Y ddweud ythafn i'r ysgrifennu diolch yn yr agenda, yn gyfnod i ddod to take item 4 in private, our members agreed. The second item on our agenda is to consider the Scottish statutory instrument that seeks to amend the 2016 budget act. Before we come to the motion seeking approval at agenda item 3, we will have an evidence session on the order. I welcome to the meeting there at Mackay, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Constitution. Mr Mackay is joined by a couple of his colleagues from the Scottish Government, Scott Mackay, who is the Head of Finance Coordination and Kerry Timon, who is the Deputy Director of Finance and Programme Management. I welcome all our witnesses to the meeting. Cabinet Secretary, I wish to make a short opening statement. Please, convener. The spring budget revision provides the final opportunity to formally amend the Scottish budget for 2016-17. This year's spring budget revision deals with four different types of amendments to the budget. Firstly, a few funding changes. Secondly, a number of technical adjustments that have no impact on spending power. Thirdly, some whitehall transfers. Finally, some budget neutral transfers of resources between portfolio budgets, including a modest budget redirection to ensure that we maximise our available budget. The net impact on all of those changes has an increase in the approved budget of £372.1 million. Table 1.1 on page 5 of the supporting document shows the approved budgets following the autumn budget revision and the changes sought in the spring budget revision. The supporting document to the spring budget revision and the brief guide, prepared by my officials, provide a background on the net changes. The first set of changes comprise mainly of the £100 million capital stimulus allocations announced by the First Minister in September 2016, along with the £23.8 million that has been allocated over a number of lines as detailed in the brief guide. In total, those changes increase the budget by £123.8 million. The second set of changes comprise a number of technical adjustments to the budget. The technical adjustments are mainly non-cash, and therefore budget neutral, as they cannot be redeployed to support discretionary spend elsewhere and have a net positive impact of £221.5 million on the overall aggregate position. It is necessary to reflect those adjustments to ensure that the budget is consistent with the accounting requirements and with the final outturn that will be reported in our annual accounts. The largest of those changes relates to an increase of £50 million required for the non-cash student loans rap charge to better align the budget with actual requirement. Again, that is a technical adjustment to the budget, and this increase in funding cannot be used to support discretionary spending elsewhere. The Scottish budget aligns with the accounting requirements under the Government Financial Reporting Manual. A coronary budget provision is included in the Scottish budget for the financial year to reflect the recognition of relevant health and prison assets within revenue, finance, infrastructure, schemes and according to the accounting requirements. The adjustment to the budget at this spring budget revision is £20.6 million. Other technical adjustments include increased AME budget cover for provisions around impairments and fair value adjustments and other non-cash adjustments to portfolio budgets. With regard to whitehall transfers and allocations from HM Treasury, there is a net positive impact on the budget of £26.9 million. That includes additional funding of £5 million contributions for HM Treasury for both the V&A Museum Dundee and the Burl Renaissance project. The final part of the budget revision concerns the transfer of funds within and between portfolios to better align the budgets with profiled spend. There are a number of between-portfolio transfers as part of the revision process, and they have no overall impact on spending and power. The main transfers between portfolios are noted in the SBR's supporting document and the guide to the SBR. In line with past years, there are a number of internal portfolio transfers that have no effect on portfolio totals but ensure that internal budgets are monitored and managed effectively. As previously mentioned, the committee will wish to note that it is part of a robust budget management process. In line with good practice, we have taken opportunity at spring budget revision to redeploy some budgets to meet emerging pressures. As always, we will proactively manage the flexibility provided under the budget exchange mechanism, agreed between HM Treasury and the devolved administrations. I can confirm, as is in the case with previous years, that it is my intention to make a statement to Parliament on provision allowed to earn in respect to both our Scottish Parliament budget and HM Treasury budget. The brief guide to the spring budget revision, prepared by my official, sets out the background in the details of the main changes proposed and hope that colleagues have found this helpful. Thank you, cabinet secretary. You mentioned a couple of times that the Whitehall transfers and allocations from HM Treasury, can you specify what stipulations are attached to these transfers? Are they essentially ring-fence for the purpose that's outlined, or is there any flexibility at all? No, they're very specific for a particular function as detailed, yes, so, yeah, something that's that. There's quite a number of budget transfers that are recurrent, and would you agree that it would assist in mitigating some of the confusion around the actual position of certain budgets to have those included in the draft budget document if they're on an annual basis recurrent transfers? My view is that, I suppose, there are two categories here. One is where it's recurring and it would make sense to try and incorporate that in at the earlier stage, and I think that that's fair comment, and maybe something that the budget review group will consider, then we can reflect upon. But we have been trying to do that, looking at recurring budget lines and where it makes sense to incorporate them and rather than have this change process. The other category, I suppose, I would describe as one where it might still make sense for the reason that the portfolio holder is essentially commissioning a service and it might still make sense in those cases to keep it that way. I suppose the best example that I can give of that is the training of nurses, where it's essentially, it looks as if it's across two budgets between health and education, but it's a clear function, it's an education function, but obviously it's support and health. I think that there will be some examples where it still makes sense to keep it that way, but where committee may believe that we should try and incorporate more in, then we should do that. I think that there are two categories there, convener, but I'm happy to reflect on it further if the budget review group thinks that it helps around transparency. Maybe someone has to say where it's recurred every year, and there are others where it's specific one portfolio essentially procuring a service from another. Last but not least, from my own perspective, I just wondered if you could talk us through the decision making process for allocating funding changes during the year. Obviously there are members here who have not always been on the finance committee, so understanding what the Government process is and allocation of those transfers would be quite helpful. Maybe the officials can cover some of that. From a political point of view, there will be natural underspends in some places, overspends in other places. That could be across Government within portfolios, within projects, even just managing that overall multi-billion-pound budget. There will be changes within that to reflect actual spend, requirement and delivering on Government's policies at the most basic account and sale level. I suppose that I can wish Kerry, would you like to cover? That's absolutely right. Obviously, we monitor across the Scottish Government very, very closely on an on-going basis, so we're very aware of where projects are slipping or maybe there's additional pressures elsewhere and demand-led budgets, so we're managing everything very, very closely to keep within our overall allocations. Where we see a need emerging somewhere or additionally some underspend emerging, we are effectively matching that to where the need is to make sure that we end the year at a very, very precise position so that we've effectively not lost any spending power for over the year. Okay. Thank you very much. James Kelly. Okay, thank you, convener. Good morning, Cabinet Secretary. I'm just looking at the figures. I was surprised to see an emerging underspend in the housing line, bearing in mind that housing is obviously a major issue and our support across the Parliament for supporting house building, not only in terms of addressing the housing shortage, but also from the point of view of supporting the construction industry. Can you maybe explain the background to that? Convener, that's a fair question. I think there's two elements to that. A smaller element is that it's higher than expected level of receipts from the sale of homes, which is a smaller element. The larger element is how we profile the spend on delivering the housing targets. There's no question that we're working towards our housing target, but how that is profiled and spent within the housing portfolio is being managed. I suppose it's how they have profiled that. We've set out a figure. They're working towards that ambitious target, which runs to 2021. It's simply the way they have profiled to spend it over that period and therefore doesn't all need to be spent in the first year, but, obviously, that will increase as we go into each year to deliver that target. I'm still somewhat surprised at that. Overall, your target is to reach 35,000 by 2021, and recent figures show that you've only got 6,000 forecast completions at this stage. I understand that there will be more spending to push that up, but that would seem to me to be a relatively low figure at this stage in the process. I'm surprised that the underspend wasn't used to be reallocated to other projects within the housing sector. The programme will escalate as we make further progress as we do the necessary preparatory work and investment and build that up. I want to reassure Mr Kelly that we will meet a target. This is how housing has been delivering the spend to meet that target, but there's no question that we're nagging on it or we're moving back. It's just how we've profiled it. Again, Kerry can give more technical detail. I think that what I would say in terms of reallocating that funding to other housing projects, obviously the vast majority of housing projects require quite a long lead-in time in terms of planning, procuring. The cabinet secretary is absolutely right. What we will do in this reallocating is ensure that the targets will be met and the funds will be made available in the following year, but what we will do is reallocate it to an area that can use it within the year, because what we don't want to do, the worst-case scenario, is reallocate it to another large capital or housing project and then that in itself slip and then we get to the year end and we've had almost a double slippage and that funding is lost. We're very careful to make sure that when underspends are emerging we can reallocate those where they can actually be used. To be clear, where the £21.5 million, where was that actually reallocated to? It's part of that full reallocation that's set out in the brief guide. So there's a whole list of... Yeah, I've seen it. So it's going against one of the projects like the farmers' payments or something like that. It wouldn't be farmers' payments because that's financial transactions, but it would have been one of the other capital reallocations there. So can you give... There's obviously a list on the table. I've given one example. You said it's not going there. Can you give an illustration of where it might have gone? I think we just need to make clear it's not as if a specific line goes from one project to another. It will contribute to the overall capital contribution. So it's not possible to say it's gone from project A to project B specifically. Yeah, I understand. Just the overall funding. I understand that. You can see in the table there are obviously credits and debits, and monies come out underspends and get any other projects. Obviously the farmers' loans is one of the main beneficiaries of that. You've said that it hasn't gone there. So am I right in saying that it's gone across the other lines? For example, policing fire pensions, Angus Groes, is that fair to say? I get it. It's probably not as simple as that. I mean, as we've said, it may have gone to other capital projects that have then released financial transactions to put against the farmers' loans. We may have re-evaluated how we're scoring things and exactly how projects are being funded. So there's no direct read across here to where it's gone. I understand there's no direct read across in the sense that you're not transferring 21.5 million into a discrete project, but there's not that many projects on that table. So I've given one example and you said it's not gone there. Is it fair to say it's been reallocated across the others? Yeah, I think it's fair to say it will have funded the rest of the capital programme. Yeah, it's a global figure. Okay, I think I've finished that convener, but I think the point does remain certainly a concern to me as a committee member and as a regional MSP for Glasgow that the housing budget hasn't been fully spent in this year. Can I ask you questions for overall to understand? I don't have it in front of me, so forgive me. The housing budget and the draft budget, what did that amount to? If I remember rightly, it was close to £700 million. Overall... We're trying to understand the scale of the 21.5 against the overall scale of housing that's been spent. 