Ethan Bloch › Comments

"Hi Jeremiah, Thank you for the mention re: Flowtown. Super humbled. We also think we're doing some innovative things around good 'ol traditional email i.e. social discovery, multiple levels of engagement (email, social, live push chat) and detailed tracking to help measure ROI. Really pumped for what the future holds!" - Ethan Bloch

"Agree re: reputation from inside of Facebook. But having stats i.e. when I share a piece of content = this much engagement is powerful. This is more influence than rep. based. Thoughts?" - Ethan Bloch

"On the topic of measuring influence on Fbook, anyone see anything / tools / apps trying to do this? There's a ton for Twitter (makes sense with the liberal API and all), but have you seen anything re: measuring influence, reach and reputation on Facebook?" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Joe, Thank you! And be sure to stay tuned ;) Cheers. Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Joel, Thank you for your feedback, it really means a lot. I would love to bring back the landing page tool "new and better" once we have the resources to allocate to it. Ping me via. email ethan (at) flowtown (dot) com and I'll be sure to keep you personally updated re: progress. Cheers. Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Andy, Amazing feedback!! thank you :) We're going to be doing some really exciting things around the follow-up marketing space from within Flowtown, so stay tuned. P.S. Would love to chat via. phone and get your feedback re: new features and roadmap. Feel free to send me an email and we'll connect - ethan (at) flowtown (dot) com Cheers. Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Thank you for the support Chris! Cheers. Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Thank you for sharing. We're also about to roll back 3+ months of dev work :) #3 and 4 totally resonate. Before we started building our upcoming iteration I went out and showed it to 20+ potential customers. They all gave us tremendous feedback and the confidence to actually start building. I love your thoughts around #3. I explain it as prioritizing the roadmap based on optimizing for revenue. When you start thinking like this all decision making become a lot easier. I believe it was the founder and/or CEO of Southwest who once said, I have the easiest job in the world, whenever a decisions comes across my desk I just ask myself one question 'Is this going to help make us the lowest cost carrier?'" - Ethan Bloch

"Bravo! In full agreement across the board. It always bothered me that Get Satifaction requires you to register in order give feedback. I guess they figure if you care enough you'll register. Which via. web is doable via. iPhone, "forget about it"" - Ethan Bloch

"It's awesome! Definitely share your thoughts when you're finished." - Ethan Bloch

"Thanks for fleshing this out. You are dead-on. However I do think a focus on both, the business of value extraction & value creation, is important. There are lots of ways to add/create value which may never translate into a profitable businesses. Finding that right mix (i.e. Walmart "everyday low prices, our margins are 3.5% but we move close to half a billion in product each year, so we're making bank") is crucial to the long term viability of any business. Thoughts?" - Ethan Bloch

"Thanks Vanessa. You're totally on-point. And once you have a system that works you just turn up the traffic dial... monitoring quality and conversation rates of course :) Cheers, Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Elaine, To start, the best approach is to see what is working for other people is similar businesses. Once you mimic their best practices it's all about tweaking and testing. We'll be sure to queue up some future blog posts elaborating on this. Cheers, Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Awesome post. Great way to flesh out this concept i.e. what startups should be focusing on, a la their true north. Cheers, Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Andrew, In regards to college finance I would take a look at my friends http://www.hackcollege.com/ they don't solely focus on finance, but they do discuss it. In addition it's an all around great blog for college students. Feel free to send me any direct questions at ethan (at) thewaytobuildwealth.org Cheers, Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Thanks Adrian! Unfortunately TWTBW is on permanent hiatus :( However, feel free to send me any questions re: past episodes at ethan (at) thewaytobuildwealth.org Cheers, Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Pavel, A big thanks to you for your support. Please see the comment above. Cheers, Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Thai, That really means a lot. Super humbling. Thanks so much for your support! Unfortunately TWTBW is on permanent hiatus. I hope to find the time to being it back soon. Or at least do some additional episodes that I've been wanting to produce. I'm grateful to have been able to, at the very least, share some fundamental insights that most people can prosper from. Until next time :) Cheers, Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

Google webmaster blog is well-known as reputable: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ - Matt Cutts

now if you have a CIALS site the above would be like a fart in a Gail,not much of an impression. - tomartomartini

