doug hornig Archives - INO.com Trader's Blog

Is There Wisdom in the Crowd?

Posted on November 17, 2012 by The INO.com Team

Back in the 1960s, a clever but financially disadvantaged fellow placed a small ad in a national magazine that read something like: Money needed. Please send $1 to the address below. Do it today! No specific need was given, and nothing was promised in return, so that fraud could not later be charged.

Yet within a few months, thousands of dollars arrived in his mailbox, a considerable sum in those days. Or so the urban legend goes.

P2P Money

A half-century later, many things have changed, but one thing remains unchanged: People still need money, and they have not ceased to innovate ways in which to get it.

We have written extensively in this space about many of the P2P Internet connections that are transforming the planet... in commerce, in education, in the job market, and with business and social networking. The list of possibilities is truly endless. For yet another example, the world of money has been given a Red-Bull jolt by a fast-growing phenomenon known as "crowdfunding." Continue reading "Is There Wisdom in the Crowd?" →

What's Going on in CRM?

Posted on October 30, 2012October 30, 2012 by The INO.com Team

By Doug Hornig, Casey Research

In Mike Judge's wicked 1999 satire of corporate culture, Office Space, there's a delightful character named Milton. Poor Milton. He's all but invisible. No one likes him, no one talks to him, and coworkers are forever stealing his stapler. Management doesn't notice him enough to fire him. Instead, Milton is shunted from desk to desk, each time losing more of that precious commodity denoted by the film's title, until he finally winds up alone in the basement, where he plots the delicious revenge he'll take on the company.

In times past, customer relations staffs were where the Miltons of the world most likely landed. If you couldn't do anything else, you could probably listen to phone complaints all day. No one wanted to, but somebody had to do it. And so they did, until they went mad from boredom or frustration.

That was then. Today, there's a new shine on customer relations departments, and the field has earned itself a fresh, glossy title and a widely recognized abbreviation: customer relations management, or CRM. And it's become an integral part of the SaaS (software as a service) industry. Continue reading "What's Going on in CRM?" →

How to Navigate an Economy Weighed Down by Government Meddling and Cronyism

Posted on September 24, 2012 by The INO.com Team

By Doug Hornig, Casey Research

If you wanted to sum up the just-concluded Casey Research/Sprott Inc. Summit titled Navigating the Politicized Economy, you could say "The situation is hopeless but not serious."

More than 20 speakers – many of them world-renowned financial experts and best-selling authors – gathered in Carlsbad, CA, from September 7 to 9 to ascertain exactly how hopeless, and what investors can do to protect themselves.

Casey Chief Economist Bud Conrad reconfirmed – with a blizzard of charts and graphs – that the ship of state is still heading for a fiscal iceberg… and that iceberg looms closer by the day.

The US national debt has far outpaced the government's ability to pay it off. It's unsustainable – and made continuously worse by the Federal Reserve, which pushes more and more debt onto its balance sheet, blowing up an ever-bigger bubble. And with the recent announcement of QE3 – read "money-printing without any limits" – Conrad thinks the resulting pop! will be one that will make the entire globe's ears ring. Continue reading "How to Navigate an Economy Weighed Down by Government Meddling and Cronyism" →