Author: Paul Costas

  • African Billionaire Mohammed Dewji Kidnapped in Dar Es Salaam

    African Billionaire Mohammed Dewji Kidnapped in Dar Es Salaam

    Mohammed Dewji, believed to be the youngest billionaire in Africa, was kidnapped during his regular gym visit in the early hours of Thursday, October 11, 2018. According to BBC Africa correspondent Athuman Mtulya, kidnappings in Tanzania are very rare, reporting:

    “Although Tanzania has seen a wave [of] attacks and abductions of opposition politicians and perceived government critics, this is the first time a businessman of Mr Dewji’s standing has been kidnapped in the country.”

    Arrests have been made and foreign nationals are understood to be involved in the kidnapping. But the whereabouts of “Mo” Dewji, are as yet unknown. Mohammed Dewji had driven himself to the gym at a luxury hotel in Dar Es Salaam when he was abducted around 6.30 am.

    Philanthropist Mohammed Dewji

    Like many mega-wealthy individuals, Dewji announced in 2016 that he would be giving away up to half of his assets to philanthropic causes. He set up the Mo Dewji foundation to help educate the children of Tanzania and provide affordable health care.

    “At the Mo Dewji Foundation we believe that education is the greatest gift you can give a person… The youth of Tanzania are our future and by improving and providing education we can build a better, brighter Tanzania for tomorrow.”

    Dewji served for 10 years as a politician before stepping down in 2015 and is something of a celebrity in Tanzania. In 2018, his wealth was estimated at $1.5 billion and he owns the MeTL group of companies.

    MeTL (Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited) was founded by Dewji’s father and he joined the business after graduating from Georgetown University in the USA. He majored in international business and finance, graduating in 1998.

    MeTL is the largest privately owned business in Tanzania with interests in manufacturing, import, export, financial services, farming, agriculture, telecoms, and real estate.

    Personal Safety

    MoneyMakers recently reported how US billionaires were fitting out their swanky pads in the Hamptons with luxury safe rooms, fearing they might be the target of gang violence.  Thus far, Dewji has been very open about his future engagements having recently taken to Twitter to promote the publication of his sister’s book.

    Politicians and celebrities are normally quite guarded about their future itineraries for fear of attack and now it seems entrepreneurs will also need to be more careful. No doubt his wife and children are praying for his swift and safe return.

    Featured image by Gonzalezbarbara.

  • Can Investors Benefit from Google Trends and Cryptocurrency Volatility?

    Can Investors Benefit from Google Trends and Cryptocurrency Volatility?

    With both traditional stocks and cryptocurrencies seeing steep price declines in the last 36 hours, an article recently written by Marc Howard caught my eye. In “How I Created a Bitcoin Trading Algorithm Using Sentiment Analysis With a 29% Return,” Howard provides a breakdown of how he built the bot.

    Using Google Trends, he obtained the data for the preceding 90 days for the terms “BTC USD” and “buy bitcoin.”

    Historically, cryptocurrencies have been much more volatile than traditional stocks, and Howard was hoping to use this to his advantage with readily available data from Google. He surmised that if people were searching for terms like “buy bitcoin” and “BTC USD” that market sentiment was good and the price of bitcoin was likely to rise, even from day to day.

    He combined this with an analysis of the price of bitcoin over the same 90-day period and set about building the bot with Excel. The results suggested that when the price had risen by more than $80 on the previous day and the ratio of the two terms “buy bitcoin” to “BTC USD” was more than 35%, it would be prudent to place a buy order and conversely sell when the opposite was true.

    Using Google Trends

    As Howard points out in the article, some of the parameters used, like the prior day price increase of $80, were fairly arbitrary so we thought we would verify the results and consider possible improvements for the bot.

    Howard had produced a paper gain of 29% over the 90 day period which compares favorably with a break even from either a daily buy and sell or HODL throughout the period.