3.3 million overall, so it is a very small percentage. Again, for our large capital projects, we would always expect there to be some shift in timing of it. Okay, that's how we understand the perspective. James, you have a second question. James. Sorry to the cabinet. Just again, give the reassurance, we have housing targets. We will meet them, but we'll meet them in a profile spend. Housing belief is the right thing to do, so we won't just spend the money because that's the figure we've set. That's the requirement that they believe they've had to spend in that year to deliver on the overall commitment, but in that year, obviously that means escalation going forward. We're not talking about future years budgets, but that would be reflected in future years. Okay, moving on to another issue then, just in terms of the justice portfolio, there's been a transfer from the police change fund to £52.6 million to the SPA. Can you give me a bit more detail around that? That's a continuation, please. Okay, so it's the continuation of the funding for police transition reform, VAT, that's again just the continuation of that approach. So in terms of the police change fund, what has been sacrificed to take £52.6 million out of there and moved into the SPA? What was planned as expenditure in that line and is now needed or can't take place? That line is specifically for the police change programme, so it's every year it was set up explicitly for that function, so it's reform money that sits within the Scottish Government, within that line, and then transfers in year. The reason it wasn't initially put into the SPA line is because they look every year at what the amount that is required is and then accordingly pass that amount across. So it was never intended for any other purpose than police reform. So it sits in the police change budget and it's transferred over? Yes, right. Based on requirement that has been assessed? It was always intended for that purpose. Okay, there was a split of it. Some £34.8 million was revenue and 17.8 was capital, but in the transfer across it appears it's all been allocated to revenue. What's the thinking there? That's it. That's a technical adjustment to do with the way that arm's length bodies budgets are presented in the Scottish budget documents. SPA, for the purposes of the budget document, is all recorded as revenue because it's not reflected in Scottish Government accounts as a direct capital expenditure. So it's still effectively a capital grant, but it's an indirect capital grant as far as the core Scottish Government is concerned. So it's not a change against our treasury budgets, but it is presented as such in the Scottish budget documents. So it doesn't mean that that's not going to be spent on capital, but it presents slightly differently in the document. So within the SPA budget, are you saying there's not a capital line that's all revenue? In terms of how it's shown in the Scottish budget documents, the budget document has to align to the presentation that we show in our accounts. In our accounts, we only record capital expenditure that is directly undertaken by the core Scottish Government. That doesn't include capital expenditure that's undertaken by arm's length bodies. So it shows as revenue within the Scottish budget documents, but against our treasury control aggregates, it is still recorded as capital. So it's a technical presentational difference rather than a substantive move between capital and revenue. So are you saying that although it's presented as revenue, that £17.8 million in the end will actually be spent against capital, albeit in arm's length body? Yes. Thank you. Good morning. I've got a couple of questions in two distinct areas. The first relates to the capital stimulus funding of £100 million that was brought forward. In the current financial year, based on an underspend from the previous year, can you give us an update on how much of that £100 million has now been spent? My understanding is that it's either been spent or very much on track to be spent. So that's as clear as that. It's been spent or is on track to be spent, yes. So you expect it all to be spent by the end of the financial year? Expect it to be spent, yes. There are some elements where there might be not total payment. We expect it all to have been passed across to the relevant bodies by the end of the year and the projects to be virtually completed. Obviously, we will be assessing that when we come to do the final accounts and the provisional out-turn for the final spend. Okay, thank you. Given that capital stimulus funding intended to stimulate the economy, do you do any assessment as to the impact of that on the wider economy? It's a good question. We haven't done an assessment on the impact post-decision, but to arrive at that £100 million, we went through an assessment of how the resource could be best used and there was a range of facts on how quickly the money could be spent, geographic interest, return on investment. So we went through an approach to make sure that it would be well spent, which I'm happy to share with the committee, but we haven't done a post-spend analysis. Okay. I think there's interesting lessons in it, for us all, of course, about determining spend and what gives greatest value, but we used a particular approach using our economists, as well as a range of other factors to arrive at that. I think it'll be helpful to show us that. I also think that it might be interesting if the Government had the capacity to do some work post the event to see whether the spending has a desired outcome in line with expectations. Sure. Again, I think that that's a very fair point. It's £100 million within clearly a much more substantial spend, but I'll take the point forward on assessing Government expenditure in achieving the impacts and what gives us greatest return. Okay, thank you. I want to move on to a different issue, which is the question of farmers' loans, which is in the funding adjustments showing a financial transaction of £48.5 million. Have I read that correct? Is this to do with the failures in the CIP-IT system that this figure has appeared? This is the issue around CIP payments where, yes, they haven't been delivered in a fashion that the Government would like. This is not new. Mr Ewing has reported this to Parliament, but, yes, this is a financial transaction that allows us to make the loans in advance of farmers getting their payment, which was, of course, warmly welcomed by the farmers in having that certainty and payments from us in advance, so that's used at the FTs to do that, yes. That's correct. Okay, thank you. Now, as I've seen, looking at the transfers, there's been a transfer of £7.5 million from the economy jobs and fair work portfolio to the rural economy and connectivity portfolio for loans to farmers. Have I read this correctly? Part of that £48 million is £7.5 million taken out of the economy for department funding. If I read that right, that means that the economy funding is down £7.5 million that could have been spent on other things because of the failures in the IT system. Is that right? You can cover the detail of the budget line transfer, but in terms of FTs, that has been deployed from FTs underspend and targeted for this purpose because the cap loans, when the cap loans are paid, that recovers the money for financial transactions. So there's a timing issue here about whether it's paid within this financial year or the next financial year, but because of our budget exchange mechanism, the rules around FTs and the limit that we were allowed to carry forward was actually increased by UK Government at our request. In terms of FTs, there is essentially no loss because it's paid back and we can redeploy financial transactions. I'm looking at the internal transfer from the economy jobs of fair work to the rural economy and connectivity, which is £7.5 million. Is that on the main document that you're referring to, Mr Fraser? I'm looking at the spice brief, let me see if I can find it in your document. If you look at page 13 of your document, is that right? I'm looking at the spice brief. Page 2 of the Government's supporting document. It's just one point of reference. Yes, convener, just to be clear, there's no loss of money. It's just a policy reallocation. What you mean is that money goes out from economy to the rural payment site and the event that will come back in once the loans are repaid. Is that effectively what you've described? Funding will be recycled as the loans are repaid. As the Cabinet Secretary and my colleague referred to earlier, this is about maximising the budget, the effective use of the budget over the piece. So it's about drawing funding from emerging underspends across a range of different areas and redeploying them to maximise their effectiveness in line with emerging pressures. My only observation has been given the importance of the economy both in terms of the Government's objectives and the wider economic interests of Scotland. 7.5 million from the economy portfolio is a very chunky sum of money and that's money not available to spend in relation to that department because it's being transferred over to deal with this issue for loans for farmers. I'm just checking that it is the financial transactions element and some of the nature of financial transactions is some of its demand-led, of course, around particular schemes. But yes, it has been a priority of the Government to ensure that in the understanding of the camp payments that we assist farmers, so that money has gone into the economy, albeit the rural economy, and that's been a policy decision, yes, to respond to that. But some of the FTE lines are demand-led, so there may not have been demand for certain budget lines which then made it available for us to use for this purpose, which clearly is a priority. Are you able to provide the committee perhaps in writing with some more information as to how this underspend would have arisen in the economy department? On the FTEs, yes. Yes, I can do that. Thank you, that would be helpful. I mean, there's just to note that any transfers into the rural economy were certainly welcome in my part of Scotland. Cabinet Secretary, the spice paper refers on page 9 under the hearing of local government to a net positive increase allocation of about £22.8 million, which is very welcome. Could you clarify that on top of the £160 million that's actually allocated to local government? Is the nature of the adjustments of the £22.8 million, please? Those budget revisions are for the financial year that we're currently in, so they add to... As is the case with local government, there are additions over the course of the year. Again, some of that is from portfolios, some of that might be spending decisions, but it does relate to as we've described in previous debates around local government finance decisions that are taking subsequent to draft budget or from portfolios. Is there any? It doesn't relate to the £160 million, of course, because that's for determined for the next year. Is there any stipulations within those adjustments, though, as local government-free tattoos, how it deploys those various funds and adjustments that it receives? Of course, there's a range of funds that go towards local government from the overall grant settlement, then ring-fence funds, and then again. In the same way that I described earlier, specific portfolio issues will have determined a policy decision and then it funds local government, and that can be a range of actions covering a number of local government functions. If it's useful, the two key transfers with a £10 million for maintaining teachers' numbers and £5 million for support for the one-plus-two-language policy, you'll be aware of the discussions around the bulk of the transfer. The detail will be in the fuller document under the community section. There's a list of the individual transfers that make that up. Thank you very much. There are no further questions. We'll now move to agenda item 3, which is consideration of the motion on the order. That is to move motion S5M-04150 that the Finance and Constitution Committee recommends that the Budget Scotland Act 2016 amendment regulations 2017 draft to be approved. I move. Do members have any further comments? There are no further comments. The question is that motion S5M-04150 be agreed to or are we all agreed? We're agreed. I thank the cabinet secretary and his officials. We will now prepare a short report for the Parliament setting out our decision on the order in the coming days. As agreed at the start of the meeting, we'll now take the next item of business and private and now close this public part of the meeting.


