I’m going to try as an experiment publishing my tweets at my blog.  They highlight significant articles that I have read.  Let me know if you want me to do this regularly.  Alternatively, you can get my tweets via RSS or email, as I described here.

Anyway, here are the tweets:

China’s Top 10 Business Stories in 2011 http://bit.ly/rRN3S0 Patrick Chovanec, professor in China gives his perspectives on a tough year $$

Job Creation Is Price for US Health Law bloom.bg/rK5s7R Inflexible mandates on business tend to decrease jobs in the economy $$ #yup

Spain says deficit bigger than expected, hikes taxes reut.rs/vF8gLj Spain goes for austerity amid large budget deficits. Surprise! $$

Fear Recoupling in ’12, Not the End of the World bloom.bg/unlphk Pesek on dangers from Asian economic 2nd-order effects in 2012 $$

Heterodox economics: Marginal revolutionaries econ.st/tGlNai The Economist on the effect economics bloggers have on the mainstream $$

Bonds Prove Best Financial Asset in 2011 bloom.bg/tvL3z5 Leave aside Shilling, Hoisington & a few others. Who called this? I didn’t.

Major Dubai companies ‘may need bail-outs’ tgr.ph/v00OEW It is usually not wise to lend money on projects that are grandiose. $$ #duh

Borrowing From ECB Jumps on.wsj.com/vFlbpR If banks wont lend 2 each other bit.ly/v42Tw7 then CBs must lend 2 banks $$ #liquiditytrap

SSgA Files For Short-Term Junk Bond ETF bit.ly/tZFizH A promising idea that will get overdone, leading to losses. Nonrated CP anyone?

The Germans have many conflicting goals $$ RT @calculatedrisk: Merkel: “Will do everything to strengthen the euro” goo.gl/fb/vxa3h

Maybe 2 cents in dividends? RT @BCAppelbaum: If you put $1 in the S&P 500 at the beginning of the year, you would end the year with… $1 $$

TED Spread on Watch for Breakout bit.ly/v42Tw7 Short-term lending getting tight, banks don’t trust each other; CBs 2 the rescue? $$

A Margin for Error in Hedge-Fund Filings on.wsj.com/sC7KAO Might some hedge funds b mismarking their less liquid stocks? bonds? X? $$

BIS Describes the Exposure of Emerging Markets to Europe bit.ly/vJ3w1a Credit slowing down from EZone 2 emerging markets, GDP slowing

Deepening Crisis Over Euro Pits Leader Against Leader on.wsj.com/v1pjlz Tale of how Angela Merkel undercut Berlusconi. Clever lady $$

Gloomy Picture for Banks in Europe’s Core on.wsj.com/vQftdv EZone Govt’s & banks depend on each other; 2 drunks holding each other up

The Q Ratio and Market Valuation bit.ly/tkbOnp Good article going over the Q ratio, what it means, how to calculate & forecast $$

California Barred by Judge From Cutting Medi-Cal Rates bloom.bg/uSFCCX Expect this pattern to repeat in a fight over priorities $$

Hospice Turns Months-to-Live Patient Into Addict bloom.bg/s0WCiH Misdiagnosis of time to live can create addicted elderly folks $$

Contra: Republicans, Lost in Moderation bloom.bg/vCrabB Did the Republicans win more elections b4 or after conservatives took over?

Banks Continue to Stockpile Agency MBS bit.ly/tOMvNz Nice credit-risk free asset to pair against cheap funds from the Fed. $$

Tough Markets: Punishing Hedge Funds Since 2003 on.wsj.com/vPf2UN Hedge funds in aggregate r yield hogs & abhor volatility $$

End of Corn Ethanol? bit.ly/v599bC US ended a 30Yr subsidy 4 corn-based ethanol that cost $6B/yr & ended tariff Brazilian ethanol $$

China is a Closed Communist Economy, concludes research bit.ly/ucMjsH The Party is still in control & directs the use of resources $$

What Deleveraging? bit.ly/vj9jmZ What is this deleveraging you continue to babble about . . . ? $$

ReformedBroker Downtown Josh Brown

Anytime I get nervous about the US economy, I just look over at how calm and stable China seems to be and I feel much better.

