How to make a fortune from Altium

[VK3DRB]

Altium's share price was 12 cents in 2012. Back then, a mate of mine, a fellow electronics engineer, suggested I buy Altium shares, but I ignored him, thinking its all gambling. He owned 5% of Altium at that time.
The share price is now $65, after being bought out by Renesas two weeks ago.
If I had invested $10K in 2012, my shares would be would $5.4 million today. DOH! Isn't hindsight a great thing.

But I am a user of Altium, paying a high yearly maintenance every year for mainly for bug fixes and minimal enhancements. Under Renesas, I wonder if they are going to hike the maintenance costs further. One would hope not, because in my opinion the benefit versus cost is simply not there.

Moral of the story: You could have made a fortune out of Altium... by investing in it and not doing any work, instead of being a user - busting your brains and wallet designing PCB's.

PS: Altium better watch out of competition such as KiCad.

[Doctorandus_P]

There was a time that I thought about buying 20 to 50 bitcoins "just for fun". I think they were around 2ct around that time.

[Psi]

There was a time that I thought about buying 20 to 50 bitcoins "just for fun". I think they were around 2ct around that time.

Yep, We've all had that.
I really wanted to get a couple of BTC when they were ~$400 each but paying for them was quite hard at the time. Most bank CCs would reject any payment to a BTC exchange considering that to be a payment to a fraudulent company.
It was all too hard so I gave up.

[thm_w]

It is gambling, you could have just as easily lost it all.
There are thousands of penny stock companies that sound like good investments, why not randomly invest $10k into one of those?

[VK3DRB]

It is gambling, you could have just as easily lost it all.
There are thousands of penny stock companies that sound like good investments, why not randomly invest $10k into one of those?

Because of these reasons:

1. I do not know enough about the industries the penny stock companies are in. I did know about Altium though but only as a subscribed user.
2. "For every winner there are hundreds of losers." I am not a risk taker.
3. It is, as you say gambling.

From the Oxford Dictionary, one definition of gambling is to take a risky action in the hope of a desired result. Putting you money into pension funds is gambling. Investing in anything is gambling. You walking across a busy road - you are gambling with your very life. Anyone who says he does not gamble is a liar or deceiving himself. We ALL gamble, including pious religious people who say they never gamble.

Now, if Altium introduced powerful AI where you just enter the parameters and the entire PCB and BOM is created for you... that would be a game changer. DFM, EMC, signal quality etc all taken care of. You may laugh, but one day this might happen, putting the likes of me out of a job.

[coppercone2]

There was a time that I thought about buying 20 to 50 bitcoins "just for fun". I think they were around 2ct around that time.

that is so unstable for all you know it would have caused the market to totally crash and burn if you bought 10 cents worth.



its true for any crazy long shot investment.

Like you go back in time, spend all your money on bitcoin, then it turns out the guy selling it was right on the thresh hold of quitting once he made a few dollars that day, it happens, then you are broke and bitcoin goes no where because he lost his drive cuz he finally made that 50$ for a warcraft game card. 


no sense in beating yourself up over past events that are that that random and unstable, because it could turn out even if you did it, the chaotic results might whoop your ass real good. their big but they barely occurred, think about how many penny stocks are totally liquidated

[SiliconWizard]

Turns out bitcoin has been a seriously incredible investment (it's literally exploding these days, but even if it's been very "unstable" - volatile - it's been on an upwards trend overall for many years), not considering any "ethical" concern you may have. Not sure "speculating" is particularly ethical per se anyway, so not all that relevant if you consider making "easy" money.

Contrary to shares though, if you want at some point to sell your bitcoins and get dollars (/euros/...) in exchange, it's not going to be as easy as it may seem if the amount is significant, unless you are yourself a banker.
I dunno, just sell 1 or 2 bitcoins currently, get the 60k/120k on your bank account from what they'll probably consider a "dodgy" source, and see what happens. You'll have less problems with shares.

[Bud]

You just declare the difference between buy and sell as additonal income. Check your country's legislation on crypto currency.

[Kim Christensen]

I don't think it matters which stock you pick to short or hold.
If you can see the future with 100% accuracy, you'll make a fortune investing. 

[coppercone2]

it could happen with anything. even google, they had big competitors. All it would take is for 1 board room decision to change about the search engine for the market to totally change (i.e. yahoo). The competitors are often kinda close, and have massive capabilities, just use them in a different direction. 

Mineral and oil too, nuclear could have caught on with the right marketing. And alot of things seem inevitable but predicting WHEN they will occur is also extremely temperamental. . there is so many options for people to pursue, because you need to get the timing right to have useful money. A EPA ruling for car emissions has a extreme effect too that shapes a industry. And it depends on who almost did not go to work on important days because their subtly sick or randomly got anxiety about calling in...

