Sean Ongley

Tag: 2 Bulls

  • My Journey into Live Streaming with Dan Leeson

    My Journey into Live Streaming with Dan Leeson

    Watch out gang. Here we go. I’m about to get back into the podcasting universe. This is step one, and I asked a new podcaster on the scene and old friend, Dan Leeson from 2 Bulls in a China Shop to join me.

    My strategy is to rock some livestreams to gradually get my interview chops back up, to reinforce and rebuild an audience, while gradually working out the technical details involved with producing a professional podcast.

    Turning out to be more difficult than I had imagined. Podcasting standards are evolving into the 2.0 realm while webcams have become a standard practice in the space. There is a lot to learn since I had THRUPoint going, a standard audio program.

    It was as easy as pie to go live on Google Hangouts and immediately turn around a monetized video on YouTube, back in 2013. I did this once with Douglas Mallette. Since then, the whole process has been divided up and converted to premium features. I am no longer eligible for monetization with my piddly 578,000 total views and 283 subscribers. For most users that is actually a lot.

    My plan originally was to use Twitter Live with mutual followers on that platform, because I’ve actually been building a community there. Then I learned if you want to do anything more than a solo rant with your webcam, that feature is exclusive (invite-only). Turns out this is the same across social media sites.

    This means you need to have a third-party source to transmit a signal that has already mixed the video between myself and the guest.

    The good news is that I built a little legacy on my YouTube account and I might as well tap back into it. It just happens to be the easiest place to host of my Livestreams.

    There are a range of options, but the first fork in the road is to either go through a service that simplifies the whole process, or engineer it to the greatest extent possible in a self-hosted studio

    I am a trained audio and video technician, but I come from the era of wires and signals. Not that we’re beyond wires, but those signals have consolidated into pure digital encrypted signals, transmitted on wifi and fiberoptic cables, very different from straight radio bandwidths received and captured into copper wires that go from A to B.

    Today, the protocol for sending video signal across the internet is NDI. This is a patented protocol and is generally a hidden, or premium feature. Skype is supposed to provide this but it’s not working for me yet.

    What I ended up with, after experimenting with Open Broadcast Studio (OBS) and Skype, and researching alternatives, was a browser app called Melon. This very quickly connects to your YouTube and launches a Youtube Live event for you.

    I forgot to customize my profile, so on the first stream I ended up with my email address in the top corner! Baby steps.

    To get more than one guest, and to send a full HD signal to social media sites at the same time, I will have to pay the premium.

    Actually, the company that makes Melon offers a proprietary version of OBS, also simplifying the whole process. I haven’t tried it yet, as I am still trying to use the core OBS.

    However I do it, controlling my own broadcast studio is the only way to reach the goal of producing a top-quality podcast. It is necessary to control the means of production, or else you are limited in your presentation. As a technician, I will not accept mediocre media.

    The advents coming through Podcasting 2.0 are great. It is an ongoing project to develop a complete standard for the new era of podcasting, incorporating supplemental content like chapters, images, transcripts, and audience-direct financial contributions.

    The reality of video is also clear, so when all is said and done it should resolve this gap between traditional audio podcasting and the new era of video, but I am not there yet.

    The future of podcasting is bright. But is mine?

    Here is the irony of life. When I was cooking with gas, had a following, was on the cutting edge of internet and social media promotion, I had no stability in my life. I moved to Philadelphia and changed my priorities. I bought a house and built a studio space. That involved a lot of sacrifice, and hard work. Now I can balance creativity and media back into it.

    It’s rarely what I do that I truly regret. It is what I don’t do. It is when I drop the ball. So on the sports analogy, I refuse to sit on the sidelines when the world is going so bananas.

    So off I go again, to fight the windmills.

  • Hedging Against the Machine

    Hedging Against the Machine

    My first appearance on 2 Bulls in a China Shop!

    Two Sunday mornings ago, I joined a conference call with 2 Bulls in a China Shop co-hosts Dan Leeson and Kyle Hedman. The episode can be listened to for free in this post, and you can find a bunch of ways to subscribe at their official website.

    Dan is a friend from high school, one of the few that I have kept in touch with. If I was more active in high school, were I guided by my natural interests and talents in those years, we might have been in the same television broadcasting program in which students produced a morning news program that transmitted official school business. There would be many mornings in which I watched Dan deliver the news on our closed circuit television network.

    Today, he is a podcaster. I am a former community media producer and podcaster as well. We are discussing collaborating more on this program, myself a repeat guest perhaps focused on cryptocurrency. Both of us have been living the odd job life of going broke and pursuing music and random ideas. Many paths one summit, they say.

    Podcasting has been a new universe since the day I launched Horizon at End Times, in 2013, which was meant to be an artist-on-artist interview program, discussing topics from a creative perspective, providing commentary on the madness of our social and political times. 

    If there was a way to invest in podcasting, like an ETF, the market would have quadrupled over by now. In that growth, many podcasters jumped in and drifted off into the noise of obscurity. Dan and Kyle seem to be finding a way to pop their little heads above the noise. I look forward to joining them for their continued success.

    Before the pandemic, I started to write blogs aimed at capturing the lessons that I was learning in the process of investing my savings. It has been a year since my last finance post, a lot has happened, so I think I am ready to get back on that train and take it to the end of the line.