Retweeted by AlephBlog

The public sphere is different, where the ECB takes lower-quality collateral; that seems to be loosening things up a bit for now $$

European Bank Worry: Collateral on.wsj.com/sbkgGT In the private sphere, loans can only gotten by pledges of hi-quality collateral $$

The most stable, dividend paying sectors have the highest PEs, the most cyclical elements tand to have the lowest PEs now. $$ #fear #yield

S&P 500 PE 11.85, Industrials 12.37, Discretionary 13.71, Staples 14.59, Utilities 14.72, Telecom 16.84… do you see the pattern? $$

The S&P and Sector P/E Ratios bit.ly/rz4LKA Financials 9.68, Energy 10.26, Materials 11.37, Healthcare 11.46, Technology 11.67 $$

Forecasting Asset Price Booms bit.ly/tOwuNN The fool does at the end of the boom what the wise man does at the beginning $$

Spikes in Bank Stock Volatility Precede Economic Trouble, suggests research bit.ly/vhMdqz Volatility flows through banks 2 economy $$

Forecasting Oil Prices with Economic Data bit.ly/toKHW4 Real crude prices go up when global econ conditions r strong $$ surprise, not

Investment Advisers Likely To Bear Cost Of More Oversight on.wsj.com/s3REK0 Could put small advisers like me out of business $$

Lure of Chinese Tuition Squeezes Out Asian-Americans at California Schools bloom.bg/scxHZm State schools becoming more like private

India to Exceed Its Record Borrowing Target bloom.bg/tiMnMi Too many governments r caught on a borrowing treadmill; can’t get off $$

China needs new policy course as capital tide turns reut.rs/vmMWsx China will likely have to reduce the reserve ratio at its banks $$

Phantom firms bleed millions from Medicare reut.rs/uJOps5 Looong article on how fraud bleeds a lotta $$ out of Medicare->shell comps

This portion goes from November 2009 to January 2010.

Yes, I was one of the eight bloggers that made it to the first meeting with the US Treasury:

My Visit to the US Treasury, Part 1

My Visit to the US Treasury, Part 2

My Visit to the US Treasury, Part 3

My Visit to the US Treasury, Part 4

My Visit to the US Treasury, Part 5

My Visit to the US Treasury, Part 6

My Visit to the US Treasury, Part 7 (Final) (if you have to read only one of these, read this one)

How to Regulate the Banks, and other Financials

It comes down to diversification, leverage, and liquidity.

Notes from Recent Travels

Commentary on the health care bill, and also the AIG Bailout, and the Fed’s reprehensible actions.

Problems with Constant Compound Interest (4) (and more)

Retells my story interacting with the Federal Reserve bank of Richmond, and makes the application to commodity investing.

Post 1100 — On Thanksgiving

Points out where we need to be thankful.  Even amid crisis, we have many things going well.

The Right Reform for the Fed

Criticizes a lame editorial that Ben Bernanke wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

On Sovereign and Quasi-Sovereign Risks

Talks about the relative riskiness of foreign debts, and the value of being able to tax.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road at Home

Explains how I teach my children about economics and other matters.

Uncharted Waters

Laments the low return on equity culture the US Government creates by trying to keep interest rates low.  (Sound familiar?)

My TIPS, Treasuries, and Inflation Model

An amazing model that describes the forward inflation and real yield curves.

On Contrarianism

“With markets, it doesn’t matter what people say.  What matters is what they rely upon.”

Not so Cheap Trills

One of a number of pieces that I wrote to fight the concept of trills, a form of debt more dangerous than any other I have seen

One Dozen or so Books on Economics

Many clever books on economics that major on history, and minor on theory.

