Things I Thunked #1

Hello and welcome to my “snazzy” newsletter. This will most likely not be a very regular thing as I don’t have the time, the motivation or frankly, enough skill to keep even a goldfish entertained for the full length of their attention span.

I’m probably going to end up writing about random things I enjoy, have learned or projects I am currently working on in an attempt to improve my writing skills. If anyone enjoys this crap, I’ll call it a success.

I have been teaching myself a lot more about SEO over the last couple of months to help with projects both in and out of my day job and have come across some cool things in the process.

First thing I’ve learned is how awesome Ahref’s is and how it’s insanely useful for seeing how your website is performing on search engines.

As you can see, it’s pointed out quite nicely how appalling my personal website is; makes sense as I’ve only started to focus on SEO recently.

Another thing I’ve picked up is how hard it is to get referring domains as an incredibly boring individual. I don’t have anything in the slightest bit interesting to say and hence no one would want to feature me in anything.

If you haven’t been keeping up with Crypto, some pretty insane news came out yesterday.

Mastercard, the massive global payments company, has unveiled that it is likely to start offering cryptocurrency payments through its network this year!

Crypto currency is currently held by about 4% of UK adults, around 1.9 million people, which is way too low I think (I definitely recommend reading Blockchain revolution if you are looking to find out more or are struggling to see the vast benefits of blockchain). Whereas Mastercard is used by a much larger percentage of the population, up into the 10’s of millions. Bringing crypto to the masses like this is a massive step forward in the mass adoption of blockchain tech.

It’s great news and something that is much needed in the financial sector which, due to its lack of innovation over the last 20 years, is far behind where it should be.

What are your thoughts on Rolls-Royce as a mid to long term hold?

I recently bought a few hundred shares as I believe it’s fundamentally the same company it was back when its stock price was around £10 per share. Although its aeronautics division has dwindled due to obvious reasons, I believe as soon as travel is allowed again, they could see a big jump back to where they were before.

Kind of relating to Rolls-Royce, I’ve recently learned about rights issues which Rolls-Royce went through a couple of months ago. I won’t explain it here as it’s still something I’m learning about myself but here’s a pretty cool article on it.

Last week I managed to finish my 4th book of 2021, ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’s Retire Young Retire Rich’. I thought it was pretty good but with the Rich Dad series I think there are a few great ideas and then a lot of waffle about them.

The book mainly focusses on using leverage to get richer and richer with less and less work. Leverage that can be calculated using leverage ratios. It also spoke a lot about expanding your context and content from a ‘poor-persons’ context to a ‘rich-persons’ context.

The book did open my eyes to a lot of things and has definitely added to my desire of getting onto the property ladder sooner rather than later to hopefully start bringing in rental income.

Recently I’ve turned a spreadsheet I was using pretty consistently into a product on Gumroad. I thought that if it was useful for me maybe someone else would find it useful as well. I would love to know what you think of it.

In other random news for myself, I have recently taken on a couple of projects outside of my day job. One of those is Homemigo which I now own a part of. I’m going to be working a lot on the tech side of things; website dev, SEO and potentially down the line some in-house API’s.

Ignore how the site looks for now, I will be changing almost all of it in the next few weeks!

In Very Very Random news, I’ve recently really got into audio equipment and as such bought myself the FiiO btr5; this thing is incredible. I wouldn’t say I have very good headphones but with this they sound amazing. Less feedback, better soundstage and just an all-round more levelled sound.

The btr5 is primarily a Bluetooth DAC and AMP but can also be used plugged in. A DAC unpacks digital audio data and turns it into an audio signal. Something cool about the btr5 is that it has a balanced audio output which improves the sound quality by using negative and positive polarity audio signals to cancel out noise.

That was probably the worst description of what balanced audio is so here’s a link to a good article on it.

On reflection this was quite fun to write. I like that I can put down random things and maybe do summaries of my week or talk about some ideas I have around investing.

I’ve got some ideas for more articles so maybe I’ll give this a go for a month if one person actually enjoys reading this then maybe I’ll continue. If not, I’ll still write them but just not share them.