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Archives for December 2018

James Dondero And Highland Capital Use Philanthropy To Help The City Of Dallas

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James Dondero is the co-founder and president of Highland Capital Management. Mr. Dondero has provided the perfect example for individuals wishing to use their business acumen for the benefit of philanthropic work.

It is the philosophy of Dondero that the most fortunate individuals in society bear a greater responsibility to affect positive change intended to benefit all individuals. He believes that through philanthropic efforts, the bulk of this responsibility is satisfied.

Charitable pursuits have been a major focus of Highland Captial since its inception. Highland demonstrates this fact by supporting a number of charities and non-profits in their hometown of Dallas, Texas. The following is a look at two of the programs supported by Highland Capital.

The Family Place

Highland Capital took advantage of the guidance it received from Linda Owens to support The Family Place. Ms. Owens is the former chief executive officer for Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation. She now works in an advisory role with Highland Capital and instructs them on charitable endeavors.

Highland supported the non-profit with a challenge grant worth $1 million. The grant assured The Family Place reached their fundraising goals faster than scheduled.

The Family Place provides services to people affected by family violence in the state of Texas. The agency provides shelter, counseling, and education to victims of violence. The organization also provides education and training to teens regarding bullying and the prevention of teen dating violence.

The Family Place is responsible for the first shelter in the state of Texas for the benefit of men victimized by family violence. Men are also allowed at the shelter who have custody of their children. The educational programs are also offered in Spanish.

The challenge grant provided by Highland was an agreement by the company to match all donations given to the non-profit up to $1 million. The funds were used to pay for a new counseling center located in the Central Dallas area.

Paige Flink, the executive director of The Family Place encouraged donations by explaining to parties interested in supporting the organization that the impact of their gift would be increased by the pledge from Highland. Dondero also uses relationships he and his company has with other businesses and non-profits to secure support for The Family Place.

SMU Towers Program

 

Highland Capital Management worked with Southern Methodist University to create the Towers Scholar Program. Highland Capital gifted $2 million to fund the endowment that will be named in the company’s honor.

The Tower Scholars Program supports undergraduate students studying international affairs and politics who have demonstrated exceptional achievement. The program hopes to stimulate an interest in these and other students for ethical public service. Students selected for the program are provided with the opportunity to study abroad, experience with policymaking for public issues, involvement with global leaders, and internships.

Admission to the program is a competitive progress that takes into account academic achievement, participation in extracurricular activities, the student’s future involvement with public policy, and other factors.

One class has graduated from the Tower Scholars Program since the initial donation from James Dondero and Highland Capital. The students have gone on to achieve great things already in their young lives.

Conclusion

James Dondero founded Highland Capital Management, along with Mark Okada, in 1993. Mr. Dondero graduated from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and worked at numerous endeavors before settling at Highland. Mr. Dondero believed from the beginning that philanthropy is an important part of Highland Capital operations. The company’s involvement with the two non-profits above, as well as others, show that the belief in philanthropy is as strong within company ranks as ever.

U.S. Money Reserve Releases New Spiderman Set

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U.S. Money Reserve has some of the most diverse precious metals pieces in its vault of gold and silver bullion, and the company has had many special sales on uniquely minted coins over the years. Earlier this year, it released a Queen Elizabeth II Coronation coin set in partnership with Australia’s Perth Mint. In October, the company released a Fantastic Beasts set around when the movie came out. Now, U.S. Money Reserve has a Spiderman homecoming set with three 0.999 proof coins, two silver and one gold, of the Marvel Comics legendary hero. The coins started circulating as part of U.S. Money Reserve’s Cyber Week sales, and they’ve become quite a hit with the company’s customers. The idea behind this set of pieces was to market both to coin and superhero enthusiasts. But U.S. Money Reserve has even more to its inventory than these sets.

U.S. Money Reserve has been selling physical gold and silver bullion to customers around the world for more than 15 years. The company’s coins are certified and tested thoroughly for purity, which is why U.S. Money Reserve is known as America’s Gold Authority®. While seasoned buyers may be the primary crowd buying from the company, they have quite a bit of information detailing why nearly everyone should consider owning physical gold and silver.