Yield = Poison (2)

The perils of reaching for yield.

Fat Fed Profits Do Not Create a Healthy Economy

Large Seniorage profits for the Fed are not a positive for the economy as a whole.

R Bonds R Bad 4 U

A veiled attempt to raid pension assets to fund the US Government by those aligned with the Obama Administration.

Rationality versus Time Horizons

To come back to the beginning of this article, the fetish of rationality exists in economics because the math doesn’t work without it.  Many tests of rationality have failed, yet the profession does not give up, because their skills are useless if man is not economically rational.

Cram and Jam

There are many distortions of accounting data, and this gives you two of them.

Double Down Institutional Investing

Deals with the asset-liability mismatch in much of endowment investing.

Fear the Boom and Bust — an Economics Lesson

My commentary on the Keynes vs Hayek videos up to that point.

In Defense of Home Bias

It is very rational to invest closer to home and this article explains why.

The Forever Fund

One of my best pieces ever, where I defend Buffett’s purchase of Burlington Northern, because it is irreplaceable.  This helps to explain how Buffett manages for the very long term, and does well at it.

I have been contributing material to the website Wall Street All Stars.  Mostly I have contributed two things:

1. They scrape my RSS feed.
2. I post some of my best articles from the past, with commentary that brings it up to date.

You can find my contributions here.

I can give all my blog readers and twitter followers a free six month subscription to WallStreetAllStars.com. Simply go sign up on http://www.WallStreetAllStars.com/ and then shoot an email letting us know you subscribed to support@wallstreetallstars.com and we’ll rebate you the $49 monthly fee each and every month for the first six months — that’s worth almost $300.

Most of the writers at Wall Street All Stars are former contributors to RealMoney, and other properties affiliated with TheStreet.com.  I think it is a credible team, and might eventually rival TSCM, minus Cramer.

But my involvement will be limited to the public side of the site for the most part, because my clients deserve my best ideas.  I am not out to sell them.

I want to start this evening with Twitter.  In the past, I used to do a decent degree of posts that summarized the news in a given area.  I don’t do those anymore.  Instead, I tweet significant articles 1-3 times a day. In general, I post the title of the article, a shortened link, and a quick comment on why it is right, wrong, important, etc.  If I want the StockTwits.com investment community to see it on their general ticker, I add a $$ somewhere in my post.  If there is a company I reference, I put a $ in front of its ticker, e.g., $AIG, and those following $AIG at StockTwits see the news.

Alternatively, if I want to have a potentially broader audience see it, I could put the hashtag #AIG in the post.  Anyone using Twitter and looking for #AIG will see it.

Beyond that, when I see articles that others have tweeted, and I agree, I retweet them, which republishes the tweet with attribution of the original tweeter to my followers.  Sometimes I get retweeted.  Retweeting can become a way of making something widely known. Sometimes I reply to tweets, or others reply to mine.  There can be some good conversations.

Twitter is not the same for everyone.  Some don’t tweet, but only use Twitter like a newswire.  Some don’t follow anyone, but use it as a means of updating their fans.  Some do both; you have to weigh off the time use.  Typically, I leave Twitter off most of the day, and then do my news updates in one set of tweets; it saves time.

Now, if you don’t do Twitter, and you don’t want to look at my Twitter page on the web, there are still two ways to get my economic commentary.  For those using RSS, you can click on the following link, and you will get my tweets: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/120209971.rss.  If you want to do this for another Twitter page, use this article.  For those with e-mail, you can use the following utility to either tweet or receive tweets by email.

But if you are going to use Twitter a lot, I recommend that you use Tweetdeck for Twitter.

Tweetdeck allows you to organize the tweets you send, receive, get mentioned in, and private messages as well.  If you’re going to do a lot with Twitter, I recommend it.

Now I recently started using a service that links my blog, my Twitter account, and my LinkedIn account, such that when I write a new post, like this one, it posts at Twitter and LinkedIn.  Tweets go to LinkedIn as well.