Well, hello and welcome to another Dev Nation Live. We are excited to have all you guys here today. We have another great topic with another great presenter, Edson Yanaga, who's gonna walk us through feature toggles and hypothesis-driven development. If you've not seen this topic before, it's gonna be awesome. Edson is one of our best speakers here at Red Hat and he's gonna deep dive in this topic. So remember, use the Q and A tab or the chat tab to ask us questions. I'll try to respond in real time where I can, but we'll hold questions towards the end and I'll verbally ask them of Edson when he's ready to go. Okay, when he's finished his formal presentation. We have about 30 minutes to spend together today. So feel free to chat us up in the chat tab and Edson, it's time for you to get going. Hello, always a pleasure to be here. So as we're said today, we're gonna discuss a bit about feature toggles and I have a challenge. I have a lot of demos to show and I also have to try to speak slower than usual. So let me try to share my screen with you right now. So today's subject is feature toggles and hypothesis-driven development. I'm Edson Yanaga, my Twitter handle is at Yanaga just in case you want to follow me. I discuss a lot about DevOps, microservices, Java, software craftsmanship and other subjects, interesting subjects I hope. I'm also a Java champion and a Microsoft MVP, which I believe is a very nice combination. And since we're talking about feature toggles for hypothesis-driven development, of course we have to discuss a bit about DevOps. And all of this discussion around DevOps and of course continuous delivery. You need a fully automated software deployment pipeline. You have all of your deployment problems already solved. So you can get to the third step, which I believe is to test your business hypothesis. But so far, everybody doing DevOps and continuous delivery, the main goal of trying to establish a continuous delivery pipeline was to try to reduce the bugs that we were deploying to production between each one of our releases. So if you're discussing this DevOps thing so far, the main goal of that was to reduce risk. We were deploying really software releases with bugs into production, where we're trying to reduce our batch size. So we could reduce the amount of bugs that we had into production. From a business perspective, we wanted to reduce the risk. But now that we have solved this deployment problems, we can dig into the hypothesis-driven development. And just to give you a comparison on how we traditionally do deployment pipelines, traditional deployment pipelines, you always assume that the next version is better than the previous one. So if I'm developing release 1.0, then the next version I'm performing some commits into my master branch. And I'm assuming that the next release 2.0 will be better than previous one. I'll have fewer bugs. All of my features will be better than previous one. I'm also assuming that the features that I'm developing right now are the best fit for the business. And if I release 2.0 into production, when I'm developing 3.0, I'm always assuming that 3.0 will be better than 2.0. And the analogy that I like to make with this traditional pipeline approach is that we are developing software as we were cooking or as we had a food buffet as a business. Because somebody, probably the owner of the business, just the chef, decides the dishes that are going to be cooked that day, you're just assuming that people will consume the dishes in the same amount. So maybe you don't know if people will eat more meat or will eat more vegetables. So you just have to cook like our pasta or you have to cook. And enough amount that will satisfy all of the users that are going to come into your beef fit today. And as you can imagine, someday you have a lot of the return people going to a restaurant. So you have a lot of meat that is not sold, not consumed, or the opposite could happen too. You have some people that own meat or steak and they don't consume the vegetables. So you're just wasting a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of resources developing food or cooking food that's not going to be useful into production. So the traditional pipeline approach is that we assume that these features are going to be useful into production, but we don't know for sure. So we have to spend a lot of time and effort developing these features, even though we don't know yet which are the results that we're going to have into production. And when we're thinking about hypothesis, dream and development, we can, the analogy that I like to make is that instead of trying to cook the whole beef fit with all the dishes that we want to present to our consumers into production, we're instead just picking small plates of each one of our features and we just cook a small plate. We offer to our customer, well, the customer decides, well, I like this food, but maybe you could put a little bit less of spices or put a bit more salt or I didn't like that at all because if the user enjoyed the food or the feature, well, you can spend more time producing more with that same feature, but if the user just rejected the feature, well, I didn't like the feature, I'm not going to consume this feature at all, you just can stop cooking that feature of that dish at that moment and you can invest in other kinds of foods or features that would be more useful to you, okay? So when we're talking about hypothesis, dream and development, I don't know what will be the outcome of the feature that I'm developing right now. That's why I need to test to give the user just a simple taste of what might happen. So the user, in fact, the data that the user is providing me can tell me which feature I should be spending more resources on. So if you're talking about hypothesis-driven development, if you ever heard about A-B testing, well, A-B testing is certainly one of the ways that we can achieve hypothesis-driven development and once I have this kind of A-B testing, we have version 1.0 and I have two different business hypotheses saying, well, maybe if I implement my recommendation engine this way, I'll have more sales into production or maybe if I tweak my recommendation engine this other way, I might have better results. So you don't know for sure and the best way for you to test your hypothesis is to deploy them into production. So maybe you have two hypotheses, recommendation A and recommendation B and the data in production tells you that, well, recommendation engine B performs better into production. So that's the branch that, that's the feature implementation that we should be choosing to keep moving forward into our software. Traditional way of trying to achieve hypothesis-driven development with A-B testing is trying to implement with feature branching. So feature branching and A-B testing are done like that. You just, since you don't know and you have the different trees of committing your source code, you just implement, there are feature A in feature branch A and implement feature B or feature branch B and later you deploy both versions of production and you monitor the behavior to test which hypothesis performing better into production and the traditional way of trying to, well, two different deployments into production and you need to route the requests of your users to your two different deployments is to use a smart router approach. And with that, you just, you add an artifact on your deployments which means your requests are going for this smart router and this smart router has the logic to route the request between feature branch A and feature branch B. It looks simple, but it does also assume that you're going to have a fully automated software deployment pipeline for both feature A and feature B and people will be developing this feature branching separately. Of course, we also have our dangers. We have some problems that become even worse. The bigger the team that you have.  And of course, if you're developing your feature branch A and your feature branch B, for every single commit or maybe even hourly or daily, you're pulling the branches, the changes from the trunk or the master branch to your own future branch. So you won't have like later integration problems. But what happens if, well, I'm developing both the trunk, feature branch A and feature branch B, and later I decide that, well, I test as both hypothesis into production and I'm going to keep one of the versions, but on the meantime, some other team is also performing some A, B testing and they're developing their other features separately and they decided that their feature branch B should be merged into trunk. The problem with that is that, well, you were performing continuous integration of your feature branch A against the trunk and the team developing feature branch B also was performing continuous integration with the trunk. But when the team developing feature branch B decide to merge their changes into the trunk, on the next pool, on the next continuous integration cycle that you'll have in your feature branch A, you just received like a thousand commits, well, a thousand so much, but maybe a hundred commits from feature branch B that you were not continuous integrating. So you just had a huge conflict because this feature branch were sold different apart that now you have to solve this huge problem. And with all of the teams that I've ever talked to, the problem with that is that when they have such a huge merge conflict problem, most of them just decided, well, it's practically impossible for us to solve this merge conflict. We're just going to copy paste the files that are important in their future branch. We're gonna discard everything. We're gonna get the trunk again and just copy over the files that we think they're important to our future branch and just tweak the rest that should be implemented. You might be guessing it's not a right or it's not a nice approach for you to be developing software, copying, pasting things and then copying over the changes of other teams, right? But that's what usually happens if you're developing A-B testing with different feature branches. You're just one of the purposes of DevOps and continuous delivery pipelines is to reduce the batch size between each one of your releases. But every time you create a separate development branch, you are creating a huge batch size on that branch and all of that commits that are being put together in that separate branch, they're creating a huge batch size that is going to be integrated all at once at trunk. So you have like a batch size of 100 commits. All of these 100 commits are going to be merged in the single request when you decide to merge that to your trunk development. So many people get burned with this kind of feature branching approach and huge merging. So that's why we decided to develop another A-B testing approach, another hypothesis-driven development approach which is to use feature toggles. And with feature toggles, we just do trunk-based development or master-based development. Everybody commits on trunk but the features are not released all together on every single deployment. You just delegate to a feature toggle the moment that you're going to release this feature into production. So in the DevOps terminology, we're saying that with feature toggles, we're just uncoupling releases from deployment. And the most popular example that we have from uncoupling release from deployment was the Facebook messenger approach because Facebook didn't know if their backend would support the amount of requests that Facebook messenger would send to their infrastructure. So they just, well, they deployed the Facebook manager feature into production but the users couldn't see that. But in the background, your Facebook page was sending random requests to your friends, to the backend. So they could test if the backend would support the amount of requests. And on the release day, somebody inside Facebook just decided, well, let's flip this feature toggle so we can release the Facebook messenger to the users. So now they can use that. But in fact, in Prats, people have been like shadow using that into production for many months before the release. So we deployed the feature much before it was released to production. And how can we do that with code? So today I'm going to show you two different demos. One, I'm going to show you the Togo Z framework for feature toggles and the other one I'm going to show you the FF4j feature toggle framework. So let me just show you here the web pages. So ff4j.org is the web page for feature, FF4j and Togo Z.org, the web page for Togo Z. Since most of us are probably Java enterprise developers, I chose two different Java implementations. You have different implementations from different languages and platforms too. The only one that I used into production was FF4j because at that time, two years ago, I compared both frameworks and in my opinion, FF4j was more mature. But it just in the past couple of months, many people have told me that they were using Togo Z and Togo Z evolved a lot in the past few years. So I decided to give it a try and in my like one week testing of both frameworks, I can tell that, well, they're both comparable in terms of features. So now maybe it's a matter of choice, which one should you be using? So in the past, I only knew about people using FF4j in production, but now many people reported to me at least like four different teams in the past couple of months reported to me. Oh, we're using Togo Z successful into production and they gave me some reasons for choosing that. And I said, awesome, because it's very nice for us to have competition in this field so we can each one of the frameworks can improve in their own pace. And with some competition, it helps us to push forward the different implementations. So I just created two different projects. The first one that I'm going to show you is the FF4j demo. And can you see my source code right now? Mer, can you confirm that? Just let me double check with you in the chat. Yes, awesome. Thank you very much. You're amazing. So, so you can see my source code right now. Here I have a Spring Boot application.  So basically I'm using the simplest possible approach for configuring FF4j. I just create an FF4j.xml And on this FF4j.xml, I declare here two feature toggles. I'm declaring feature hello, which is enabled by default. And I have a description which I'll be able to see. And my administration panel, and I have a new recommendation engine feature toggle, which is not enabled by default. And I have this beautiful description. So how does it work? If I have here my hello controller, suppose I just inject my FF4j instance as a Spring Bean, and I just need to check here, if FF4j.check, and the name of the feature hello, if that's enabled, I return hello. But if it's not, I'm going to return hola, which is Portuguese. I'm Brazilian, so I'm going to return that in Portuguese. So I just added this if in my source code, and I want, now I want to run my application. So if I decide to run this application, I'll be able to see that in my browser. So application is starting up with my feature toggles enabled, and it's already running. Okay, and now let's see localhost 88 slash hello. So hello, my feature toggle is enabled by default. So if I want to tweak, how is it working? Let me open the console. FF4j console. And now I have here my feature panel. It's toggled a zone by default. If I turn it off, then I can just go to my web page back, and now it's showing things in Portuguese. So it's very easy to implement the feature toggle feature with FF4j into production. But this I'm adding this kind of if statements in my code. Right now, maybe we can have a better approach for that. So in some cases, we want to have like a different algorithm implement implementation into my production source code. So I want to test. So I created an interface recommendation engine, which has one method. And I have a default recommendation agent here. So it just returns like a default recommendation and which is burger, hot dog and milkshake, which is very appropriate since yesterday, here in the US, it was four for July. And I can tell that people consume a lot of this when we have holidays here in the US. And I implemented recommendation controller, which basically injects for me a recommendation engine instance, and I just return as the list of strings from this recommendation. So if I go to this implementation into production right now, go to recommendation. I have this beautiful JSON recommendation, which are burger, hot dog and milkshake. But how can we do that changing dynamically into production or source code? So basically the recommendation controller, I'm going to say it out. Well, this method, I want to add a ff4day feature. And the name of the feature is new recommendation engine. All right. And now I'm going to provide on my application two different implementations of the recommendation engine interface. So I'm going to add like public, improve it recommendation engine, and it's going to return a new improve it recommendation engine instance. And it's going to be a bin. For those spring lovers here, you know that, well, since I'm providing two different implementations of the recommendation engine interface at runtime, spring would complain because spring wouldn't know which one to inject since I have two different options. So I have to mark one of them as primary to be injected. Well, if I have a conflict, you're going to choose this one as a primary. And I have to restart the application because I changed the source code. So let's see how it behaves. So let's get back to the recommendation, hitting reload and still getting the burger, hot dog and milkshake. So let's go back to the panel. And here I'm going to turn the new recommendation engine on and let's see which is the recommendation, steak, steak and steak. And for those that know me, well, that's my particular favorite recommendation because for me, that's my favorite food. And so that's how you flip different implementations using FF4j into production. The backend repository that I'm using to store my feature toggles using FF4j today is just an e-memory repository. So it means that every time I restart my application, I'm going to lose all my data. But of course, FF4j provides you a lot of different repository implementations. So you can store your implementations using Redis, you can store that using MongoDB, you can store that using NEJ cache implementation, which means you could use in FinisPan, you could also use JDBC. So you have many different options for using your FF4j. And for J, I think that the benefits that you have a very nice spring integration, which at the moment for the amount of knowledge that I have from both frameworks right now, I would say that the spring integration, the spring proxy integration for me to be able to do this flip switching with FF4j is a bit more mature than to go Z, but both are very nice frameworks, okay? So next demo that I want to show you is, just let me stop this application. Now I want to show you how can you perform the same kind of thing using to go Z. So now let me switch my projects. You can see even, let me show you my to go Z implementation. And I'm going to run to go Z. So the basic endpoint is basically the same. And this one I'm using a wild flies form as the implementation. So basically what I can do, the nice thing about to go Z is that it has a very nice CDI implementation. So if CDI is your favorite implementation of dependency injection, maybe you want to give a try. I just create the configuration also is very simple. I just need to create here, I just added the to go Z dependencies on my own dot XML and that created a class that implements to go Z config. So I have here, it gives me the class that is implementing my features, the state repository. I'm using