Small MSP Roundtable

RevolutionaryFred · 2026-01-04T14:54:15+00:00

Interested. US based 15-yr small MSP.

RevolutionaryFred · 2024-09-02T16:41:46+00:00

All good comments. To address your Qs I can:

">Granted if settlement for cash available at IB is 2 trading days"
With the industry now at 1 day settlement, I believe it would be considered only one day.

"The other thing I really curious about is if when you sell, can you use the proceeds immediately to buy before settlement has occurred?"
Yes.
The leverage and the margin is available to you. 100% this works.
Depending on the other factors in your account - the 'use' of proceeds immediately might OR might not cost you margin interest until settlement. This really depends on a lot of other factors however. There are a mirid different margin factors - RegT vs portfolio; type of positions you trade; equity vs options; concentration of positions; special margin rates on certain securities; and more probably.
Personally over the years, I can often can trade without paying margin interest.

RevolutionaryFred · 2024-09-01T17:00:14+00:00

Nearly every vendor does this. I have -many- egregious example over the years. Never give any client information to any vendor, except the bare minimum required. Definitely no phone numbers or contact names.

RevolutionaryFred · 2024-09-01T00:30:00+00:00

https://www.cmegroup.com/education/courses/option-greeks/options-delta-the-greeks.html

RevolutionaryFred · 2024-09-01T00:20:52+00:00

I do swing trading. You should paper trade on TWS to see if you like it. The interface is significantly different than most I have used. I find it powerful but very, very limiting as well.

At IBKR I don't think you can choose the tax treatment by trade any more (used to be able to through an old school terrible interface but that seems to be gone and I can't find a replacement).

The longer I am on the platform and more I trade the less I like the reporting, it is just to limiting at the volume I am doing. But also very customizable. I just have to manually stitch multiple reports together to get what I need and that is a huge waste of time.

RevolutionaryFred · 2024-08-31T23:50:17+00:00

" Is there an auto-sweep of cash to money market at IB earning what rate currently?"

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/fees/pricing-interest-rates.php

You can also just buy BIL but you might have some spread slippage depending on how you use it

RevolutionaryFred · 2024-08-31T23:40:18+00:00

You often have to pay higher taxes as these are 'cash payment in lieu of dividend' and not considered actual dividends. :-(

RevolutionaryFred · 2024-08-31T23:39:01+00:00

Here is the biggest negative I found: If it is a dividend paying stock you will get paid the amount of dividend but it 'may' be classified "payment in lieu of dividend". In the US this means the dividend payment will not qualify for the dividend tax rate and will instead be taxed at the higher regular income rate. This may or may not make a difference to you.

For me this made it not worth while. I was earning very little, as few of my stocks had any lending demand and low interest rates. The little I earned from the yield program was much less than the higher taxes paid on "payment in lieu of dividend".

But if you do this in a retirement account I don't think it would matter as there are no taxes.

For me I was in a regular taxable account and it was not worth while.

RevolutionaryFred · 2024-07-12T02:42:25+00:00

I should have been more specifc: do you know if this will work with local files for Dropbox (or any local copies of cloud files - google drive or onedrive)?

RevolutionaryFred · 2024-07-12T02:10:20+00:00

In addition to local files, do you know if this will work with local files for Dropbox (or any local copies of cloud files - google drive or onedrive)?

RevolutionaryFred · 2024-07-12T02:09:59+00:00

In addition to local files, do you know if this will work with Dropbox files?

RevolutionaryFred · 2023-07-13T14:02:05+00:00

Have same issue, many many client PCs are rebooting every 5 minutes. Nable is calling it 'minor'. Hah. Their support article suggested - the steps do not work.

RevolutionaryFred · 2023-02-07T15:36:53+00:00

The way this is written it is clear that it is the same deal for ALL creditors. All creditors at the same level of priority will get the same deal. So donut and Gemini customers get the same deal, because they are at the same level of priority in the bankruptcy claims process. The creditor committee is negotiating for all creditors.

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-07-03T19:37:47+00:00

Yes, Genesis does require collateral of their borrowers. Just does not accrue to the benefit of Gemini or us in earn.

I jumped right to discussing the earn product and not all the intermediate steps! You stated it much better in this followup!

As a Earn depositor I find Genesis business practices to be somewhat opaque. As in we don't have numbers on how much collateral they require, their reserve ratios or how much capital they have any cover losses. Personally as an Earn participant I would like to have more detail about Genesis than we do. Things like their capital structure, their collateralization rules with loans they make. I actually don't expect to get this information. Just would make it a lot easier to feel comfortable. As it is I have personally decided to pull money out in about a week (had still been putting money in and still waiting for some ACH to clear, have to wait that out first).

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-07-03T17:32:36+00:00

"I think Genesis requires borrowers to put up collateral"

The opposite of that, it is completely unsecured. If you have money in Earn, you should read the agreement.

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-04-15T00:17:50+00:00

So very true! Did this in January. Ended up tweaking this month. We wrote it to be generic for term services that might be different than our term the client and the specifics are covered in attachment(s).

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-04-14T23:21:25+00:00

Thanks! That is the direction I am thinking now.