"Hi sfkid, Glad you've been enjoying the videos. We will eventually discuss buying individual stocks. However it may not be for a little while. I've recently had some pressing personal issues (nothing bad... actually quite good). I will be release a video soon to update everyone. Thanks for your patience and understanding! Cheers. Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi David, Thanks for the great comment. You definitely bring up a valid point. The long term success of Index Funds rests on the premise that there will still be dollars invested in individual assets directly outside of the world of Index Funds. If all investable dollars in the world were Indexed you are right, it would cause quite a problem. However an everybody indexing scenario is highly improbable because trader and investors alike will surely take advantage off the of arbitrageur opportunity or in other words the value / price discrepancy opportunity created from the mass herding into Indexed assets and this would most likely bring back some form of market equilibrium. Furthermore it really isn't worth worrying about the world indexing. The total amount of invested dollars that are Indexed pales in comparison to total invested dollars. You also have to remember that even the total amount of invested dollars in Index funds, is in a wide variety of assets and asset classes. Not..." - Ethan Bloch

"Hey J-man, LOL, gnarly skin disease was a perfect description :) Vimeo's been acting weird lately, maybe it has something to do with all the updates they've been pushing live to the site. Thanks for the heads-up though! We are re-compressing the video and updating the Vimeo upload. Cheers. Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Thai! I think that looks great. Quite a simple portfolio. I should note there are both Tax Deferred retirement accounts (Traditional IRA) and Tax Free Retirement Accounts (Roth IRA). See the rest of my notes below: (3) If you had to, you could loose the Treasury Bond Fund, in the tax-deferred account. Not really necessary since you'll have Treasury debt exposure through VMMXX. Maybe replace with TIPS fund, new episode covering them in detail coming out Wednesday. (4) It's not tax deferred money market fund, just Tax-Free :) An answer to your final question is difficult due to the word reasonable. All of the small cap stocks are included in a TSM fund, the thing is they account for a small percentage allocation of the portfolio because they have such small market caps. The S 500 alone accounts for about 80% of all stock market value in the United States. The other 4500 securities account for just 20%. Which means in a Total Market Fund your direct exposure to Small Caps is minimal,..." - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Nick! Don't hate us, but we stopped all the of themed days. When we went back and looked at past episodes we noticed that the themes were taking up a too much time, sometimes 3-4 minutes. That just doesn't make sense when we're trying to keep the entire episode in the 5-6 minute range. I definitely miss them, but it's for the best. Cheers. Ethan R.I.P. Themed days :(" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Axels, that is totally understandable, the majority of people are allergic to volatility; we humans are extremely emotional when it comes to our money. However, I would like to point out that you don't actually lose money during a market downturn unless you actually sell your investments during the downturn. Having said that, it is important you are not buying broad based index funds at market heights either, and you can avoid that through a Dollar Cost Averaging program ( see here http://www.thewaytobuildwealth.org/2008......). Spending a lot of time and energy worrying about 'paper losses' on broad based index funds is a waste. Furthermore downturns usually create real opportunity to buy additional slices of corporations at discount prices. I would like to share two solutions to your allergies toward 'volatility' . (1) Put your psychology in check and adjust your temperament to handle turbulence. Understand that by owning a broad based Index Fund you own everything, so..." - Ethan Bloch

"Thanks J-Man. I think the 120 age ruled (for those who don't know, it's where you subtract your age from 120 and that is the percentage of stocks you should hold in your portfolio), is easy and is a relatively good guidance stick. However I think money held in a money market fund should not be included in this estimation. You should always have a well funded money market fund even at age 25. Furthermore this guideline starts to get a bit risky the older you get i.e. above age 60. I think a more important question in your case, is how many funds are you holding in that 401k? Cheers. Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Anytime Thai! Cheers. Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

Moonraker - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Pavel, I'm not sure I totally understand your question. Can you be more a little clear? Furthermore I'm that versed in regards to the volatility and movement of markets and or what cause Index Funds have on market volatility. If you can be a little clearer I'd be happy to find you an answer. Cheers. Ethan" - Ethan Bloch

"Hi Thai! You were correct in your assessment of me being pressed for time. I used the term bandwidth in regards to my personal time and attention, not as literal bandwidth limitations from my video providers, sorry for the confusion. There are no good excuses, but I want to make maintain high quality content and right now for that to happen I have to scale back a little bit. As I always say, THANKS a TON for your support! Cheers. Ethan" - Ethan Bloch