Time to take a moment to reflect on what?s happened over the last hundred posts (as WordPress counts them), together with what has been going on in my life, and what is in store for the future on my blog.? Ten months is a long time in blog terms.? Let’s start with what I have gotten right and wrong.
Right:
- FOMC
- Currencies
- Credit markets
- Super SIV
- Personal Finance
- SOA Presentation
- Book Reviews
Wrong:
- National Atlantic
- Stock-picking generally
- Blog programming
In general, my macro commentary has been pretty accurate.? At this juncture, being bearish on the dollar and credit have been winners.? No telling when that will change.? That said, my hand has gone cold in the market since value stocks went cold.? Beating the value index is not enough for me, thank you.? National Atlantic is a continuing problem, though it seems to have found buyers around $4.
Now, if someone had told me when I started this blog that more than one-third of my readers would be outside the US, I would not have believed it.? 19% of my readers are from Canada, 7% from the UK and 4% each from Uruguay and the Netherlands.? Hey, thanks for reading me; I hope what I write is relevant to you.? And thanks to the readers from China, Germany, France, Brazil, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Japan, Spain, Italy, India, South Korea, Taiwan, and Bermuda.? I may not be a global traveler, but my blog gets around.
Where? do my readers come from?? In order, Abnormal Returns, The Kirk Report, The Big Picture, Stumble Upon, The Street.com, FT Alphaville, Random Roger, and VIX and More.? Most of the rest find me through search engines (Google) or RSS.? Seeking Alpha (Aleph — Shalom) is another source, and really don’t know how big that is, as well as other syndicators.
For the last four months, I have been trying to obtain work or build an asset management business.? Though the latter has been cold, I have received several job prospects, and I should have an announcement soon on what I will be doing.? I have sometimes said that this blog is an option on a business.? That has proven true for me.
Other improvements have been the continuing series on personal finance and book reviews.? Both of those came as a result of reader feedback.
On the negative side, the job hunt has left me little time to contribute to RealMoney.? Most of my blogging is at night, and RM is during the day, when I am trying to work.? I’ll see how much I can contribute to RM in the future.? I owe them a debt of gratitude for inviting me to write for them.? It sharpened my investment writing skills more than I would have expected.
Also on the negative side, I know that I have to do blog repairs.
- My left margins aren’t quite right.
- My top banner should lead back to the home page.
- I need to anti-alias my banner.
- An error message comes up when comments are posted (the comments do post, though).
- The same is true when I post articles.
- My descriptive permalinks are gone.
- And more…
Anyone with a good lead on PHP programming should e-mail me.? I suspect the changes should not be too great.? Otherwise, I will? slog on, and do it myself.
In closing I want to thank referrers, syndicators, readers, blogs who link here, and especially commenters (even if you don?t agree, but keep it civil.? I end with a question for my readers.? What do you all want from my blog?
- More on equities
- More book reviews
- More macro commentary
- More personal finance
- Something else
- Or, the same mix that you are currently getting
Let me know.? It is a pleasure to write for all of you.
Full Disclosure: Long NAHC
I think the current mix of topics is pretty darn good!
Add to the list, RSS feed is broken.
Add to the list, RSS feed is broken.
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More writing regarding analysis techniques; especially within insurance industry.
It’s great to have someone focused on the value side of investing. So many sites out there are aimed at chart reading, sentiment indicators and hot stocks. You can always find something in these to support your point of view, but they don’t help for long-term investing.
As a fellow value investor, I agree it has been a frustrating period. As another data point, the results of the Canadian value-oriented mutual fund investors with the best long term records have also been getting whacked the last half of this year. The good thing is that in the past when this has happened to their funds, it trended to be a good time to be buying and it does seem like things have stopped going down and are starting to turn for value stocks.
I like the current mix of topics as well.
Originally found the blog via SeekingAlpha. I’m grateful to anyone putting out free stuff worth reading, and hope you achieve success with your job search. If you had more time to put into the blog (it rather sounds like you will be having less going forward), my preference would be a greater emphasis on interactivity, equities, and the areas where you have particular expertise. Also appreciate some references to resources you think are most worthwhile for learning./improving forensic accounting. In NAHC at $3.97.
Your blog delivers one of the best in web experience.
1) Fonts: You respect the font size set by the browser. This makes your blog easy to read in wide range of screen resolutions (and most importantly DPI)
2) Browser size: You respect the size of the page set by the browser. Changing the width of the browser reflows the middle column where the content is.
3) Content dominates the space of the page — above 70% probably. Other sites have their articles content take less than 30% and the rest is pile of links and ads. Good example of a site with low content to page space ratio is thestreet.com.
4) You have non-blinking ads. I’m not against ads that have animation which cycles 2-3 times, like in wsj.com for example, but most of the places don’t pay attention to that irritatingly distracting factor. Many of the animations are draining the batteries of notebooks as they might take 100% of the CPU while reader is on that page.
Why don’t you try to join The Deck. They are very respectful to reader experience on the sites where they put their ads. For an example of how a page looks with ads form The Deck check http://daringfireball.net
David,
I vote for keeping the mix as is, nice and eclectic. After all, if somebody hired you to manage their money, you’d have discretion over that, so why not over the topics covered on your own blog?
Keep up the great work, congrats on 100.
Steve
I continue to absolutely love this blog — thanks again! My favorite stuff by far is the macro commentary, but it’s all good.
Rich
I too like it all. I most appreciate the first-hand insurance discussion (though not so much the quarterly earnings play-by-play :-). Also I like the macro pieces and the personal finance pieces. I like how you deep-dive on a few different topics over the course of 3-5 posts. I can concentrate on the ones that are most meaningful to my situation and skim over those that are less applicable.
One issue – I sometimes have tried to read the blog via my smartphone and it is not formatted for the Microsoft mobile environment. While I am sure this isn’t a huge issue for your readers it would be a nice upgrade for those of us on the move!
Same mix. Your blog is refreshing. In particular, your blog has a good ethos, if that makes sense. Good full disclosures and thoughtful tone make you easy to trust. I don’t come here for predictions per se, more for one persons honest assessment of a variety of topics.
I think I came here through seekingalpha or maybe a friend’s recommendation. I read the blog using rss.
Interested to hear about your job prospects. Best, Todd