    Can Investors Benefit From Google Trends and Cryptocurrency Volatility

    We built the Google Sheet above, which is available for download as a local Excel file, and it contains two worksheets, “Marc Howard” and “MoneyMakers”. The “MoneyMakers” worksheet was created before we contacted Howard with our findings, and rather than use the average daily closing price for bitcoin we used the Coinbase closing price.

    This was done on the basis that an average price is simply that, an average and an actual exchange price would be closer to reality. Coinbase is one of the biggest exchanges in the US, and we were able to pick up the closing prices with an API whereas Howard manually entered the average closing prices.

    In addition to the variances between Coinbase closing prices and average closing prices, we noticed that the Google Trends data in the original report produced by Howard was different from the data we had obtained.

    In some cases, the difference was relatively small, but on other days it was quite significant. A Google search confirmed that Google Trends data does vary and even modifying our IP address to various geographical locations didn’t help.

    Trading Bot Design

    As shown in the screenshot above, we were able to validate the results of a 29% return over the 90-day period by using identical data to Howard. Unfortunately, the bot is quite sensitive to small variances in the input data and using a similar methodology on the Coinbase exchange and accepting variances in Google Trends data would have given a break-even return.

    One major weakness in the original design of the bot, as highlighted by Vikram Urun, is that Google Trends doesn’t provide real-time data and is generally two days old, thus rendering the bot unusable.

    Howard is looking to enhance the bot in due course and acknowledged the time lag with Google Trends. As a workaround he suggested:

    “to change the timespan to Hourly then you can aggregate to a daily metric.“

    We commend the work carried out by Marc Howard and look forward to seeing his further iterations of the trading bot.

    Featured image from Shutterstock.

  • Britain’s Donald Trump Alan Sugar Returns for Season 14 of The Apprentice

    Britain’s Donald Trump Alan Sugar Returns for Season 14 of The Apprentice

    Opinionated, political, extremely wealthy, and hosting the popular television series in the US and the UK, The Apprentice links US President, Donald Trump, to the British equivalent, Sir Alan Michael Sugar. The 14th series of The Apprentice has just begun on British television with Alan Sugar again taking the leading role. Unlike the US version where President Trump stood down to “make America great again,” Sugar has been the ever-present host since the UK version began in 2005.

    The Apprentice (UK) sees Alan Sugar setting business-related tasks to a dozen or more aspiring “apprentices,” all eager to join his business empire. Contestants range from humble market traders to thriving entrepreneurs that have already made a name for themselves in business, but at a much lower level than they hope to achieve by joining up with “Sir Alan.”

    Week by week the contestants are whittled down until just one entrepreneur claims the £250,000 investment from Alan Sugar as equal partners in the business they recommend. Uniquely, the last series had joint winners as the host couldn’t decide between the two business proposals.

    Humble Beginnings for Alan Sugar and Politics

    President Trump, or plain Donald John Trump as he was then, took up the reins of his family’s real estate business before going on to become one of the world’s best-known entrepreneurs.

    Alan Sugar became a Lord in 2000 for his contribution to the explosion of low-cost personal computers in the 1980’s, but he is a self-made man, having been brought up in an apartment owned by the local authority before he built his business empire.

    Alan Sugar is a popular figure in the UK for different reasons to different people. For soccer fans, he was Chairman of popular Premier League, Tottenham Hotspur from 1991 to 2001. To computer enthusiasts in the 1980s and 1990s, he pioneered the development of cheap personal computers under the brand Amstrad and buying the rights to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, originally developed by Sir Clive Sinclair.

    To the wider general public, Sugar is best known for hosting The Apprentice on the BBC. But like President Trump, he also has a powerful political voice. Between 1997 and 2015 he was regarded as a Socialist being a fully paid-up member of the Labor party.

    His humble beginnings may have influenced his early political persuasion, but just after the 2015 General Election, which the Labor Party lost, he became “disillusioned” with the Party and left. By 2017 he had moved to the right and was supporting Conservative Theresa May in the General Election, which she went on to win.