    One of the major educational processes that I went through was more vicarious than personal, as I persuaded my father to move his annuity fund into a personally managed portfolio. I gave him a number of good picks and jumpstarted his path to profit. This will be the topic of my next finance post.

    A Few Thoughts on GameStop and the Finance Economy

    The financialization of our economy is rapidly disrupting stock markets, monetary policy, industries, technologies, and truly the whole social fabric. To hedge against the machine today is to play the game and try to beat the machine using its own tools.

    The weekend that we recorded this was the one leading into a major market activism event in which GameStop (GME) grew by 222% over the week, and by 1,476% over the month, from about $19 to $312.

    There is nothing about GameStop that can justify this valuation, the company was disrupted by lock downs and was shuttering locations. Like record stores, the media can be transferred more efficiently online. Its revenues were only declining.

    That is why the market was broadly betting on GME to decline. There are ways to do this. One common method is options.

    I don’t play options. This is the casino aspect of our markets. I’m a bad gambler.

    I don’t like options. It turns stock valuation into a speculative game rather than a rational valuation based on revenue over loss, supply and demand.

    These are basically just bets that you place with regards to the movement of a stock, up or down. There is more to it but that will do. You don’t actually invest in the company like when you buy a share.

    Options are part of this story, but short selling caused this whole mess.

    Short selling is a little hard to wrap the head around, but this is a common bet in the big investor class, the hedge fund world. One of the best of all the analyses of this short squeeze event that I have heard is, ironically enough, from Speaking of Bitcoin podcast.

    Speaking of Bitcoin Podcast Explains Short Selling and GameStop

    The arrogant move on the part of the investor class was that GameStop was so heavily shorted that 138% of all available shares were being shorted. That means there were 38% more shares than exist floating and would need to be called if the price went up. This means that a large contingency of small investors could call the bluff and force their hand simply by going long on GME.

    It was a movement of retail investors organized on Reddit that forced this whole situation. These are regular people with brokerage accounts who jumped in as a swarm to drive the price of GameStop upward against the hedge fund bets locked and loaded to crush the company. Short sellers were forced to accept losses or hold the bet by raising their position. That is why it is called a short squeeze.

    Tesla is a company that picked up massive momentum in a short squeeze. The valuation is still inflated, in my opinion. Tesla might hold because the outlook for the company is much better than GameStop. Tesla is at the frontier of something while GameStop is comparable to Blockbuster Video or Tower Records, it is simply obsolete.

    The problem lies in the fact that Wall Street has the dangerous ability to crush a company and accelerate its demise. In a world where the balance of power isn’t so top-heavy, GameStop could carry on a number of years without even changing its business model, employing thousands of people, filling hundreds of retail spaces on Main Street.

    Anyone that educated themselves over the weekend will realize that the only position for GameStop ultimately is down. R/Wallstreetbets continues to call for a hold.

    Here is what I would have done, had I been following this Reddit forum. I would have bought GameStop around $20 and did the old halving on double strategy, so when it hit $40, I’d sell half of my shares and hold the remainder from that point until collapse. Even selling those shares at a loss would be a profit.

    Retailers should have liquidity as hedge funds eat the loss. This is actually a major transfer of wealth from the elite downward, largely into RobinHood accounts, Cash App, and other tools that are free and easy to use in the hands of the masses.

    This rare transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor happened on the platform named after Robin Hood, the mythic character that steals from the rich and gives to the poor. 

    Even for the platform’s coordinated effort to control the losses, at the behest of its financiers, enabled the situation by innovating a platform that onboarded millions of first-time traders.

    More importantly, it is a mass public education about big finance and how the dirty business works. There are now millions of people that just learned what options and short sales are.

    This is a peoples’ movement in the truest sense of it, as far as it looks from my angle. The more people that own stocks, the more the people have leverage over companies.

    Democracy is built into the market system. Rather than a single king own Coca-Cola, there are millions of investors that own it, and they can organize. Every stock counts for one vote and every year these votes determine major decisions.

    Millennials are jumping into the markets and today it might be possible for a social media group to remove a CEO, breakup accounting monopolies, inflate a stock, even short their own stock to buy up more shares.

    We are living in a world where personal finance is most likely to become more integral to people’s lives, just like social media, year over year.

    As jobs are lost to automation, even as manufacturing comes back to domestic operation, which it is, automation is changing the landscape of the now passing industrial age, and factories with great productivity will not employ people en masse the way industry did a hundred years ago.

    Social interactions are no longer limited by locality. Tribes form and coalesce in global ways with their own language, to make huge moves. GameStop is one example.

    Or this could all be a set up. It is easy to manipulate the masses into seeming social movements. History has repeated this over and again.

    Right now, silver is at an all-time high and the mainstream news is blaming the Reddit group. I look at the group myself and see flat denials that they are doing anything with silver. This seems like a tug of war, for real.

    The real ending to this story will be the bankruptcy and demise of GameStop, unless it can somehow receive a wave of support in real sales. Lots of naive first-time investors jumped in at the height of this stock and they will lose money. This will be a wealth transfer upward and sideways, from the most naive and late coming players to the game.

    But let the buyer beware. This is a free market, after all.