Now Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and to a lesser extent LinkedIn are becoming identity providers/gateways to using other sites, such that when you sign up for a new site, it can be simple as clicking on a Twitter link.  If you are logged into Twitter, Twitter asks you to confirm the link, and if you do, the signup is complete.

Back to the Blog

There are two aspects to choosing a theme/style for a blog.  First, you want it to look good, and fit the content that you are producing.  A minimalistic style works well for many blogs, particularly if content is simple as well.  But to the degree, that you want to come off polished, a more graphically sophisticated style can pay off.  Whatever you do, make sure you like it — that it fits the personality of what you are doing.

The second aspect of choosing a theme/style for utility.  How many columns do you want?  What do you want to put in them?  How many built in widgets/utilities do you want the theme to have?

This is what I did: I wanted three columns.  Center for main content, left for advertising, right for everything else.  Now, regarding advertising, all advertising at my blog is labeled as such.  That means most advertising deals proposed to me don’t go through when they hear my terms.

The same is true when I write any book reviews, and link to Amazon, or anytime where I have an economic interest in what I am writing about.  Full disclosure is given.  If I or my clients own a stock, and I write about it, I disclose the interest.

As for the right side of my blog, it starts with my disclaimer that tells people that I make mistakes, so do your own due diligence.  After that, my sites widgets divide up the content by time and categories.  After that comes my blogroll, links, and registration/login data, comments, trackbacks, ways to subscribe, awards, and then the odd stuff.

Just a moment on the Blogroll: I use it to identify who I read every day, without fail.  Usually that means they don’t do a lot of posts, or I would be spending too much time reading.  There are many good bloggers that I read irregularly, often because they are so prolific.  I read their best stuff when it gets featured at Abnormal Returns, which is the best linkfest for finance posts.

That brings up the more general topic of linkfests.  It is easier to start blogging by doing linkfests, pointing out what you agree and disagree with, and broadening out from there when you find your voice.

Tracking Popularity

If you want to track the popularity of your web presence, there are a lot of ways to do it, depending on what you are trying to analyze:

RSS — Feedburner

Blog — Quantcast, Google Analytics, Technorati, Alexa

Twitter — Tweet Grader

Total social media presence  — Peerindex, Klout

There’s no end to all the tracking you can do, and it is possible to waste a lot of time with it.

A little bit more about Quantcast, which is my main means of getting data on my readers.  The 3 follow screengrabs give you the summary data for my blog.  Quantcast puts a cookie on the computers that will allow it.  Without knowing exactly who the person is, it correlates other data that it knows about the person to tell me a decent amount of geographics and demographics about my audience, including who their internet service provider is.

LinkedIn

I’ve heard the following: Facebook is where younger people pretend they have friends.  Twitter is where older people make friends.  LinkedIn is where you go to make money.  Here’s my public profile.

Unlike at my blog, where I am relatively picky about who I place on my blogroll, I connect with most people who ask me on LinkedIn, if I can figure out any small aspect of advantage to either side.

My only tips for LinkedIn is to create as complete of a profile as you can, and don’t just take the lazy way in communicating with people by simply using default methods of contact.  Try to differentiate yourself, be respectful, and realize that many people won’t want to connect with you, and that’s fine.  Start small, and build.

Amazon

Though not thought of as social media, my book reviews from my blog that I cross-post at Amazon.com, generate approval from those seeking out good economics, business and finance books to read.  And sometimes people comment on my reviews, and vice-versa.  It could change, but at present, I’m in the Top 2000 reviewers using the New Reviewer Rank.

Wall Street All-Stars

Recently Cody Willard, a friend of mine, asked me contribute to a new site he was starting called Wall Street All-Stars, together with some writers that used to write for TheStreet.com.  What I am doing is taking old favorite posts from my blog, generally classics that are timeless, and writing 200-300 words after the end to explain how things are different now, where I was wrong or right, etc.  They are trying to make it a social site from the beginning.  If you get a chance, check out the site — it is about a month old and is a work in progress.