Why is buying physical gold or silver so important today? Generally, when people want assets they can later liquidate or save for retirement, they look at traditional vehicles such as owning stocks, buying real estate, or maybe even stockpiling cash somewhere safe. Those options can certainly be helpful, but should an economic disaster occur or the markets become completely destabilized, you may need a better asset that can survive these kinds of situations. Gold and silver are reliable and stable assets that have endured throughout history. Owning physical gold may not be for everyone, and most experts will not advise putting all your savings into it because it still has its risks but having a portion of your assets backed in gold and silver could be vital in the long run.

One reason why U.S. Money Reserve has built its reputation as America’s Gold Authority® is because it has experts in the industry who have a long history of working with gold products. One of the company’s key leaders is President Philip N. Diehl, a former public accountant in the Texas state comptroller’s office and, most notably, the 35th U.S. Mint Director. Diehl was influential in bringing about congressional action to legalize minting the first ever platinum coin, and now he’s active in educating consumers about different gold coins. He even gives an introduction to U.S. Money Reserve’s Gold Buying Kit and informs people on how to begin a self-directed IRA program for physical gold. You can find out more about this information and get started buying gold or silver bullion by visiting the company’s website.

 

Altium Capital Makes Impressive Growth Rate

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Jacob Gottlieb is back in the healthcare investment sector with a new company known as Altium Capital Management, LP. Between 2016 and mid-2017, he was out of investment activity and was winding up the operations of the former firm he worked with known as Visium Asset Management.

Gottlieb is passionate about matters of the healthcare industry, especially on investment. He is even regarded as the titan of the healthcare investment industry because of the success he has recorded in his career. He has risen to top positions in the industry by heading various successful hedge funds as a fund manager and CEO. Altium Capital is aligned based on his expertise and knowledge in healthcare investments. It is most likely to be the next big thing in the healthcare investment sector and will mark his successful comeback after the end of Visium Asset Management. With investors in the financial and healthcare industries expecting a good business environment in the future, Gottlieb is likely to be one of the best performers.

Gottlieb built Visium Asset Management and built it between 2005 and 2016. It became one of the key firms in the healthcare investment sector. It attracted high profile investors in the field of pension funds. With Visium, he brought together a team of professionals who assisted him to take the value of the asset of the company from $300 million to $8 billion. Gottlieb has previously worked with other companies such as Merlin Biomed Group, Sanford C. Bernstein, and Balyasny Asset Management. In these organizations, he created his reputation as a top portfolio manager.

The Rise of Altium Capital

After the end of Visium Asset Management, Jacob Gottlieb was ready to move on and establish a new firm. Altium Capital is the vehicle he is now using to run a successful healthcare investment business. The firm is benefiting from the good reputation of Jacob Gottlieb as a top investor in the healthcare industry. Altium is building a strong portfolio with investment in a few firms.

Altium has made a 5.61 percent investment at Oramed Pharmaceuticals Inc. Oramed Pharmaceuticals is developing alternative medical treatments. One of its main golas is to develop an oral drug as opposed to the injection drugs used for diabetes treatment. This method is going to reduce treatment costs, reduction of infections and improve patient comfort.

Other companies in Altium’s portfolio include Amarin, which develops cardiovascular drugs and Oragenics which develops antibiotics against infectious diseases.

The Lineup

Altium Capital under the leadership of Jacob Gottlieb is now a successful investment firm. He has added senior investment professionals in hedge funds and healthcare sector to assist him in running a successful business. The focus of the company is to generate from equity-focused products. Combined with fundamental analysis, Altium is ready to make investments that guarantee a high risk-reward ratio.

Growth Report

Altium Capital recently released its growth report, and the numbers are impressive. In five months of operation since opening doors in June 2018, it had made 7.37 percent returns. The results show that the company is most likely to perform very well in the long-term. Gottlieb is taking every possible measure to ensure that the ghost of Visium Management does not crawl into the new firm. He is observing due diligence, and that’s why the results have started coming out true. By seeking out firms that offer important health and medical treatment methods, the firm will boost the healthcare sector while at the same time befitting from the proceeds of growth in top companies. Gottlieb is a big name in the industry, and his prowess will come out clearly as Altium Capital does more business.

How Much Does Social Media Affect Sports Profits

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If used wisely, social media could be a powerful tool that can help create enormous benefits for a sports club or organization. It can be used to an informative or promotional end, and completely change the picture the fan base has about a club or a sports personality.