And I can't imagine the kind of insanity a strong command structure (i.e. china goverment) has on predictions LOL


I am looking at a list of best investments and I dunno how many there are that can't be effected by minor stuff.

cable vs internet - depends on pricing. would netflix still take off so hard if cable companies lowered their bill and added more channels? They were unusually greedy, I could see some 'coca cola kid' in the board rooms getting them to lower prices and improve offerings and stunt netflix. cable box gives you beta waves, people like it, but it has to be cheap

apple vs blackberry - again it seems that blackberry got killed by greed. could come down to hiring a slightly different person from a really good candidate pool. maybe if someone felt better and decided to listen to 1 more interview before hiring, 1 minor annoyance

amazon - not sure. this one seems the best. i think this one is really inevitable unless there was some kinda major snafu with the postal service increasing prices to absurd levels. but it did kind of benefit from china market flooding. it seems companies would need to be unusually organized for amazon to get pushed out. It would take really harsh tarrifs to stunt amazon, and cooperation between manufacturers NOT to use it (deals with big box stores).

graphics card companies - also seems inevitable


I wonder if amazon and tiger direct could have gotten in a equal market share oligopoly or something that reduced their total potential lol. I think I renember a LONG time ago some people were predicting that TG would go into selling retail non computer stuff. I think they could have branched into common tools pretty easily. Suddenly its a approved retailer for high end hand tools. Even food delivery... they had that old everquest pizza order command they put in, that was like when someone first realized you can sell food to computer people. offer a delivery service to sys admin crews lol

[Doctorandus_P]

apple vs blackberry - again it seems that blackberry got killed by greed.

Matthias Wandel has worked for Blackberry and recently made a video about just this topic.
In short, Blackberry built a very lean system with limited capabilites because hardware simply was not capable of doing more at that time. And then Moore happened and they were not able to make good use of all the capabilities of newer hardware quick enough and they lost to the competition.

[nctnico]

apple vs blackberry - again it seems that blackberry got killed by greed.

Matthias Wandel has worked for Blackberry and recently made a video about just this topic.
In short, Blackberry built a very lean system with limited capabilites because hardware simply was not capable of doing more at that time. And then Moore happened and they were not able to make good use of all the capabilities of newer hardware quick enough and they lost to the competition.

Yep. But they are not the only ones. The same happened to Nokia (for example).

[Doctorandus_P]

Philips is near extinct although they sold the name so you can still see it on some consumer appliances. Bits and pieces of Philips have been sold of to various companies over the last 20 years. Some CEO's probably got rich of off that.

General Electric is defunct as of 2024-04-02 according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric

[coppercone2]

apple vs blackberry - again it seems that blackberry got killed by greed.

Matthias Wandel has worked for Blackberry and recently made a video about just this topic.
In short, Blackberry built a very lean system with limited capabilites because hardware simply was not capable of doing more at that time. And then Moore happened and they were not able to make good use of all the capabilities of newer hardware quick enough and they lost to the competition.

If manufacturing is so lean, where is that saving going to? I would call it greedy.

Of course there is some exceptions to increase time savings (i.e. 1 thing is not dependent on another thing verifying something before it can get implemented). But you could always run it at a backlog. From what I have seen its obsession about reducing manufacturing and R&D costs usually (costs), not making it faster. They can usually make it faster with the same capabilities but its more expensive. I.e. 1 team that team 2 normally depends on to do something gets more people on team 2 instead of removing the cooperation between team 1 and 2.

Even as simple as something like 5S. You could either get more storage space and a inventory/maintence guy to preserve old equipment, or throw it out. Could be as simple as renting a ware house to put some capital machinery in, and paying someone to oil and power it up once a month. Or you could scrap it then die when the market requirement changes. I have seen the effects of this one. the company was changed forever because they did a gamble on the market and got rid of very important tools that were not replaceable in the time required to take the market. a VHS vs Betamax type deal. In the grand scheme of things, they saved pennies and blocked themselves from one of the greatest markets ever, and became dependent on contract companies over seas to even have their name stay in the game with marginal quality products with a small sliver of product that basically served as "hey  its just a reminder we exist in similar markets that are not nearly as lucrative as this one". ALso they lost expertise in doing QC on that product (which came with the people that knew the manufacutring machinery), losing the first class status for building products because they could not evaluate the offerings from other companies properly (i.e. bleed money for contract services that made every decision unappealing, and they can not even properly evaluate products they wanna basically re-sell with minor design changes from overseas).

This was made under the guise of 'being lean'. You could say they lost a fucking national manufacturing sector with this decision .

[nctnico]

apple vs blackberry - again it seems that blackberry got killed by greed.

Matthias Wandel has worked for Blackberry and recently made a video about just this topic.
In short, Blackberry built a very lean system with limited capabilites because hardware simply was not capable of doing more at that time. And then Moore happened and they were not able to make good use of all the capabilities of newer hardware quick enough and they lost to the competition.

If manufacturing is so lean, where is that saving going to? I would call it greedy.

That has nothing to do with it. Blackberry focussed all the engineers on getting maximum performance out of hardware and a network with limited capabilities. That is being lean. This resulted in situation where Blackberry had very specific knowledge for a single type of solution. A one-trick-pony. Then internet + GSM / Edge happened which made all the knowledge at Blackberry obsolete. And Blackberry didn't switch in time to develop for internet + GSM / Edge, so they faded into obsolescence rather quickly (within 2 or 3 years the Blackberries dissapeared).