Summary

The internet is big, and I am not.  I don’t have a lot of resources.  But I lever what I can to make myself known, and it has made for me many friends, acquaintances and clients.  It can work for you as well; start small and add a little each month.  See what fits your personality, and where you have an edge versus other on the net, and give it your best shot.  You might end up surprised at the results you get.  Personally, it has been a surprise to me.

I’m writing this post for the Society of Actuaries Annual meeting, to explain some of the nuances of building a blog, and using social media.  I write this knowing that I am still a learner after 4.5 years of blogging.

Goals

The first question is why do you want to blog?  What do you have to say?  Do you have a lot to say, and the expertise to back it up?  You will need that if you want to blog long-term.  You should be able to state your goals in 30 seconds or so.

My main goal is to give back to others.  My secondary goal is to raise my profile, because it indirectly aids my businesses.

Commitment

Are you willing to give blogging regular time?  A few times a day? Once a day?  A few times a week?  Once a week?  As the frequency gets lower, the demand on quality gets higher.  If you can’t meet the tradeoff of quality versus frequency, blogging might not be for you.

Do You Have a Thick Skin?

I can be hurt.  My skin is not so thick that I can’t be hurt, but once you start publishing, the attacks can be significant.  The attacks can be reduced if you are humble, and willing to admit mistakes.

Building Your Brand

It is easier in the short run to start with Blogspot or some other free blog hosting service.  But then you have less control over anything except your content.  From the start, I had my own domain, and using WordPress, almost all of my blog has been self-created.  All of the utilities that I used to create the blog were free or donation-based.

Themes are readily available, which can make the appearance of your blog distinctive.  A little theme editing can go a long way.  Themes also can contain useful widgets like calendars, and other ways of segmenting your posts in order to make them more accessible.

Fixed Content

By fixed content, I mean pages that rarely ever change.  Who are you?  What are your goals?  How can they contact you, should you want that?  I have fixed pages for Book Reviews, My Portfolio Rules, Presentations I have given, etc.

Starting Out

Write a really good post, and point it out to a few bloggers who might be friendly to your point of view.  Ask them for a link, or to be on their blogroll.

Show Link Love

When you find good content, write about it and link to it.  If you do this well, links start coming back to you.  Maybe you will create anew niche, where you curate all the best posts in a given subject area.

Make Your Blog Accessible to Readers

Not everyone wants to make a regular trip to your blog, to pull your posts.  They might like the content pushed to them.

Do readers want to read your posts via email?  Then set up an account with FeedBlitz.

Do readers want to read your posts via Really Simple Syndication [RSS]?  Then set up an account with FeedBurner (a Google Sub).

If you have a good blog, you can allow an aggregator to scrape your RSS feed, and you will be published there as well.  More fame, but they get the ad revenue.

Worse, if you have a really good blog, unpermitted scrapers will republish your work (I have maybe a dozen or more).  I don’t care much about this, but many bloggers do.  You can threaten them with legal action; which usually gets them to stop.

Make Your Blog Visible to Google

Using a utility like XML-Sitemaps, it is easy to have a rich set of links for your site when people search using Google.

Offering Metadata on Posts

When you post, use categories and/or tags so that people can search your content for the things they are interested in.

Comments

Think in advance as to what your comment policy should be.  Unmonitored, monitored on the first post, you reserve the right to delete anything, etc.  Do you even want public comments?  Emails to you could be enough…  I monitor comments, all first posts must be approved by me, and I see all comments via e-mail, and edit/delete objectionable comments.  Oh, one more thing, I have people register in order to make comments.  That doesn’t mean that I get get any true information about them, but it does mean that there is a little hurdle, which means that a person has to be motivated to make a comment.  It makes the comments more high-quality.