    Sugar and Trump Billionaires

    Sugar and Trump have both joined the billionaires club, but they didn’t amass their fortunes before the age of 30 which is left to a very select group of fewer than ten individuals globally. Unlike President Trump, Sugar is not yet “running the country” and at the age of 71, it is probably unlikely that he will ever become the Prime Minister of the UK. Switching his allegiance from Socialist left to Conservative right probably also hampers his prospects of taking up the number one job.

    The similarities between these two entrepreneurial heavyweights are quite uncanny, with a few notable exceptions, and for most people, The Apprentice is their closest link. For budding entrepreneurs, following Sugar’s business decisions during the program can be quite insightful and selling part or all of any businesses you create is a tried and tested route to financial freedom.

    Featured Image by De Damien Everett, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16205713

  • Tweets by Entrepreneur, Elon Musk, Cost at Least $40 Million

    Tweets by Entrepreneur, Elon Musk, Cost at Least $40 Million

    With a net worth of $21.1 billion, Elon Musk is probably not too concerned about the substantial fine recently handed down by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). A few days ago the SEC broadcast a Press Conference to announce it had “charged Elon Musk, CEO and Chairman of Silicon Valley-based Tesla Inc., with securities fraud for a series of false and misleading tweets about a potential transaction to take Tesla private.”

    In early August 2018, Musk took to Twitter stating he had funding in place to take Tesla private, at $420 per share.

    The price quoted by Musk was significant for two reasons:

    • 420 is a term commonly used by marijuana users as the optimum time to smoke “pot,” i.e., 4:20 PM. Some Twitter users suggested that Musk may have been high on marijuana when he sent the Tweet.
    • More importantly for the SEC was that $420 was significantly higher than Tesla’s stock price and Musk hadn’t provided any evidence for the source of funding.

    An investigation for Securities fraud by the SEC would typically take months or even years. Within just two days of the Press Conference, the SEC announced: “Musk and Tesla have agreed to settle the charges against them without admitting or denying the SEC’s allegations.” The punishment for the handful of Tweets is $40 million, split equally between Musk and Tesla, plus Musk has to relinquish the role of Chairman for at least three years. Musk takes a salary of just one dollar per annum, as did the late Steve Jobs of Apple Inc, with most of his remuneration paid as stock options. Resigning as Chairman will probably result in reduced stock options even though Musk is also the CEO and Product Architect at Tesla.

    Elon Musk and the source of his wealth

    Elon was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971 to Maye and Erol Musk. His mother is well known as a model, and his father is a pilot, electromechanical engineer, and sailor. Musk taught himself computer programming before he was a teenager and moved to Canada at the age of 17 with just $2,000 before amassing sizable student debts. His first known business deal was the sale of his computer game, Blastar, for $500 at the tender age of 12. At the age of 27, he sold his 7% stake in Zip2, which he founded with his brother Kimbal in 1995. Zip2 was acquired by Compaq/Alta Vista/CMGi in the year 1999. Elon made $22 million and Kimbal made $15 million on the deal. With the proceeds from the sale of Zip2, he co-founded X.com which became what we know today as PayPal.

    Musk received $165 million for his Paypal stocks in 2002 when eBay acquired the business. Since 2002 he has gone on to build and invest in numerous companies, most notably SpaceX and Tesla. Today most of his wealth is derived from stock holdings of Tesla. He has made no secret of his annoyance at short sellers of Tesla stock. Some commentators have suggested the Tweets was his way of making investors think twice before shorting Tesla stocks.

    The road to financial independence

    Thus far Elon Musk has taken a tried and tested route to financial independence by building and buying income generating assets. We can’t all hope to nurture businesses that become household names like Tesla and SpaceX, but great wealth can still be achieved today from setting up a low-cost website or a smartphone app. If you are serious about creating financial independence for you and your family you might be interested in a couple of articles MoneyMakers published recently: