“Do Something Today That Your Future Self Will Thank You For.”

So you finally have a bit of money and you have decided to take control of your financial life. Good for you! You realize it is time to begin investing, and you are willing to think about the long term – weeks, months and years – and not just today. You are willing to be patient. And you want to take steps now to benefit your future self.

Let’s say you have $10,000 available to invest. But investing is new to you and you are not exactly sure what first step to take. It can be intimidating to think about making decisions about the entire $10,000.

Before you do anything else, here is a practical way to get started. First, learn a bit about your different options. You can reference blog posts such as Mr. Money Mustache to understand investment trade-offs. After that, begin building your investment portfolio. This is a...

U.S. stocks closed slightly higher today, with the Nasdaq at a record high, as investors digested earnings.

Greece is now in the “rear view mirror” and technology (IT) companies drove gains. Gold plunged to its lowest in five years and oil prices fell due to a growing supply and ongoing concerns about Iran’s oil reserves coming available for sale should a deal go through.

Investors are now turning their attention to corporate earnings. So far, 70 percent of companies have reported earnings above analyst expectations, above the 63 percent average beat rate since 1994.

The Dow rose 13.96 points, or 0.08 percent, to 18,100.41, the S&P 500 gained 1.64 points, or 0.08 percent, to 2,128.28 and the Nasdaq added 8.72 points, or 0.17 percent, to 5,218.86.

The S&P 500 is less than 3 points from its record close of 2,130.82 on May 21.

Things to watch out for tomorrow:
Apple announces...

To be clear, you should not compromise on API quality for mission critical things. We do not do this.

Sometimes you have to work with web APIs that have reliability issues and or inconsistent error responses – and changing APIs is not always an option.

Here are a five tips we’ve compiled at Instavest to help you deal with finicky web APIs:

1: Retry loops

This tip only applies to information requests (not changing data).

We had a third party data source that gives us 500 errors and undocumented error responses at high rates (90% of so of requests succeeded). Mathematically speaking, trying twice should give us an error rate of only 1%:

90% + 10% * 90% = 99%

Re-trying 2 times should lower it another order of magnitude:

90% + 10% * 90% + 1% * 90%= 99.9%

  success = False
  for x in xrange(3):
    try:
      response = requests.get('https://api.bigco.com/v1/entries/')
      if

Earlier this week, a family friend who just wrapped up his first year in college approached me for some advice. He, like most of us, was trying to figure out what do with his life and was stressing about picking his college major and career path.

“What do I do? What do I do focus on? I like computer science a lot but I also like finance because it seems so practical. If I don’t pick the right major now, I’ll get distracted, won’t get a good job and I might end up a failure!”

Sounds dramatic? It was – but we’ve all been there. Rather than get into how I calmed his nerves, I wanted to share the highlights of our conversation – choosing between computer science and finance.

The Case for Computer Science

Computer science is pure. You start with logical primitives (and, or, not, etc.) and work towards creating expressions that model complex situations and decisions. It’s the closest...

1. Whitenoise

With a couple of lines of config, WhiteNoise allows your web app to serve its own static files, making it a self-contained unit that can be deployed anywhere without relying on nginx, Amazon S3 or any other external service.

Whitenoise handles Gzipping your content and setting far-future cache headers on content. With a trivial amount of work, you can configure your app to automatically append a hash to each of your static files every time you deploy changes, so that you can set the cache headers as so.

A WSGI compliant app literally requires a few lines of code changes to deploy Whitenoise:

from whitenoise import WhiteNoise

from my_project import MyWSGIApp

application = MyWSGIApp()
application = WhiteNoise(application, root='/path/to/static/files')
application.add_files('/path/to/more/static/files', prefix='more-files/')

Why is this important? Using Gzip...

Over the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to observe seasoned investors up close. This has significantly changed the way I view investing in the stock market. Here’s what I used to hold true, what I now believe and why my thinking has evolved.

You Can’t Beat the Market

Actually, you can. With one caveat: You can beat the market if your investment strategy is based on a scalable, successful framework. To illustrate, devout disciples of Benjamin Graham’s value investing approach believe that over time a stock will gravitate to its intrinsic (or true) value. As a result, investors of this strategy look for temporary market dislocations and security mispricings to take advantage of embedded investment returns. The fact that a company is a market leader or has strong competitive advantages makes the investment much more compelling.

I’ve also found that investors who beat the...

Saleem Khatri, Co-Founder & CEO of Instavest, sat down with Thomas Lott, an Instavest investor, to find out why he loves investing. During the interview, Tom not only revealed a bit about himself but also showed how to make 17% with little effort.

Tell me about Thomas Lott? How did you become interested in investing?

Upon graduating college, I started my career in investment banking at Raymond James, covering energy and the tech industries. After 3 years as a sell-side distressed analyst at Merrill Lynch, I joined a (then) startup hedge fund called Owl Creek. Later, I was recruited to be a portfolio manager at Gracie Capital where I grew my book from $100 million to over $450 million in 7 years. I retired to Charlotte, North Carolina to spend more time with my family in 2009 but still actively invest with friends and family today.

What’s your investment philosophy?

I’m really...

Jay Yoon is an example of the Warren Buffett next door discovered by Instavest. His returns on Instavest have exceeded 27% across 5 positions and Jay already has close to 100 followers and +$125,000 backing his investments. Saleem Khatri, Co-Founder & CEO of Instavest, sat down with Jay to learn a little more about him and why he loves Instavest.

Who is Jay Yoon?

I’m just a normal guy who happens to be a good investor. I play ice hockey twice a week in a local league and hang out with my friends on the weekends. I live a fairly simple life for the most part.

I love public market investing because there is always something to look at. I enjoy seeing a variety of different investment opportunities and love being in charge of my own destiny.

What’s your investment philosophy?

I’m a value-based investor, so I look for companies that are trading at less than their intrinsic value...