Excerpts of recent comments appear on the front page of the blog along with excerpts from other websites quoting my work — a utility called “Get Recent Comments” automatically takes care of it.  Users can also subscribe to comments if they like, post by post, or all comments by RSS.

Using Akismet, or another utility to eliminate spam comments is necessary.  If your blog gets big, you will have to set up a Captcha to strain out machines that try to register with you and send spam comments.  Before I had this, my service provider nearly shut me down because of the huge number of Russian entities trying to use my blog unsuccessfully for spam.

Improving Usability

I added utilities to my blog to allow people to turn my writings to print, PDF, Word, XML, etc.  I used Universal Post Manager to do that.  It also allows users to send information about my blog to other social media sites, such as:

The Guts

Regular database backup is important.  There are utilities that do it quietly in the background.  In order to speed up the loading of the site, I use WP Minify and WP Super Cache, which caches the most recent version of the site for fast loading, along with the CSS and Javascript.

Tracking the Response

I use Googlebots, via Google Alerts to troll the web for comments about me or my blog.  Feedburner gives me data about how my RSS traffic is doing.

Quantcast and Google Analytics give me detailed demographic information on what sort of people read my blog.  I’ll give some examples in my next post.

Finally, I can get basic data on how much overall use the blog has been getting through simple software like WP Stats, Statcounter, and my blog host, Netfirms.

That’s all for now, more in part 2.

Next Monday I head off to the Society of Actuaries Annual Meeting in Chicago.  I’m giving talks at two sessions: the first one on Monday afternoon is called Being Social–It’s a Game Changer.  It is meant to introduce and encourage actuaries in the use of social media.  My next blog post is going going to explain how I built my blog, and some broad concepts on how I use social media.  The slide deck I am not using because it is an interactive session and not a talk can be found here: My Sojourns in Social Media.

The next day, on Tuesday morning, I am giving a modified version of a talk I have given several times before for the session Systemic Risk: Early Warning Indicators.  Here’s my slide deck for the talk: Who Dares Oppose a Boom? And, Can you Predict a Bust?  It’s a variation on this blog post of mine, Who Dares Oppose a Boom?

Finally, I will end up doing a live video blog for the SOA that afternoon before returning home late Tuesday.  I did not know that the SOA would like me so much after ending being a dues-paying member.

I will possibly have some time to meet with people around these sessions, so if you are in the area, let me know and maybe you can drop by.

I regularly get people asking me how they can get jobs in finance.  Many of them are young.  Some are older and have done other things, but have been bitten by the investing bug, and want to make a shift.

Now, before I start, let me say that if you are smart, driven, motivated, organized, and generally capable at all that you do, and you are working in another field, say chemical engineering, and you want to move to investing, you might be better off asking your supervisors to give you projects with dotted-line relationships to the investment function of the company.  That could propel you to later roles where you head a division, or run a smaller company.  The ability to invest wisely has all sorts of positive spillover effects in managing an enterprise.  So before you head off to work in investing in the public markets, take a step back, and see how you can combine your existing expertise, and try to invest in the private markets, where you may have Buffett’s “unfair advantage.”

The first thing I tell them about is my career.  In short, here it is:

• Actuarial Trainee — Pacific Standard Life
• Actuary for the Domestic Annuity Lines at AIG
• Investment Actuary for the Pension Division at Provident Mutual
• Investment Actuary for the Annuity Division at Provident Mutual
• Mortgage bond manager and Risk Manager for Mount Washington Investment Group, which was managing the assets of Fidelity and Guaranty Life.
• Manager of of the investments for Fidelity and Guaranty Life. (Still risk manager too)
• Corporate bond manager for Dwight Investment Management (Still risk manager too)
• Senior Investment Analyst for Hovde Capital Advisors, covering insurance companies, and managing the profit-sharing and charitable endowment funds.
• Concurrently, writing for RealMoney.com.
• Chief Economist and Director of Research for Finacorp Securities, which allowed me to work from home during a difficult personal time for my family.
• Concurrently, writing the Aleph Blog.
• Principal of Aleph Investments, offering stock and bond management strategies, and a strategy to switch between them.