Moreover, social media can greatly affect the return on investment (ROI) in sports, as we have already seen in some popular examples in the world of sports, listed in the infographic below by Betting Sites.

For example, by using Facebook, the NBA champions Golden State Warriors had an 89 time bigger ROI compared to before focusing on this social media outlet. The organization managed to change its public image and create one that is more appealing to the average fan. The result was that it became more attractive and could make more sales.

In the world of soccer, the most popular European clubs such as Real Madrid and Barcelona have  more than 100 million followers each on social media. Interestingly, the infographic below shows that the average revenue per one social media follower for soccer clubs is €10. You can do the math yourself – this is a huge boost for the clubs’ annual budget.

However, this gold mine is not reserved just for the greatest sports stars and the most legendary clubs. Underdogs can do the same if they follow the right set of rules.

For instance, the Texas Christian University’s volleyball team experienced a 40% increase in profits after it started using social media platforms. In addition, after just seven weeks of activity on social media, the team managed to increase game attendance by a whopping 24%.

Thus, social media seems to be a pot of gold available to everyone. All you need to do is reach for it and draw handfuls in revenue. If these facts sparked your interest, read the rest of the incredible data in the infographic below.

3 Effective Strategies for Generating More Leads from Your Blog

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Blogging has been popular among businesses for a while now, and for good reason.

When done correctly, a blog can serve as much more than just a way to publish news releases – it can help to educate your readers, showcase your expertise, and answer the most common questions that your audience might have.

In fact, your blog can even become your most powerful lead generation tool, if you know how to use it correctly.

But how can you generate leads with your blog?

Well, there are a few ways how you can use your blog for attracting prospective customers, but here are some of the most important strategies that you should implement if you want to turn your blog readers into leads that are eager to buy from you.

Optimize Blog Content for SEO   

Developing quality content for your blog is hard work, so you need to make sure that those efforts don’t go to waste and that you’re rewarded with high search engine rankings.

Luckily, you can use in-depth and informative content to target profitable keywords and increase your blog’s traffic, bringing you a ton of leads who are already interested in what you have to offer.

But in order to reap the huge benefits that ranking high on the SERPs can offer, you need to make your content stand out from the crowd of articles covering a similar topic. That means you can’t just churn out mediocre articles on multiple keywords and expect them to automatically appear at the top of the results.

Search engines have learned to recognize quality content using advanced algorithms, so methods that try to cheat the system by stuffing keywords are doomed to fail.

Instead, your best bet for achieving sustainable results is to simply do your best and create content that’s informative and covers the subject better than other articles that are available.

The good news is, if you do take the time to create quality posts, you will not only be ranked higher on Google but will also have a much better chance of getting people to actually read your articles, which should be the end goal anyway.

Beyond just making sure your articles are useful, you should also make it easy for the search engine bots to understand it – that means having a clear structure, marking all the headings, and adding meta descriptions.

Luckily, you can use one of the best free WordPress plugins that help to optimize your posts and ensure that they are SEO-friendly, so you don’t need to be an SEO guru to be able to figure out all the technical details.

One of the most popular options is the SEO plugin by Yoast, which helps to optimize titles, meta tags, meta descriptions, as well as social sharing info on each post, helping you to streamline the process and do it more quickly.  

Have Clear CTAs in Your Blog

Even though people come to your blog to read useful information, if you don’t tell them what to do next, they will simply leave your site after reading the article, and you’ll lose a potential customer forever.

That’s why you need to make sure that you always provide clear next steps for your readers in the form of a call-to-action, or CTA.

Most of the readers on your blog are on a journey towards solving their problem, so you need to act as their guide and make sure that there’s always something they can click, subscribe to, or buy, depending on where they are.

What’s more, your CTAs must be compelling and make a strong argument for why they should take action because otherwise, it will be hard to compete with all of the distractions that are always present online.

But how exactly do CTAs look like?

Well, there are a number of ways that you can display CTAs on your blog, including banners, buttons, links, or lines of text that are anchored to link to another page or a landing page.

You need to ensure that these buttons and links are placed in convenient places on your pages so that clicking on them isn’t a disruption, but instead the next logical step.