a file-based implementation because I think it was cooler to show you right now. And I have a user provider which provides me the users for authenticating the console. And if you go, what does this class means? This in FF4j, I'm basically implementing since I chose to use an in-memory repository, I needed to create a FF4j dot XML and I had to declare my features there. But if I'm using to go Z, I can create an enum and I can declare my enum implementations here. So I can say that, well, I'm going to have two different feature toggles. Hello, and it's going to be labeled hello to be shown on the my interface. And I also have WordCup teams who were playing the WordCup right now. So we have, I have a different feature toggle called WordCup teams. And you have to implement these methods which is the default implementation. So if you think about how we implement the feature toggles, maybe to go Z, my particular taste is that I prefer to code, to implement things using code as in Java. So for me, it's a win that I can use enums for my feature toggles. So basically that's all that I need to do. And in my hello worded point, I just have to check here using code. I just say, if my features dot hello is active, my enum is returning is active on this method return hello or else return hola. So let's see, let's go to my endpoint here. And hello, if returning hello because it's enabled by default, but now I'm going to open my to go Z console. To go Z, oops, local host to go Z. So if I open my administration console, I can turn it off. So if I turn it off, I go back here to my local host and it's returning hola because now it's returning Portuguese. So it's very similar the way that we can use both of them, my administration panel. But since I'm using my file repository to go Z automatically changes into production here's dot properties. It already changes dynamically that the values of my properties file here. So if I decide to change it, but to enabled, it's going to show hello again. And if I go back here, hello equals to true. So you have a sync here. It's an e-memory repository. It's a file-based repository. If you had JDBC, it would work the same. But I will want to show you other things like how can I do to, let's create another endpoint. World cup endpoint. So I decided here I want to return some kind of JSON. If I want to implement that, I can do just the same if like my features dot world cup teams is active. Maybe I want to return world cup favorites dot better favorites. Yeah, or else I can return. I don't have a best practice, but I assume that maybe you want to show your future toggles using if our statements. I think it should be clear for you to see how the flow of the code is behaving. So let's restart my application because I just added another future toggle. And just in case you were wondering, does to go Z provide me the same proxy feature that you can switch the things dynamically without adding the if statement? Yes, but as far as I can tell, it only works with spring. And since I'm using wild class form with Java EE, I couldn't find a similar implementation for a CDI. But I guess, well, that's the tip. Somebody could be implementing that. Let's see how it behaves into production. So hello, it's still working. And if I go here to my endpoint world cup, it says that, well, the favorites so far are Croatian, England and Sweden. But if I just go back to my administration console and I enable my new features saying, well, let's have better favorites from now, I would say that, well, maybe the future right now should be Brazil, Brazil and Brazil, which by the way is playing tomorrow afternoon. And that if you don't have a favorite team so far, I strongly suggest you to cheer for us because I will. And that's what I wanted to show you for now. So I'll stop my screen sharing. And if we have any questions available, I'll be more than happy to answer them. Back on the scene here. All right. So John had a great question for you, Edson. It was around the concept of, what about performance of a given feature? So think in terms of an A-B test, if I am doing an A-B test between red versus blue or green versus black, whatever the two things I'm testing, Brazil versus let's say Germany, Brazil still in the tournament. How do we measure the performance of one of those particular features? You mean business performance or back and forth? Yeah, the business performance. Business performance, okay. Yeah, as I mentioned that very quickly in the slide, in the beginning of the presentation, you need to monitor a behavior. And traditional way for you to monitor application, well, you're just monitoring CPU, memory, network on these kinds of things, which is our back and statistics. You have to start sending your statistics to a monitor platform. And these statistics needs to be kind of business statistics. So maybe if you have an online sales application, you're going to measure how much you're selling at this time of day, during one week, you're going to measure that and compare to your baseline on the week before. If you normalize all of the other variables, you can compare the algorithm between one implementation and the other one. Okay, and I would mention that for A, B testing in particular, there are a lot of great online resources to describe what statistics you need to capture to validate that you are doing it correctly and making sure that A versus B is being tested correctly. Yeah, and just- Another question that came up, oh, sorry, go. Please go. I was about to say another question that came up was related to what about not Java? You saw all your demonstrations were in Java, which of course is a primary user base for people like you and myself. But what about Python or Node.js or .NET? We did find a website, featureflags.io, that seems to gather all the different toggle Z-type things, but do you have any other insight into non-Java platforms for feature flags? Well, yeah, no, I don't. Unfortunately, my experience is purely Java and that's the, well, as I said, I used FF4G in the past and I've been playing with Togo Z in the past week so I could have a baseline, but I don't have knowledge. I know that people are using feature toggles in other languages and platforms too. I just can't recommend anyone because it's out of my knowledge. Okay, one last question and we're out of time, but Vicky asked a question that I think is good to kind of recap and kind of summarize everything here. What is the exact significance of this framework and if you already have instrumentation frameworks in place? So if you're already capturing metrics, what is the real value this is on top of those metrics?  You're already measuring the performance of your business results into production. And now, as I said, you can switch your, maybe you want to develop a new version of your recommendation engine, but you're not sure if the new version will be better than the current one. Or maybe you have two different teams that will be implementing two new different approach, but you don't know for sure which one will behave better in production. So you can implement both features and then flip them dynamically into production just to monitor the results. And one of the things that I wanted to compliment in the first question is that you need to monitor for a long enough time so you can compare with a baseline. And you have to be sure that all of the other variables are the same. I have to tell a famous taxi app in Brazil, for example, they were performing A, B testing. So they released a new version of the application and they realized that the number of rides that they were having at that day was much lower than they had in the previous week. So they said, what's happening right now? And they just realized that, whoa, Monday at this time last week was raining. So we had much more rides. So it's unfair to compare with the metrics that we're having right now. So you have to monitor a lot of things to make sure that all the variables are the same to have a meaningful result with comparing your future titles. Okay, well, I'm afraid we are out of time for today. The recording will be available to folks that are interested in it. I did add both of Edson's GitHub repose for the demos that he showed today to the chat. So you guys should have those already. But always feel free to email me if you have a question, have a need and also have a future topic. You'd like to see us discuss. I'm now working on the next round of August and September and October definition live session. So if you have an idea, feel free to reach out to me at birdredhead.com. And I'll get that information back to you. Also, the recording will be available as soon as we have it. Thank you so much. Thank you, Edson. Thank you. Thank you all.


when something used to kind of tick me off from the way I was brought up in the game, I would look down the dugout. And if nobody was upset about it, Manny Machado or JJ Hardy or Adam Johnson, who am I to impose upon the way we played the game? Okay.  If he takes it from ball four, you're going to push it run across. Always felt like you swing in the back gives me a better chance to get somebody out and taken the pitch. I think we're I always want to go to home playing.  I'll manage my team. If at some point you want to forward for the game, give me a thumbs up or thumbs down was shut her down.  I think you got to keep in mind is the player's game. Yeah, you do impose the way you were brought up and teaching a run down, teaching a double play pivot, teaching a tag player relay. Yeah, you do impose that. But you know, I can go back into the fifties and sixties and show those guys it was played different than the way you played in seventies and eighties. I mean, I think we all need to kind of take a pill and keep in mind if it doesn't upset the players or the fans, who are we to impose our will of how we were brought up to play the game to make us right? Does it make us wrong? Not necessarily.


Just a couple of weeks ago pro-publica released a report detailing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's close relationship with right-wing billionaire Harlan Crowe along with decades of unreported gifts worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in total and This week we learned that Neil Gorsuch failed to disclose that a law firm who frequently argues cases before the Supreme Court Purchased property that he co-owned in just nine days after he was confirmed to the Supreme Court Now considering the fact that this property sat there for two years without a buyer and then all of a sudden Conspicuously when he's confirmed to the Supreme Court This law firm who argues cases before the court decided to purchase it. I Think that most reasonable people would assume that the law firm wanted to cultivate goodwill with the new Supreme Court Justice by helping him net Hundreds of thousands of dollars for his personal wealth now while Gorsuch reported the sale He never actually disclosed the identity of the buyer. Hmm. I wonder why he wouldn't disclose this fact That's pretty relevant if you ask anyone with a brain Yeah, so to say that the highest court has a few ethical issues would be the understatement of the century So Dick Durbin share of the Senate Judiciary Committee extended an invitation to Chief Justice John Roberts to testify about the Supreme Court's ethics and Roberts responded by Telling him no he turned down the invitation Especially given this time when the public has questions and concerns about the Supreme Court rightfully so Roberts said no so in a letter to Chairman Durbin He writes I must respectfully decline your invitation testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the Chief Justice of the United States is Exceedingly rare as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence He then went on to justify his decision with a bunch of vapid bullshit and attached a statement of ethics principles Signed by every single member of the court and I've just got to ask What the fuck is he thinking? This is what a lot of people are asking Declining the invite is bad in and of itself But simply stating their ethics principles is almost insulting considering how senators have Explicitly asked them to adopt a binding code of conduct. So to just say we're not going to do that But we're just going to state our principles. Oh, and I'm also not going to testify I mean it's just completely unreasonable and he's getting slammed because of this NBC News reports a new statement signed by all nine Supreme Court justices stressing their commitment to ethics principles has come under immediate fire for failing to respond to recent calls for The court to adopt a binding code of conduct Several experts faulted the court for doubling down on its decision Not to adopt a formal code of conduct when public trust in the institution has plummeted after high-profile ethical concerns As well as public backlash to some of its rulings on hot button issues like abortion and guns The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Now get this District and appeals court judges are bound by a judicial code of ethics that requires judges to avoid Impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities Judges who breach the code can be investigated and reprimanded through a separate complaint process The supreme court however the highest court on the land has no procedure for complaints to be investigated short Of the substantial step of impeachment the nine justices say they follow the spirit of the code But they have never adopted one of their own. I love that last line so much see We don't actually need to be bound by a code of ethics because we follow the spirit of the code wink wink I mean it's It's so absurd. We have uh an alleged rapist on the court. We have alito leaking cases to republican donors We have thomas who has a nazi admiring billionaire sugar daddy. We have gorsuch getting um buttered up I guess by law firms who are constantly arguing cases before the court I mean, it's so deeply unserious and orwellian that I don't know how anyone can take this court seriously at this point And this is why their legitimacy is in crisis currently and I think that aoc put it best The chief justice is refusing to appear before congress and answer questions about his justices receiving money from special interests This statement brings hollow a court that rejects accountability for itself It roads its own legitimacy to hold others accountable in turn and that is an excellent point This is precisely why the court is facing a legitimacy crisis perhaps worse than the lochner era legitimacy crisis But to be fair I mean simply politely inviting roberts to testify was never going to lead to real accountability Real accountability in my opinion comes comes in the form of meaningful investigations and actual impeachments Now there are senators like chris murphy and angus king and lisa murkowski Who have introduced legislation to force the court to adopt a binding code of ethics? But I think that you have to take it a step further That's fine and expected but you need to do what senator ed marquis is doing by actually calling explicitly for justices to Resign like clarence domis. So as the new republic reports quote I will say what needs to be said clarence domis should resign from the supreme court of the united states His reputation is unsalvageable the massachusetts senator ed marquis said it is evident that he cannot judge right from wrong So why should he be judging the country's most important cases on the highest court? marquis made the comments while flanked by representative iana presley and senator elizabeth warren in boston During the kickoff of a 20 stop tour focused on advocating for tighter ethical restrictions on the supreme court. Good That's what I want to see now We've seen house representatives like alexandria acasio-cortez and ilhan omar called for thomas's impeachment or resignation before But it's really nice to see some senators start to join those calls Because if there isn't enough pressure then he's not going to budge if you just have a couple of House of representatives members say yeah, he should resign, but the calls aren't overwhelming It's not going to affect him and with that being said Still the choice ultimately with these calls for him to resign Is up to him. He doesn't have to heed their calls The problem here is that these justices have already proven that they're not going to hold themselves accountable They won't even hold themselves to the same standards of district and appeals court judges So why should we expect them to listen when people say that they should resign? They won't because when you have like this lifetime appointment It probably affects you In a deeply deeply psychological way, right? Like you probably feel untouchable So the only way to get actual accountability is to impeach them impeach thomas Investigate every remaining justice on the court and rebalance the court by adding more justices who aren't extremist Theocrats, but I mean all of these recommendations. It's it's nothing more than wishful thinking because it'll never happen But if those actions specifically aren't taken then there probably will never be accountability


A 65-year-old hunter was found dead last Saturday near a deer stand east of Emily. Foul play is not suspected. The sheriff's office says it appears the man had a medical emergency. His name has not been released. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


How's it going people? How's it going traders? It's Dapo Willis once again now guys. Today I want to discuss a very very personal topic to me which is how I went from being broke to becoming forex millionaire that you guys know now and that's on YouTube and all that. Now the reason why I like to speak about things like this is not to necessarily brag about how much money I have in my trading account and how many beautiful women I have in my life or how many fast cars I drive or the fact that I live in Dubai. The reason I do this is so that you guys can understand the real journey behind forex trading. The problem I have with the industry is a lot of people come on YouTube and portray it in a certain way and because of how they portray the sorry guys I just need to make sure this is recording because of how they portray the the the forex mark the forex market in a certain way the forex lifestyle a lot of young people not just even young people a lot of people are led astray. They think that this is a game that they can easily come into spend a little money just put some money here and there and start making million dollars overnight. So I've been doing this for 10 years and I feel like I'm in the best position to educate you guys on exactly how the journey goes. So if you are at a point in your life whereby you want to come into forex or you are to point in your life whereby you want to quit forex or you're absolutely struggling forex I feel like this story that I'm about to tell you guys my own life's journey my own life story in this industry can equally help you out as well so that you know okay Mr Willis faced this at this particular time I'm facing this right now and this is exactly how he overcame this so if indeed you understand any chance of becoming a millionaire in this game or making some good money and feeding your family I suggest you listen to everything I have to share with you guys today so let's go all right guys so this story might be a little bit different from what you were expecting okay now the reason I'm saying this is the fact that whilst I was trading I was fortunate enough I'm not gonna go into the early days of my trading I'm gonna save that for another video so I'm gonna use another video to explain to you guys my entire journey from when I was 17 and how I discovered forex that's not what I want to discuss today I want to tell you about how I bounce back from being broke to becoming a forex millionaire that's what I want to share with you guys today so in order for me to just quickly make this video you know as short as possible in order for me to just summarize everything in 20 now this is very personal information that I've never shared with anybody right and I'm coming on here and being transparent as possible okay in 2016 um early 2017 right so you guys know I started trading in 2012 right so I'm just writing stuff down you guys know I started trading 2011-2012 right late 2011-2012 I just let secondary school high school so as a 2016 I've been trading the market for about four years remember guys it had taken me about two and a half to three years to master this craft right and the reason why it took me three years which I feel at the time it seemed like a long time but the reason why for those of you who are struggling forex now you realize that three years is actually a short time because a lot of people have been have been doing this for about seven eight years they are still not successful I know this because a lot of traders run to me like I miss the willis I watch your video I've been doing this for 10 years no luck I've been doing this for 12 years no luck I'm like oh my god what have you been doing and then obviously we have to refer them to willis university whereby they take the course and then paying just $99 for it they take the program and then they come back to us like oh my god so thank you very much it's the life changing that I finally made my first redraw you know yourselves and I'm happy you guys are making money however that's besides the point it took me three years I was fortunate enough to meet my mentor right and then things really changed around for me and before anything was happening my life really took off however in 2016 late middle of 2016 I got a call from now this is what actually led me to be in broke I got a call from a family friend and he said he was interested in forex long story short I told him get some education let me coach you let me teach you let me this no no no what do you know you're a small boy I'm a big man I've been doing this longer than you I'm a stock broker you're a small boy and you know Africans are very condescending people right and the guy didn't listen to me I like all right cool do your thing in it as with most people on YouTube the first of all the people most people on YouTube when they watch my video the first like this guy he's always talking higher time frames always talking these like his strategy is the best all right your strategy is the best screw you and then they go and blow their account and then when they're done blowing their account they run back to the comments of my videos I'm like oh my god boss you're the best you're the best after watching my videos so same story with this guy I'm like dude I know what it took me to get here you know long story short he invested about maybe $40,000 in the training account and he blew his account so he calls me back and almost shot of blaming me for blowing his account you know like you know this has nothing to do with me so I rang up my mom at the time I was like yo mom this is exactly what's happening hold on guys I need to put the air conditioning on in my office it's on low I need to put it on medium because before I start sweating don't go anywhere all right people so I'm back right so long story short he blows his account and then he's calling me like shot of blaming me for blowing his account I'm like this this guy's serious like you introduced me to Forex and I'm like I introduced you to Forex you must be crazy man so the guy is obviously pissed off and all that I'm like listen this has