That’s a lot for 25 years.  Do you notice something unusual here?  Most of the jobs I switched to I did not have the full complement of skills to handle.  I learned as I went, but there were two costs to that:

1. Only risk-taking businesses would hire me.  That meant more pressure, which in general, I did not mind.  I liked challenges.
2. I had to learn more as I took the jumps.  Not everyone likes to do that.  I love a challenge.

For those looking for jobs in investments, if you can’t find the opportunities you would like, I would encourage you to look for adjancencies. Look for jobs that are close to investing.  Here are examples:

• Investment marketing
• Investment accounting
• Investment auditing
• Investment management consulting
• Working for the rating agencies (anyone can get a job there)
• Working for the regulators
• Working for government investors, pension plans, GSEs, Supranationals, etc.
• Working for endowments
• Working in the Treasury arm of a corporation.  Hedging, pension plan, short-term investments, etc.
• Work in a bank, thrift or insurance company.  Look for projects where you can show off investment expertise.
• And more.

And in all of these ideas, network.  Join your local CFA Society; get the credential if you can.  Talk with people in investing.  Volunteer and show your competence.  This will not return void.

Those with energy and a willingness to learn have a huge advantage over the rest.  If this article benefits you please e-mail me, and let me know how your career has benefited.

Every 100 posts or so, I take a step back to think about the broader issues I face in blogging, and describe what I am up to in my life, so that my readers can understand more about me.

Since my last post on this topic, I have had a difficult time.  Why?  I worry that my firm will not grow fast enough that it will support my family.  That said, I pick up 2-4 new clients per month, and my friends in the Baltimore CFA Society tell me that I am doing better than most.

So, I try to take heart amid the bear market, where it is more difficult to gain clients. Now, it would be nice if there were a database of dissatisfied investment management clients, but that doesn’t exist.  Thus I have to look to others for referrals of those who are dissatisfied with competitors in my business.

Over the last 100 posts, the economic/financial environment has turned from optimistic to pessimistic.  I haven’t changed much.  I still think there is more pain to come, where the big banks have to take losses.

I am more bullish now, but I am waiting for a turn in the momentum to get more aggressive.   With momentum so negative, I commit small amounts of capital to my best ideas as they fall, like my RGA piece yesterday.

With all that, I thank my readers for reading me.  You have a lot of things you can do with your time, and if you decide to read me, I am flattered.   I am grateful for any investing referrals.

Aside from that, I still enjoy blogging.  It is an opportunity to call out the powers that be and tell them they don’t know what they are doing.  Away from that, explain to people to avoid common scams.  I have a post coming on one of the scams soon.

I really enjoy writing for all of you.  I hope you enjoy my writing as much.

Every 100 posts, I take a step back and try to think about where we have been over the last five months.  The investment world has been bullish, favoring stocks and commodities, and not bonds.  Money market rates have been driven to zero or so. (Have they tried to bill you yet for holding your money? )

I have a wide array of interests, which is what makes my blog a little different.  I’ve been doing more with stock and bond investing, which reflects the work that I do, but I still have time for commentary on Macroeconomics, banking regulation, and monetary policy.  I know that there are few who want to read everything I write, but there are many who want to read a few things I write.

The biggest things I have written recently have been:

• Impossible Dream, Part 1 5,385 Views
• Critical Analysis of Buffett’s Annual Letter 4,882 Views
• Impossible Dream, Part 2 3,815 Views
• Most People are not Better off Buying Common Stocks on their own 2,437 Views

That doesn’t count RSS and the many places where my blog is syndicated. I’m relatively free with my content.  But if you are reading me elsewhere, if you want to make a comment, please come to my site.  I do not interact with readers outside of my own site, and that includes Seeking Alpha.  I don’t have time for it, so if you want my attention, come to my site.

