Definitely illegal in USA, and I doubt any big companies do this here. Sounds like tinfoil hat conspiracy talk to me.

Look back 15 years ago and you'll see similar conspiracy theories about hotels supposedly blocking cellular phone signals so they can continue their old cash cow of charging exorbitant rates for long distance phone calls (I used to sell wifi solutions to hotels around 2000 and dealt with a lot of business travelers and big chain hotel IT types). The hotel IT guys who knew better would laugh at these allegations, but the theory used to get tossed around a lot by disgruntled travelers who were unable to get a signal in their room.

Anecdote:
I did biz dev for MobileStar Network who provided hotspots in hotels and airports and eventually Starbucks, and there were a couple hotels in Boston and NYC getting away with charging $300 per day per user for internet access in conference rooms in 2000. And they'd get groups happy to pay this because few hotels offered it, and a T-1 sometimes took months to install plus expensive fees and the hotels hadn't yet gotten wise on providing broadband themselves.

The tournaments will be played using something like tournament $ and at the end prizes will be distributed based on the finishing T$ bankroll of each player. i.e. 6 players enter a commodities trading SNG; the player with the highest finishing bankroll gets 70% of the total buy ins and the second player gets 30%.

Innnnnnteresting.

I think the big key here is to adjust whatever variables need adjusting to make it likely that the prizes are generally a bigger ROI than what the winner would've made. No one's going to want to enter a competition where they get a 200% return on their play portfolio for a 150% return as a prize.

I don't foresee that being a problem with a 70/30 payout, but the length of the SNG will certainly have an effect. 30 is an 80% return, and in a gambool-tastic 7 day SNG I wouldn't be surprised to see 2nd place consistently over 80%. Maybe competitors won't be as concerned with that though.

If you need or want any help on this let me know.

Another thing I didn't think of is the possibility of collusion. If 2 players bet on opposite sides of an extremely volatile investment, one is almost guaranteed to win the SNG.

Do you really think those kinds of investments exist that are easily identifiable for volatility to the point that will guarantee victory? I mean, if it plummets the trade is limited to a 100% return on a short (assuming you're not allowing margin, which seems reasonable).

Not to mention that it'd have to be something that persons A and B can easily identify, but persons C, D, E and F don't see.

It's a reasonable concern, but I don't think it's very practical to implement from a scamming perspective. If you're really worried, then just make a rule that no 2 players can hold more than 50% of their positions in direct conflict or something like that.

hey op, can you please prove that my idea is worthless when you have time? its post 766. thanks

Idea:

There are several countries across the world that offer "retirement visas" with some fairly generous terms. It depends on the country, but they often let you import a vehicle and all sorts of goods without import tax as a one time deal of making your move to that country easier.

Now imagine if you filled your allowance with things that you plan to resell instead of keeping.

For example, MB SLS AMG costs under $200,000 in the USA. In Thailand, it costs almost $800,000. (MB prices in Thailand)

Virtually all luxury goods are ridiculously overpriced in developing countries because of crazy high import duties. The above is an extreme high end example but everything else is very overpriced as well because of import duties. Retirement visa exemption - that only works for one time shipment - would be a way to possibly circumvent these rules. There is no need to start at the top end importing SLS AMG. It can be started importing cars that retail for 20-30K in the USA or electronics, etc.

The logistical nightmare would be finding willing participants, but this may not be as difficult as it seems. Most of these countries have expat forums where potential expats/tourists/visitors go and that would be one way to target these people. On the other end, you still need to find a local buyer in that country, but my guess is that it would be easy to find a buyer if you are selling a $100K car (local price) for $80K and still making $20K because it costs 50K in the USA...

Sidenote:
When I was growing up, this was fairly popular for people to make money in my native country. (the country allowed people to import a certain very limited about of things for themselves... 1 car, XX amount of alcohol, things like that... every X amount of years.)

Sidenote 2:
This is why it's hard to live in developing countries if you like your toys/have expensive hobbies.

I finally got a mobile app idea that's good enough I'm not going to post it publicly. Working on a prototype now. I'll let you all know when we're ready for backers

I have lots of money

I'm in. Depending on the timing, I may throw in a sizable chunk if the idea is really good. Hopefully after football season.

A friend from Finland is looking into doing this. He's running into issues with EU requirements for things like headlights that may require retrofitting before they'll let it through customs, and holding periods before you can resell (seems to be taxed differently depending on the holding period).

Apparently American muscle cars (Mustangs, Camaros) are popular over there and the prices are crazy high. Seems like it could be quite profitable if you have connections on the sales end.

In my experience, people also had to retrofit headlights (and possibly some minor other things). But this cost was tiny considering the profit margin so it was worth it. Usually, the person who was abroad would have his family search for a buyer in their local country so they usually had end-user lined up before even making the purchase.

Everything is crazy expensive in Finland. Whatever you can sneak in, it will be worth it. Tons of people doing it illegally, and probably a good number of people doing it 'on the side' occasionally as rules allow. This is similar to a lot of UK people who always grab maximum allowed cartons of smokes and alcohol coming back to UK.

This was exactly his plan. The retrofit costs do indeed seem minor but the holding period is a bigger issue. He was planning to store the car in his mother's garage for a year for tax purposes, but the buyer didn't want to wait that long, so they're trying to find a workaround. If they can't, my friend will probably just resell it right away and pay the higher tax.