nothing to do with me you're not like okay okay I know this has nothing to do with you how do we recover this money and all that blah blah blah so I don't know why that particular incident really really really made me feel bad made me feel like a type of way because I was like man this forex thing like people are you know I was looking around and like people are really losing money in this forex thing you know and it really made me sad so for a lot of you guys are going through your forex journey right now your parents are probably telling you to quit the wife is telling you to quit this person is telling you that this person is telling you this you haven't really started seeing results yet so you're not happy with yourself and stuff like that I did this stupid thing at the time I allowed what was happening around me and what people were saying about Forex to like nudge me like knock me off my grind so guys I did the most stupid thing I quit Forex yes I quit Forex 2016 not because I was trading badly not because I wasn't making money in the market but because I allowed what people around me you know allowed what people around me like what they were saying get to me do you know what I mean like you know this one the guy was you know he was because I could see how stressed out he was out so I said to myself I said man then I started doubting my own self like I started doubting my own thing meanwhile I had been consistently turning out results for the last maybe 24 months yeah don't forget like 2014 2015 was my best trading year at the time 2016 was absolutely fantastic this was just around brexit 2016 was smashing I remember because brexit happened and then the pound just dropped 20s AUD USD was training as well so I just literally made a significant amount of money um from from the market but that just was to show you how powerful the mind is like people just around me just you know kind of like speaking ill of the market and just like so you're still doing that thing so you're still doing that Forex thing you know people just talking and I left out like you know to forget about this thing I'm gonna go I told my girlfriend at the time I'm like oh listen man I don't think I'm gonna do this anymore my mom told me don't go anywhere stay here and do this Forex thing because this is your life you've been doing it since you were 17 you've been doing it since you were a kid what are you doing like mom I'm tired I don't really I don't I was not proud of the market I wasn't proud to be called a forex trader so I quit that's exactly what happened now once I quit the market I went in less than four five months I was broke broke why I've withdrawn all my money from my trading account and then I'm taking it to start investing it in other businesses I wanted to do farming I wanted to do this I wanted to do export I wanted to do a lot of things so this is saying my dad always tells me says divided attention multiplies tension I was going into industries that I knew nothing about I was trying them for the first time just because I didn't want to trade forex I was literally leaving something I was so good at to go and do other stuff just to show you you know that even traders that know what they're doing still doubt themselves from time to time talk less of traders who are struggling with the market okay now the moral of this story is don't freaking quit but I'm getting to that and then you know I started trying other things here and there and guys I even dived into digital marketing don't get me wrong like I learned a lot of valuable skills within that period I think that's really what has helped me build my empire but that's not even the case at that time it was a very bad time like I probably if I tell you how much money I had of me was so bad like my literally my girlfriend had to support me at the time imagine madness I was like okay ah I still didn't want to go back to forex still don't want to go back to forex I was like you know I'm out I'm out of forex I'm gonna find another way to break bread forex is not a it's not a noble industry it's not it's a zero-sum game you read people talk about this and then once your mind is in a particular state of mind you start seeing all the negative things and blah blah blah long story short guys one day I just woke up like the people who used to respect me before the people that used to look up to me before the people that used to basically want to be around me everybody was just disassociating themselves from me my investors were not really respecting me anymore people that I had taught how to trade were literally taking my own clients and my own investors so I woke up one day and you know I said I had a conversation with my mom and my mom was like listen you need to like this is what you know how to do best long story short I'm flat out broke 2016 slash early early early months of 2017 I just had to say to myself I'm like okay listen your flat out broke dabs there's only one thing you know how to do well which is training for an exchange market now guys this is what I always tell people you see signals indicators all those things they don't they won't help you at the end of the day it boils down to your skill set okay your skill set the forex market is my ATM machine regardless of how broke I am regardless of how rich I am regardless of if you take everything away from me if I opened up my charts tomorrow I will be able to feed myself okay and this is what I keep preaching for those of you who haven't taken the forex mastery program you guys think that I'm just coming on here to shove down a cost shove it cost down your neck at the end of the day it's not even that it's a situation of it's a skill set the top down analysis is a skill set your ability to interpret the market and if you take the forex mastery program you realize that see it is a situation of price action analysis that can be used for multiple instruments you guys come on here you see me analyze bitcoin you see me analyze crude oil like I am analyzing commodities that are driven by opaque prices and I'm correct because the principles of price action remain constant I analyze prices of coffee apple amazon so this is not just a strategy of early morning New York session bullish candle crossover and then this is your ability to look at a chart and break things down right um sorry give me one second I don't want to forget something yeah just want to make sure let's touch on trader psychology you know so long story short I knew that okay and I knew I had what it takes for those of you who are thinking about getting the forex mastery program as always we will be glad to educate you guys the link is going to be down here just click the you just see grab the forex mastery program or my team always puts the link somewhere in the video right so back to what I was saying now how was I able to bounce back into where I am today I'll tell you what I did so I was flat out broke at the time my girlfriend literally used to have to send me money a whole me a whole me me me me you know bless her man bless her at the time bless her so to you bless her you know she believed in me and she was like you know dabs I think you should go back you should go back to this forex thing you should go back to this forex thing because man you love it so much so I love you guys are passionate about the forex market so there's no point going anywhere you need to see through till the very end because it is so rewarding long story short I like it time to go back but there's no money they want to take money from anybody so what I did was one day I just actually I logged into because I was using FX primers at the time to trade FX primers was my broker at the time FX primers was my broker at the time so I logged into my FX primers account because I wanted to I wanted to see if they were doing any promotional offers like a 50% and all that and I logged in there and then I realized that when I withdrew all my money six months ago they did not process the money so I had two trading accounts the two empty four account there was a secondary empty four account that I always like to have a high risk at low risk trading account so the high risk trading account still had a thousand one hundred dollars in there guys now I have one thousand I'm literally starting now fresh one thousand one hundred dollars now the question is dabs how did you now take one thousand one hundred dollars to a million bucks to where you are right now I'll tell you for free to not to burst your bubble but I did not take one thousand one hundred dollars straight to one million dollars this was the progression path for me now as a 2017 I remember doing my analysis obviously I transferred the money to my empty four I have it with me so I you know put the money there and I do my analysis my top down analysis and I find that the market is not exactly trending at the time so the market isn't trending at the time I'm thinking okay all right cool so I realized that gbp usd is about to fall off a cliff like it was at a major decision point I knew from a monthly timeframe I could tell like the market had pulled back into major resistance and the market was about to drop off I could see it but the market was still consolidating around that region once again top down analysis always wins every time because if I'd started trading that market at that time just say okay I had one for out I've blown the account because the market was not ready but the top down analysis literally told me when the market was ready like I keep telling top down analysis is on module five of the forex mastery program once again the link is always around here guys it's what I tell you before you do anything just go on higher time frames do your top down analysis right and a lot of you guys okay before I digress I'm gonna come back into that shortly now back to the story now do my top down analysis the market is not ripe it's not ready so I have to wait like four five weeks because you have to understand something if you're training with a small account and you want to grow your account at a fast pace the market needs to be trending when the market is trending it makes it a lot easier to flip that account I'll tell you for free but if the market is stuck in a range just like gold at the moment as at the time I'm recording this video is Valentine's Day Monday 14 February right 2022 so just like gold right now you can't walk into gold now with your small money I think you're going to double it would slice you into pieces so I had to wait for about a whole month for the market to for the thing to you know it's like a you know iPhone cables like the ones the wired ones you know how they get tangled before like get tangled and then you have to untangle them so I literally had to allow the market untangle itself and give me a clear direction and that's exactly how I hopped on to GBP USD and I was just riding it so I grew the account from 1k to 5k in about three months and from 5k to 7.5 in another three weeks now that was pretty high risk trading which I don't encourage you guys to do as you know I encourage the 10% in what actually were currently only 10% monthly return challenge at the moment I speak about that in the subsequent video however this was my progression path from 1.1 to 5k 5k to 7.4 however whilst I was doing this that I this is what I always encourage the 4x mastery students on the program always connect your account to a platform called my FX book because my FX book will help you track your performance so once I was able to grow my account obviously which I think I had an advantage that most people didn't have however it doesn't really matter right so I already knew some old investors I was already speaking to family friends and stuff like that I already knew the wealthy people that I could that had money right for you guys who are watching this that you know rich people you everybody has that rich uncle and that rich auntie everybody does no matter how you know in abject poverty you are everybody knows that person so you know I had my equity called them I study having meetings you know however before I was able to grow this account to that this thing I had to go back to my my analysis so what actually really helped me grow that account that fast was the fact that I had been documenting my trades over time the ones I was taking prior to when I quit 4x I had screen recordings I had videos I had the things strategies that you know my strategy was intact because it had worked for me over time so for those of you who are thinking of coming back to the market or something you just really want to have some some kind of thing to look forward to if you're coming back to the market or if you're thinking of quitting or really visit your educational material once I had the $1,100 it was very straightforward for me because I just went back to watch things that were proven and tested and in your case is a 4x mastery program those are video analysis those are educational materials that have worked time and time and proven over and over again from module one to module 12 from how to use candlesticks properly from how to use you know identify the trends how to draw your trend lines properly top down analysis all of that chat pattern or everything so I just went to revisit my own version of the 4x match not mind you I didn't have any 4x mastery program to watch it was still my stuff luckily for you guys all that stuff that I you know that I've built over the years is what I used to create program so in my own case I revisited that and now the advantages of revisiting your educational material mastery students will tell you this