Keeping Up With the Markets
One of the best qualities of great bloggers is their ability to act as filters for entire genres of content; finding great new stuff on the web, formulating insight on said stuff, and then publishing the results for your easy consumption via RSS.
This sort of intelligent content curation is extremely helpful should you decide you are suddenly interested in a subject you previously eschewed.
Interested in modern culture? Try Kottke.
Interested in Apple? Try Gruber.
Interested in media and pop culture? Try Rex.
Interested in emerging technological novelties? Try Waxy.
These sites are all well-known within the geekosphere, because most of the world’s RSS feeds are still consumed by us — hyperaware geeks. But what if you find yourself suddenly interested in a subject that is best curated by much less technical people? Something like botany, or philanthropy, or philately. Finding the best source on subjects like these can be tough.
One such subject is investing and personal finance. The financial world is chock full of some of the most uninteresting and meaningless stories on the web. Whenever the Dow drops a lousy 10 points it’s “Markets Crushed by Investor Worries”. And when it inches upward, it’s “Dow Rebounds On Rate-Cut Optimism”. These aren’t the sort of stories that will do anything for you as an investor. In fact, these days many of them are actually written by computers!
So where is a grasshopper to find the week’s most interesting and useful financial observations in one place? My new favorite place for such things is:
Charles Kirk’s The Kirk Report
Kirk provides a short post almost every day with some quick market observations and then a bevy of the most interesting financial links he’s read throughout the week. Things like how to bet on a dollar rebound by investing in Canadian lumber or what doomsday would look like for the U.S. economy. Interesting stuff.
It’s a perfect one-stop-shop for anyone wanting to keep up with market news and insights but lacking the time to check 100 financial news sites every day. I highly recommend it.
It’s interesting that you’ve suddenly found yourself interested in personal finance… strange.
Nice find. I’ve been looking for a financial blog to follow for awhile, as I’m tired of television garbage like Mad Money w/ Cramer.
Good thing he provides full-text RSS — that green text with the black drop shadow is painful.
Cramer certainly can be a little over the top. If you’re able to watch TV in the morning “Squawk Box” on CNBC is a great way to keep yourself up to speed with just a few minutes of your time. It doesn’t hurt that Becky Quick, one of the anchors, is a knockout!
Notice how Kirk’s shortcut icon resembles that of Kottke’s?
Chuck: Good catch. Busted!
Wow Mike!
I was browsing trough one of the above sites and I guess that they like you there.. Here’s the evidence..
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fimoculous/1800087109/
I look forward to following The Kirk Report, because I find the markets entertaining. But, like just about every individual investor, I would very likely be better off financially if I limited myself to other forms of entertainment.
If you really want to get the most out of your personal finances, in terms of investment returns and time spent allocating resources, limit your reading to Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letter, William Bernstein’s quarterly Efficient Frontier, and each new edition of Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street and Andrew Tobias’s The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need (not that Malkiel or Tobias change their books all that much from edition to edition, but that’s the point).
Nice post Mike. Shared it with my readers this am as I am always pushing the use of blogs both to get filtered content and then to provide filtered content with commentary to your target audience. Being such an intelligence agent for professionals is a big deal when their blog is being used to enhance their reputations and grow their business.
wow, looks like everybody is having this idea at the same time. i’m developing software to do intelligent aggregation on specific topics. a couple of my acquaintances are independently working on it too.. should be interesting to watch.
Odd? They both look a lot like … Mike’s Favicon. Just different colors and with a border …
Chuck writes:
Notice how Kirk’s shortcut icon resembles that of Kottke’s?
November 23rd, 2007 at 7:59 pm
5
Mike D. writes:
Chuck: Good catch. Busted!
November 23rd, 2007 at 8:18 pm
How creative to put a single letter in a square. Of course the whole notion of a favicon with limited pixels to work with gives you some limits.
Mike, it has been a while. How about another of your famous contests for the best favicon someone can spot?
Oh.. Don just wants a crack at an Ipod. I do miss seeing what competition can produce.
Wait, Mikes in bed with MSNBC now, guess the competition could be for a Zune instead. Yay!
Hey everyone, spread the word! Mike is going to have a contest for a Zune! How about.. Who can make the best belly button lint sculpture of Steve Jobs in the New Orleans of the Future?
[...] Davidson wrote this interesting entry the other day in his blog titled Keeping Up With The Markets. The entry included a few blogs that I began clicking on to see what they were all about. The one [...]
[...] Of more substantial interest was his recent thin recommendation of a financial site. [...]