Away from blogging, my asset management business has launched.  let me quote from an e-mail to a more successful friend of mine:

I have had a lot of lessons over the past four months, and I don’t think they are over.

1) Unrealistic expectations: partly because there was quite a lag between my announcement and my start up, a lot of people that I think lost interest because of the lag.  But when I talked with other investment advisors later, they told me I had:

• More prospects than I should reasonably expect for a new advisor, and
• A better conversion percentage of prospects to clients than most, and
• Chosen an underserved section of the market ($100-500K).

So, after four months, I am managing a little more money than my own assets at the firm, with about 12 clients, and 5 more on the way.

2) I did not realize that I would need to create fixed income management so early.  But for those that can’t hedge, I had to have another way of reducing equity market risk.  No track record there, but a lot of experience doing it, both with bonds and ETFs.

3) The most common objection of potential customers is that the market is too high, and so they don’t want to invest.  Still more asked for a Tactical Asset Allocation strategy, which I eventually created.  No telling whether it will work well, or build assets.

4) Custodial issues have not been absent.  Getting set up with Interactive Brokers is more difficult than with most because everything is automated; if one thing is wrong, it rejects and you have to try again.  Once Interactive Brokers is set up though, things work easily, the trading tools are great, and they are cheap, especially for clients in $100-500K range.  So I try to help clients as much as I can going in; so far, so good, with a little annoyance to me and clients.

Aside from that, I have been underperforming of late.  Not by much, but it feels bad to be missing the benchmark with the money of others.  I did not enter this business to lose.  After beating for so many years, it is a test to be missing now, largely because my posture is the most conservative it has been for the last eleven years.Anyway, that’s how I am doing.  I think I will reach viability by the end of 2012, but who can tell?

Indeed who can tell, but I got another new client today, equal to my largest external client, and there may be more if I do well.  I am grateful for their confidence.  Hey, perhaps one day I might get investors larger than me.  I hope so.  If I get to double my current size, I will try to hit up the emerging manager funds — there aren’t many emerging managers with 11 year track records.  And from there, who can tell?

I have an intern (child #7) and she is a very bright young woman who wants to learn investing.  She may have the “gene” that I got from my mom, but she sees this as the best way to be economically productive as a future wife and mother.  My Mom and Dad were equals economically, though Dad’s work made more difference early with his work — Mom earned more in the later years from the investing.  Give Mom credit for wisdom, and Dad credit for setting her free to do it (more or less).

I am enjoying this a lot, and am not worried about recent underperformance.  It has always corrected in the past, and then some.  If nothing else, it makes me work harder.  I like working hard.

My but the time passes rapidly.  When I was invited to write at RealMoney, because of compliance issues, it was several months before I wrote there.  And i wrote there for about four years, never thinking that I might write anywhere else.

But I had a guilty pleasure of very occasionally trolling Cramer’s blog comments, and occasionally commenting myself.  A few commenters encouraged me to start my own unvarnished commentary, and so I began what would become this blog.

Once I started blogging, the advantages of independence were apparent.  Lack of relevancy, editor, necessary business purpose could go out the window.  Though I think I was liked as a columnist for RealMoney, I don’t think that most of the stuff that I have blogged would have made it there.

The Aleph Blog is an expression of the character of David Merkel, no more, no less.

I get a lot of requests for offering guest content, but I turn them all down.  Maybe other bloggers do well with that, but I don’t.  My blog is an expression of me.  And that is why I blog — to give something back to the general public and media who do not get most things financial.

Don’t get me wrong, if someone asks me to come and speak, generally I will, and presently, at my own expense.  I will be in Chicago in 10 days, and in NYC in April.   (Note: if you would like to meet with me, let me know.)

Two notes:  Abnormal Returns has had me on video two times.  Here’s the first time:  And here is the second time.  Though I am not always rapid in my responses, I give very active responses to Tadas.