once you watch educational material again especially when it comes to 4x when you go back to the chart you are so sharp you're just taking things down like you're you know like every analysis once you draw the light it's happening your eyes can see so for if for any time maybe you've blown your account in the past and you're looking to fund your account again always revisit learning materials but always revisit learning materials okay and like I'm keep saying in your own case is the 4x mastery program so that's exactly how I had the confidence to come back into the market grow that account from 1 1 to 5k from 5k to 74 in the span of maybe another six months now whilst whilst you're trying to grow your account I always advise that you have some money in your hand like just just just have money feel a bit rich because once you feel a bit rich you don't feel the need to keep putting pressure as my lips are dry let's go once you have money with you you don't feel the need to you know put pressure on your trading account because you're not thinking I have to pay school fees I have to do this now just keep some money aside that you that you can use for your day-to-day lives because if you rely on your trading performance to give you that daily bread you will run into big issues because you'll be desperate you'll be hungry you want the money to happen now and that is exactly where traders start to make the wrong trading decisions so long story short that Paul Willis has his equity curve now $7,400 he has grown into and I started speaking to investors again um you guys have watched the story about the African billionaire he had invested in me about a year and a half before this issue happened I literally had to let him him go at the time so obviously we met again in the UK at the African summit Warwick African summit Ubuntu was the team uh that time so he was with the vice president of Nigeria we were all together so I saw him and he was like oh why were you as things going you don't want to work with us anymore like no side was just going through some personal things and that's exactly how we started um that's exactly how we we started um we kick things off again so I mean like this this this should be like a listen to you guys guys listen you know at the end of the day you can't keep listening to what people say to you right you can't you can't allow the noise from outside to get to your parents don't like uh African parents don't believe in digital ways of making money spouses don't believe in this because they they they used to the traditional way of doing things right even not just African parents parents all over the world people will tell you stuff you have to guys this is a game that requires your life's dedication okay it does require your life's dedication and you guys are so lucky you have that poll is on youtube you have the forest mastery program that is so cheap it's $99 literally $99 so you have no excuse all you need to do is bury your head down and get this thing done and whatever situation you find yourself in if you've even if you've blown an account even if you're at the point whereby you feel like giving up there's always light at the end of the tunnel okay now as of the time I'm recording this video this is February the market isn't exactly trending so I know a lot of you guys are a bit frustrated at the moment you're a bit pissed off you need to calm down and relax allow the top-down analysis give you the headway allow the market open up for you because if you keep fighting it you will keep losing money forest mastery students you know I love you guys very much all you need to do is go back on the program try and if you haven't revisited it revisit it again watch the top-down analysis module come back select three pairs you like my favorite pairs AUD USD at the moment AUD USD Euro USD GDP USD I'm already long oil I did a prediction on oil for it to hit $95 a bar $92 a bar it has actually hit that made some money on oil at the moment the euro is looking nice to me but the market just isn't it's not trending at the moment so what do we do we have to be patient okay we have 11 months in this year to trade there's a lot of money to be made right don't run into issues because you know you're being impatient and all that revisit the program for those of you who haven't gotten the program the link is it's going to be down here somewhere around here again revisit the program head to the voice master student you know how to access your platform revisit the program watch it again and calm your nerves relax okay it's not the end of the world there's something else I wanted to speak about I can't even remember so yes ladies and gentlemen that's exactly how I was able to bounce back and things started to pick up from there I also understood myself a lot more I kind of like tweaked my trading style now I'm more of an I look at the market from an investor's perspective I know my yearly goals my yearly goals are usually about 70 percent I like 70 percent I'm comfortable 70 percent all I need to do is make seven winning trades in a whole year which is very very extremely achievable for me I'm a lot more relaxed now there's nothing you can say to me about forex that is going to change my mind at this point I am 100 percent 1 million percent committed forex changed my life it changed my forex is responsible for everything I have today every other business that I have has been funded from forex okay so forex can't be that thing for you as long as you play your cards right you have a small amount in your trading account grow it a little by little 10 every month put the equity curve together and get an investor investors are not expecting you to return crazy amounts of money they just want their little 20 30 percent they're not looking for a ridiculous amount of money and that's how exactly how you start building your base 50 percent a year is only five winning trades don't forget that 50 percent return on investment a year is only five winning trades if you have a hundred thousand dollars that's 50k you split down with your investor 50 50s 25 thousand dollars each I don't know what part of the world you're in right now but 25k at the end of 12 months is a lot of money for a lot of people so I mean I think that's pretty much it so ladies and gentlemen that is the honest story from how a forex trader like myself went broke and bounced back into where he is right now live in life in Dubai live in la vida loca enjoying myself all thanks to forex so yeah once again ladies and gentlemen thank you for staying to the very end of this video I want to say special things to the forex mastery students as always people keep complaining like oh what is he always talking about for his mastery students like people have invested no matter how little they have invested in my knowledge that means they believe in what I have to offer I am forever indebted to them if you're not part of the family it's too bad it's too bad you get what I mean but I would always keep speaking to them when they respond when they ask me questions are as much as possible to respond to them I do this for them okay because they have they have shown commitment a lot of people want free stuff I realized that when I was always looking for free stuff on the internet I didn't get anywhere until I started paying some good money and the forex mastery program is just $99 I spent well over $30,000 in my entire trading life on education alone so you haven't even scratched the surface and everything I've learned so far over the years I put in the program so another thing that a lot of people keep speaking about on YouTube is the fact that okay the strategy on the forex mastery program you can't trade it if you have a small trading account that is a big lie now let me explain to you how it works let me explain to you the methodology behind my method okay which is the top-down analysis all the top-down analysis does okay is to give you a clear bias a clear direction let's take the euro at the moment for example the euro is looking very very bearish sorry it's looking very bearish on a higher time frame due to the top-down analysis I'm not trading on the monthly time frame you're not required to trade on the weekly time frame as a matter of fact these time frames are for analysis only therefore what analysis only the daily time frame is where we come to start looking for potential setups if at the daily time frame is where we start looking for the trend within the overall trend what does that mean let's say the monthly and weekly are pointing down you need to come on the daily to find a more recent trend so that once you have a more recent trend you can then scale to four hour and one hour and then trade in that direction I'll give you an example a euro week monthly down weekly down daily needs to give me a trend that is also pointing down as well because it is that daily trend we would then be looking to trade so we will now scale to four hour and one hour time frames to now look for entry points so think about it with your small money you are always going to trade on one hour and four hour and 30 minutes so it's the same thing all this is asking you to do is understand direction finish we're just putting more pressure so that you stand a better chance of having a successful trade do you get what I mean like nobody's stopping you from doing scalping and doing whatever thing scalping is just not my style okay you can scalp with it with the forex mastery program you can do that all we're asking you to do is scalp in the right direction that's all that's all and that's it that's the clarity the forex mastery program and the top-down analysis brings to the table okay so I don't want to keep seeing comments like oh I can't hold my trade for so long you have a lot of money that's why you cannot that's a lie with 200 dollars if I take 30 dollars and I get into a trade and I hope click buy you have 30 dollars I have 30 thousand dollars if I click buy and I hold this 30 thousand dollar trade and it goes to 500 thousand dollars for instance you too when you hold when you click buy your 30 dollar trade and you hold it the same amount of time that I'm holding my own your own also grows to 500 dollars as well it's just buying and holding this is all I'm saying like finding the direction clicking the trade and just holding on to the freaking trade nobody's asking you to trade on big time frame you're not even supposed to trade like if you were to trade on monthly time frame nobody would ever trade so this is some misconception that I also wanted to clear if you have a if you have a small account you have a big account the mastery program is here to give you clarity direction also my strategy is also in the program as well if you like my strategy you can adopt it as well if you have a strategy a lower time frame strategy that works for you all you need to do is combine what is working for your lower time frame and watch the top-down analysis so that you can put both of them together I have my strategy there as well but if you feel like you want to use yours that's fine so that you know keep these things coming down okay so all I'm going to do is now when my own tells me to buy I won't buy when it tells me to sell a hand I will sell because the overall guy is pointing down so this is the way I want you guys to trade so that's pretty much it I'm not going to show up any Lamborghinis today no Ferraris no this no that no girls no poor all of that I just wanted to come on here and clarify a couple of things to you guys and just basically tell you guys that there is hope don't quit on this game okay don't quit on this game there's light at the end of the tunnel I believe in you guys and I continue to pray for you guys especially my mastery students I pray that one day one day not even just one day we're already getting testimonials on my telegram people are telling me sir for the first time in my life I've made a redraw you know people are telling me I'm so I cannot believe that my knowledge that I almost threw away one time in my life is actually impacting and changing people's lives so I'm very happy to see you guys doing very well for those of you guys who are still somewhat struggling your light is around the corner definitely okay if you haven't grabbed the program ensure to do it the link is going to be here around here somewhere if you're on the program keep pushing okay it is straightforward there is what light at the end of the tunnel okay understand that if the market isn't trending it is going to be tough but if the top-down analysis tells you it is time to go ladies and gentlemen it is time to go and go selling so guys I'm about to go now so I'll catch you guys in my subsequent videos um maybe the next video I'm going to give you a story about I'm going to jump back on the charts and do analysis so it's going to be it's going to be um life experience forex training experience analysis lifestyle content experiences uh trade off like technical because technical are the fundamentals of this channel so I keep giving you guys analysis but however these things these stories that these events that happen in my life are very very important for I didn't even realize how important they were until people used to tell me like yo I'm going through the same thing as well so I'm going to keep sharing this yeah there are things that have happened you know when I'm going to keep those ones for a subsequent video so once again ladies and gentlemen thank you for staying with me till the very end I know I'm wearing the same shirt I wore in my previous video who cares take it easy peace out