US Finance World

This past Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a piece on professional sports gambler, Billy Walters. Mr. Walters has been professionally betting on sports for over 30 years. Walters has defied all odds and is worth hundreds of millions. Betting on underdog New Orleans in last year’s Super Bowl brought home $3.5 million for him.

He’s become so good at it that most sports bookies will not take his bets.

Billy Walters Is Better at Calculating the Odds than the Odds-Makers

How has he done it? An insane amount of data. He has used consultants to compile databases that predict outcomes and betting lines for games. And his team has done it so well that they’ve been able to out-predict the professional odds-makers in Las Vegas. He considers what the data is showing for each game, compares it to the actual betting line, and then makes a call of how much he wants to bet on each game.

And it has worked for him. Billy

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Shoppers are eager to avoid some the debt pitfalls they may have fallen into in the past, and have tried to reduce their credit card use over the last year, according to a report from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

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1. Could you be less boring?

Prior to his audition for “Million Dollar Money Drop,” Joel Sturdivant thought he and his friend had a pretty compelling story – high school sweethearts, now best friends. Then he heard one of the other would-be contestants was a lion tamer, another pair had spent the last year as missionaries in a developing country. “I knew we were screwed,” he says.

To a game show’s producers, fitting a type or having a unique background is as important as playing the game well, says computer programmer Warren Usui, who has been a contestant on “Jeopardy!,” “Merv Griffin’s Crosswords” and “20Q.” They want interesting people who will keep viewers watching. For those who aren’t missionaries or circus folk, Usui suggests weaving interesting tidbits into the answers to the shows’ producers’ personal questions. “I once lost a boa constrictor in my car,” Usui recalls telling producers, who later asked him to share the details on-air with Alex Trebek during what ended up as a four-game stint on Jeopardy. (

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In November 2009, we ran an article that explored the difficult economics of opening a cupcake shop, and we asked this question: Are cupcakes a viable business? This week we got an answer — at least for one cupcake chain, Crumbs Bake Shop. Crumbs, which is based in New York, announced plans to go public in a $66 million deal. It claimed 2010 revenue of $31.1 million with earnings of close to $2 million.

When we first asked about the viability of cupcake businesses, we received more than 100 comments offering wildly divergent opinions. What do you think now? What, if anything, does Crumbs’s success suggest about the cupcake business?

For the last two years , its been nearly impossible for subprime borrowers to qualify for a loan of almost any kind. But that’s beginning to change as banks slowly return to lending. First up: credit cards.

Consumers with less-than-perfect credit scores are once again targets for card issuers. A growing number of banks have picked up the pace of card offers to the best of of subprime borrowers—typically those with FICO credit scores between 620 and 660. According to credit-card comparison site, CardHub.com, the number of solicitations for cards sent to that group has risen up to 300% since June. Among the most prevalent senders are large lenders like Capital One and HSBC, who say the campaign is part of a bigger effort to provide access to credit to more borrowers.

For subprime borrowers, this is just the beginning. “We’ll see more of these offers this year to the cream of the subprime,” says John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education for SmartCredit.com, a credit-monitoring web site.

Before the credit crisis, subprime was an important market segment for banks. T

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At this time of year, it’s common for small business owners to assess what’s working in their business and what’s not so they can do more of what’s working (hopefully!) and get rid of what’s not.

Most of the time this activity is focused on marketing (because it’s sexy) rather than operations. But looking at operations can often reap a big reward for your business. That means looking at the tools you use.

The majority of small business owners have less than 10 people in their business. Tons of you are the single, solitary business of one. Oh, you might outsource a thing here and a thing there, but you are the meat of your business. And that means you need good tools to make your time and effort the most effective and useful.

So I thought I’d share three tools that are critical to keeping my business running in today’s virtual world. I’ve become so

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Keep Your Home California is a federally funded program recently opened by the California Housing Finance Agency to keep consumers who qualify for unemployment benefits in their homes, according to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle. Applicants whose mortgages are handled by Bank of America, Chase, GMAC or Wells Fargo Citi is expected to join soon can have up to $18,000 in home loan payments over six months covered.

However, there are some strict qualifications consumers have to meet, including maximum income levels, the report said. In addition, consumers may not own more than one property, or have a second mortgage or equity loan on their home.

Many consumers have faced foreclosure problems in recent months, though that may be due to the robosigning controversy that led many to be unfairly hit with seizure notices.

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Many years ago when I was a freshman in high school, I tried out for the cross country team.

At one of our first races, I remember giving it everything I had in the final sprint for the finish line. Making it through the chute and coming out on the other side, I bent over with hands on my knees gasping for air.

Still feeling nauseous and seeing stars in the corners of my eyes, I felt two sets of hands on either side of me patting me on the back telling me what a great race I had run finishing first out of all the runners in our school. I quickly realized the two people congratulating me were none other than seniors Mindy Star and Amy Feeny.

“Wow!”, I thought. The

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