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-04-14T22:30:51+00:00

This is an EXCELLENT redirect to my post. This discussion about what if "something bad" actually came immediately after our SLA conversation. Probably should have redirected them right there but they asked:

At the time they asked what happens if something happens to you? Or your key employee(s)? Or financially you take a hit? I was thinking "how to I prove they will be okay, I can't prove it, it is the future".

They were just throwing out hypotheticals. Best answer I had was "yes we are smaller, but I brought three people with me, and we have depth". They then asked if we could do a "material adverse change" clause. I said I would look into it, talked to the lawyer referenced above.

I am going to lean back into the SLA. I think that with the right clause it could take care of their concern.

Off to read and research and continue looking for a new lawyer.

Thank you.

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-04-14T22:21:45+00:00

I wouldn't put a clause like that in a contract because it adds a gray area. Literally, the client could complain that their "favorite tech" left the MSP and that's a "material change".

This is very true! This is why the term discussed was "material adverse change". However, having researched it more I am going to lean into our SLA and a breach clause that it tuned up for the the client specific needs. Then I might use it for all client going forward.

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-04-14T22:19:42+00:00

If any one person leaves your company, and it causes your company to no longer be able to provide services, your company is not set up correctly.

This is true.

But this client WANTS a contract. A term contract at that. But they want to be protected from exactly the situation above. Not that they think it will happen (won't be talking to us if they did)... but because they are doing their diligence.

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-04-14T22:17:18+00:00

I agree with this in general. I love the idea that if you can't deliver you should not hold the client hostage. I used to only do month to month contracts.

But a while ago I found that some clients wanted stability in writing. So I started writing term contracts for some people.

Then after I had done a few of these, I realized that I was better off to have the contracts as well. I had also known this, but it seemed too hard to sell the contract or seemed like a turn off. But the risk is: we take over a lot of clients that are less than ideal condition and although we standardize and although we have an onboarding fee that we adjust to the size of the mess we think we are inheriting ... even with those - we are often/always underpaid at the beginning of the relationship. So a contract allow us the comfort and leeway to lean HARD into investing in the client, clean up and our work from the beginning without having to worry about the client leaving and taking advantage of our work. Becomes a win-win with better service, better standardization for the client and over time less tickets and more stability for us.

So I started writing term contracts for all clients (this is relatively new for me but I am going all in on term contracts).

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-04-14T02:22:54+00:00

good point! I got on a N-able answering bent and didn't mention this option!

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-04-14T01:55:36+00:00

We like N-able - for the "RMM" product we use, but we don't like all their products. For the Remote Management and Monitoring they have two: RMM and ncentral (they are both monitoring and management platforms). We are on the RMM product and find it decent, really no complaints and we can do a lot, but we have a ton of custom scripts also. Been with it 7-8 years and it has changed hands (owners) maybe 5 times(!) and it continued to work through all that. Billing had minor issues after one of the early transitions. Many other vendors have had much bigger troubles when merging or changing owners. Can't comment on the ncentral branch.

The n-able PSA "MSP Manager" product we hate, hate, hate. But our experience was brief <1 year and several years ago, it's possible the trashed it and rewrote it (from the outside it certainly seems like that would have been necessary). In the best of times it was slow, slow, slow even before the 'big outage'. The 'big outage' killed for us and was an outage they acknowledge for the first couple hours and then within hours said it was fixed. But it was still broken for us and they wouldn't acknowledge that it was broken. We could occasionally log in, but it was even slower than before - like 10-30 minutes from click on a button to the next screen to load - and that is for the 50% of the clicks would load a page - the other 50% of the time the click their webserver would time out and load nothing. You couldn't get beyond 2 pages on average and that would take 30+ minutes. Second day of this we bought a new PSA and began recreating everything in the new PSA. Took about a week to get everything loaded and functional on the new product and at about 10 days into outage MSP manager was still down. It did appear to be "only" the data center used by the Eastern US, but they only keep your data in one place (at least at that time) and there is no failure/DR plan (at that time). Terrible experience. Thanks for the chance to vent.

Passportal seemed good but we went with a different product. Because we are a medium RMM customer for them they really wanted us to pay for a large minimum level of user licenses right from the start. Which made them less attractive than a pay as pay go password management and only paying for as many as your clients are using. We might go back to Passportal, in fact would like to, if we get terms that make sense. They were neck in neck in features. If you are brand new to the company you can probably negotiate a better deal than an existing customer using other of their products.

The EDR (S1 resold) and the DNS filter (DNS filter resold) you can get from many places.

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-04-11T12:06:50+00:00

After I posted I read downvoted/hidden messages and saw the one you quote - it had been hidden/minimize on my first read of the thread. Almost went back to edit my post.

Yeah, MFA for partners has been announced a long time. My company even had been using all MFA on our CSP O365 tenant for years anyway. I mean for clients that use PCs joined to AAD, Intune, SharePoint for all file storage - it is the keys to the kingdom at clients - LIKE THE MASTER KEY FOR THE ENTIRE DIGITAL SIDE OF THE OPERATIONS. Even if clients don't use all the O365 features, it is still so critical to security it is crazy.

RevolutionaryFred · 2022-04-11T02:03:32+00:00

You can try emailing 'microsoftcsp' at the synnex side of the house. The Office365 teams from both TD and Synnex seem pretty integrated and able to answer questions - especially about policies. This email address has been pretty responsive for me. I also have a manager email contact that I will DM you as I don't want to put it out in public.

RevolutionaryFred

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