $1,000. This should reduce your money at risk to under $11,000. The next time it appreciates over $11,000, do it again.

If, on the other hand, the investment falls below $9,000 add $1,000 worth to the ETF investment.

The results are remarkable. This investment, the yellow, top-most curve, grew to $17,780. That’s close to 30% annually; not bad for a turtle! The chart doesn’t show this statistic, but 75% of these trades were winners.

I repeated this test on three more broad based indexes: the Nasdaq 100, S&P Mid-Cap 400 and the Russell 2000 changing only the two ETFs. Each did better. The statistics of these investments, starting on 9/12/2007 with $10,000 and ending on 5/5/2010, are shown in the table below. All data is based on back-testing, not actual trades.

The basic plan: buy one of these ETFs when bullish and the inverse ETF when bearish, or stay out of the market in cash, is as simple as it can get. The SPXTimer brings order and safety to the investment because you know whether to buy the bullish ETF or the bearish ETF. The entry condition, combined with this money management strategy, will improve your investment results beyond what you might hope to achieve with stocks or mutual funds – with much less risk. Now isn’t that what you wanted all along?

Footnote
You may be wondering about the choice of dates; particularly since on 5/6/2010 the Dow fell over 1000 points in less than a half hour. Many of these ETFs were first introduced in 2006 and 2007. As a result, data was not collected for the SPXTimer prior to mid 2007. The start date corresponded to the first change to a bullish signal. On 5/5/2010 the timer signaled a close for all bullish positions. Prices in the table reflect the Open of 5/6/2010.

Forecasting Tent And Marquee Hire Sales

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Predicting possible sales for your Tent and Marquee Hire business is a very worthy process; you should have a strong idea before you commence your business of your likely sales. It is doubtful you will be right on the money but if you do not make a realistic attempt your Tent and Marquee Hire business will likely not succeed; forecasting is an essential component to your business stratgey.

Your sales forecast is the financial projection of the quantity of revenue your Tent and Marquee Hire business will create from the sales of its products or services. Your sales forecast can stand alone, but it will be closely connected to your Tent and Marquee Hire business plan. It is an essential and fundamental piece of the planning process and it will be a major part of your profit and loss account and cash flow forecast.

So why do you need to forecast sales?

It is needed so you can

1. Plan cash flow – that you will need to include in your business plan when seeking funding, and to avoid out of the blue cash flow problems by establishing if and when you will need to inject capital or have access to funds.
2. Manage Cash flow – central to the success of your business, it is essential that you recognize how sales forecasting contributes to the computation of the cash flow forecast.
3. Plan future resource requirements – for example, the quantity of personnel needed to manage your orders and provide a certain level of service.
4. Plan marketing activities – and the consequent fiscal strategies arising from these.

Whatever the situation, it is critical that you investigate your expected sales frequently and realistically, and take proper action to re-examine your strategy. Your sales forecast is the standard alongside which you should frequently quantify what truly happens in your business in terms of sales and the important thing is to recognize the variances and why they transpire, and to incorporate what you have learned into yet to come forecasts.

So what do you need to consider?

It’s usually considered you should look to the next 3 years of your Tent and Marquee Hire business for your sales forecasts – the first year being detailed on a monthly basis

Things to think about

1. Are there any related products or services already being provided in the region?
2. What is the extent of the market?
3. Is this an growing/contracting market and if so; by what percentage?
4. What are the major factors that are at this time influencing that market?
5. What may well affect it in future?
6. Is your business cyclic?
7. What trends or fashions are appropriate to the sector?

Who are your customers going to be?

1. What percentage will purchase?
2. Will they desert a different supplier to come to you?
3. What is your pricing strategy and how will it affect sales?
4. Can you actually supply the products and services that you are predicting?
5. How many other businesses like yours are out there?
6. It’s not likely your business is the only one of its kind – what happens to your customers when fresh businesses enter the market?

You must be transparent about how your products or/and services match the marketplace. Practically every business has some competitor(s) – how can you hoover up your competitors customers? How can you prevent your competitors taking your customers? Just how adaptable with regard to pricing and the assortment of products or services to be had can you be?

Preparing your Tent and Marquee Hire business forecast

All Tent and Marquee Hire businesses need to base their forecasts on certain assumptions regarding potential changes that may take place in the future. These can be quantified and could include:

1. Sector growth/decline by a certain percentage e.g. 5%.
2. Staff increase to increase production or sales – maybe 25%.
3. Different location – more customers – 30% increase in sales.

Preparing your forecast

You should prepare a sales forecast for each product you sell,and forecast:

1. By volume
2. By value
3. By a combination of both volume and value.

So what are the pitfalls when forecasting sales?

1. Make sure your forecast is based on certifiable,realistic and unbiased information.
2. Do not be tempted to pay no attention to your research if it showed bad results.
3. Don’t make predictions only on historical results. Keep looking at what else might impinge on your sales in the future and amend your forecast appropriately.
4. Understand what volume of goods you can produce. Can you produce the amount of sales being forecast with the equipment,personnel and financial resources available to you?
5. Are your prices realistic?, or conversely, have the prices been set too low down or too high so that either way your forecast is potentially unrealistic?
6. If you have just started up in business, your business may take longer than you imagine to get established, and have you set accordingly realistic sales targets?
7. Have you allowed for the possibility that high sales based on an opening promotional surge may drop off, leading to a need for more intensive marketing and higher ongoing expenses once initial interest has peaked?
8. Can you identify and justify the assumptions you have made in reaching the forecast, and explain them to interested parties if necessary?

Business Strategy Tips For Telemarketing

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It is always important to keep track of and have a good business strategy. This is very true for the direct marketing industry as well as telemarketing. The goal of these strategies is to get people to purchase the largest number of products possible.

The strategy chosen to bring about this goal is what can make a business survive or fail. For telemarketing, there are usually two strategies of direct marketing that are used to sell products.

The traditional strategy for telemarketing is set up much like any other call center. The companies practice direct marketing services, and try and get people to purchase their products. Each telemarketer calls a list of people and tries to convince them to purchase whatever product the telemarketing firm is selling.

There are two main categories to traditional telemarketing: business to business and business to consumer. Each call center is set up into four main segments, depending on the kind of job being done.

The lead generation gathers the information about potential customers and targets the best people to call for the particular product that the company is selling. The sales team tries to sell the product in the most persuasive way possible.

The outbound callers solicit people through cold calling and the inbound phone people handle the requests for orders and other such matters. This system of database marketing has worked for many years, but the recent legislation, which is designed to stop telemarketers, has had a major effect on the traditional telemarketing system.

The traditional format of outbound telemarketing has had to change with the new laws surrounding telemarketing jobs. A lot of these telemarketing companies are incorporating the internet into their new business practices. The call center services of the past are changing into the virtual call center services of the present.

These centers allow companies to hire people from home, saving building costs as well as being able to pay home business workers a reduced salary. This is a very popular business strategy for telemarketing companies. Other companies are abandoning the call centers and are moving on to other marketing ideas altogether.

One of these areas is internet marketing, and many businesses are having great success with it. Still, it is impossible to know if online marketing will last forever or will fade into obscurity in just a few years.

The business strategy that is used for a business is quite important to the survival of the business. Traditional strategies are being changed to meet the demands of today’s society.

Internet marketing is a new way of doing telemarketing business. A virtual call center is a good way of bringing telemarketing into the future. Time will show if telemarketing will be around in the future or if these are its last days.

Visit Mike Selvon portal to learn more about telemarketing business strategy. Your feedback is much appreciated at our telemarketing training/a> blog where a free gift awaits you.