Seems like opportunities abound. One of his relatives said he netted $22k on a Mustang a couple years ago. I was skeptical until I checked out some Finnish websites and saw the prices- wow.

A guy I know here in Atlanta is married to a Brazilian. He's calculated that if you take an iPhone, an iPad, a Kindle, and an XBox down there with you that you can make enough money reselling them to pay for the trip. Then you start adding in the frequent flier miles you earn going back/forth and if you purchase all those things on something like a Delta Skymiles Amex and you're making money for going on vacation.

Plus, those things are all common enough that it's not a red flag to be traveling with (although the XBox would be a little weird).

On several trips abroad, I've paid for my flights by bringing an Ipad, DSLR, P&S and a few other things to other countries. Since one almost always flies into big cities, they usually have some sort of Craigslist to list your items on. I wish I did it more often when I'm traveling but I'm usually rushing at the last minute and not thinking about this stuff.

People are doing this on bigger scale for sure. That's why with a lot of electronics products, you can get them in country X before it even comes out in that country.

The problem is that a lot of times these businesses are trying to circumvent import duties. (They know someone at the shipping port, bribe to get their shipment classified at lower rate, etc) This is easy to do occasionally with low quantities like I did, but hard to do on larger scale.

My idea is basically an improvement on this setup by using people who get retirement visas to ship things for you. Under many retirement visas, they are legally allowed to move their possessions to their new country of residence, duty free.

Rent/lease it to the new owner with the predetermined buy price at the end of the year.

I know the Russians are already sneaking a ton of stuff to Finland.

I am a member of the Coto Country Club (Where the real housewives of OC live). At the club near the back of the parking lot is a guy who does exactly all of this. He washes everything from Honda Civics to Ferraris.


It will happen and it is happening.

The office building I work in has an outside company come in and wash/detail cars once a week. I'm sure they take some type of cut, and don't have to worry about it's setup/management.

Not saying this would work on a golf course, but the business model exists, and at least in my building, appears very lucrative for the car wash company.

where are you vacationing that you can sell those electronics? is it mostly 2nd or 3rd world countries? obviously i assume australia wouldn't be profitable no?

not a bad idea at all, go on vacation for free.

I would think this wouldn't be an issue at all. People like services, they *especially* like services where they can get something done with zero hassle. Getting your car washed while playing golf sounds perfect. Pay the fee, go shoot golf, come back and your car is clean and ready to go. One of the best things about having money is being able to pay other people to do things you dislike, it's the perk of having money - getting services done. Poor people don't ever get services done because they will save money if they do it themselves. They have time and the energy to do it, so they'd much rather save the money over the inconvenience.

We have an auto shop that posts fliers at work. They pick up your car, do maintenance while you are at work, drop it off by end of day. It's wildly popular, even though it's a few bucks more. Getting your oil changed while you're at work is awesome, and every person here does it.

nordstrom does that here, or maybe the shopping mall where they are tenants

drop your car off, go shopping and have lunch, leave in clean car

not really that revolutionary, the trick will be getting agreements signed by business owners or golf courses or strip clubs or wherever you want to do this

How often are the photographers on site? It might not make sense to hire one full time, whereas a car detailing service would need to be there the whole time.

Sure, if you come in once a week, it makes no sense to set up this service. And the office building might have multiple businesses working within?

I do travel mostly to developing countries, but I've grabbed items for friends in London and Paris as well just to help them out. (Pretty much all of Europe is overpriced compared to Amazon.com)

Developed countries are actually a better deal and easier to find buyers - I would love to ship goods to Finland - but developed countries usually don't have generous retirement visa schemes... I might be wrong on that...

I live in a semi-ghetto/transitional neighborhood in DC, and my street has plenty of 5 and 7 series, S class, and even some old Rolls Royce. (probably worth very little because of age and condition but still...) In the USA, anyone with documented income and hypothetical credit score can go down to the dealer and pick up a luxury car on lease - and many people do as they love to live above their means. It's not really a status symbol the way it used to be.

But in developing countries, financing is much harder to get and things cost a ton more. If you see an S-Class rolling down the street in Bangkok or Gaborone, you can be 100% certain the owner is pretty loaded. Driving that car really means something over there.

As to why these countries tax the hell out of import goods I would speculate that they don't want their local businesses undercut. Even for agricultural products, you would be surprised how competitive USA prices are (thanks to economies of scale and efficiencies) versus developing countries where the mega-farms are rare.

Secondly, if you are running a country, you probably want as much money coming in, and as little money as possible going out. That seems sensible as a matter of national policy. It's unfair and it sucks, but I can see the logic.

Isn't it still illegal though? Do goods bought with for the intention of selling at a profit count as duty-free possessions? (what if its arranged on some fee/commission basis?)

A blind eye may be turned when an individual does it but you're talking about an organised evasion of import duty/tax with (even if you dont care if its illegal) some likelyhood of being caught and prosecuted.

I've been kicking an idea around for awhile, creating a social movie watching site, with a dollar movie mentality. Kinda like redbox. 24hr rentals, $1 per movie, can join in a room with friends and chat about it and ****. Lots of ideas i've been working with, just need to find people who like the idea with me, and want to work on it