However, one thing to consider is that you don’t want to overdo the process – if you flood each blog post with too many CTAs, they will become a distraction and may cause a significant part of your audience to leave your site before even finishing the read.

Instead, try to figure out the best spots for inserting links that help to enhance the article or build on it, serving as a helpful suggestion instead of a sales-y pitch.

Create Shareworthy Content

Even though SEO can be a powerful lead generation strategy for your blog, it usually takes time to start bringing results.

That’s where social media can be so helpful – if your content is useful, chances are that people are going to share it on their feeds, which can help attract hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your site in a matter of hours.

However, just as with SEO, if you want to achieve good results, you need to put in the work.

The content that gets shared on social media the most is usually very helpful, informative, and actionable. In fact, 94% of social media users carefully consider how the information that they share will be useful to others, so if your content doesn’t serve that purpose, you can’t expect anyone to share it so that you get a bump in traffic.

As we already discussed before, the key to success is making your content better than what others are creating, but with social media, there are other elements in play as well.

Usually, content that receives the most shares provides a hot and different take or perspective, shedding new light on a subject and promoting a discussion among people interested in the topic.

That’s why your best bet is to use your own expertise in your field and try to add value to the conversations that are already happening.

To get started, you could talk to your customers and figure out what some of the most pressing issues and problems they’re facing. Analyze the most common questions that they’re asking and try to pinpoint the areas that are causing the most confusion.

Then, use your expertise to provide a new take on the issue and offer helpful solutions to the problem, or at least outline steps that could be taken.

But don’t just make it an opinion piece – cite studies, other sources, and try to make your blog post the most in-depth article on the subject online.

You should also make it easy to read – split up your content into different segments, use smaller paragraphs, and make sure to include plenty of media such as images and videos. You can find high-quality royalty-free images that can be relevant to your topic and help make the article more pleasant to read.

Finally, make sure that if the reader wants to share your article, the process is as simple as possible – include social media sharing buttons on all your posts and also share the blog posts on your own social media pages as well.

Simple Tips For Your First Big Jump Into Financial Investment

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If you are thinking of taking your first step into financial investment, then it is an exciting time. You may also be feeling a little bit nervous and daunted by all the information you need to take in. That is perfectly natural and will soon pass once you become more familiar with investing.

Trading on the big financial markets like the FX market or the global stock exchanges is a popular way for investors to grow their capital. The world’s stock markets are worth almost $70 trillion and the biggest among them can be worth $1 trillion alone! This shows just why they are so attractive to invest in.

Simple tips for first-time investors

Investing on the world’s financial markets is undoubtedly a serious undertaking with a degree of knowledge being required if a professional advisor is not being used. However, for the first-time investor, getting the below basics right is enough to get you started.

  • Find out about how the market works – this is a really key point to understand. Whatever financial market you invest in then you must first learn how it works. If you do not, then it is simply gambling and not investing! Learn what can make the market move one way or another, how to spot investment opportunities and what the different terminology means.

 

  • Draw up a trading plan – once you have a grasp of how the market you plan to invest in works then you need a trading plan. This is especially important for new investors as it will provide the discipline needed to only invest when there is a rational reason to do so. Your plan should set out how much you will invest on each trade, what profit you are seeking, when you will exit and how you will find your trading opportunities.

 

  • Consider a diversified portfolio – many new investors make the mistake of putting all their money into one or two companies in the same sector. If the sector itself crashes or the two individual companies do, then you are in trouble. To reduce risk it is better to diversify your investments across a range of companies, sectors and asset classes. Many investors will structure their portfolio to have a certain percentage of stocks, bonds, currency and ETF’s for example.

 

  • Prepare for upcoming events – forewarned is forearmed as the old saying goes. This is true for investing as you need to be ready for any upcoming events that might affect your holdings. Keeping an eye on a weekly stock calendar will help you to do this. By knowing what is coming up that week in terms of reports or events then you can avoid getting caught out by them. It also gives you the flexibility to act before the event happens or be there on the day to act quickly if needed.

Don’t dive straight in

It is naturally tempting to start investing in the financial markets immediately. The desire to make money and not miss out on any opportunities is something that we all feel. It is though essential to take the above tips on-board first. That will help you make your first steps as an investor in the right way and will aid in making your investments a success.

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