Backing off on Blogging For A While

I need to focus on research for the next couple of months, so blogging will likely be much less frequent for a while. I'm not closing down, but I am scaling back - probably only a post a week or so. In the meanwhile, here's a picture of the Billboard for Anders Bookstore, which is just at the edge of the Auburn campus. Smart marketing.



For any students reading - good luck with finals - if you're at Auburn, consider a longer rental term. For all the faculty - good luck writing (and grading) them and wrapping up the semester.

A Quarter Million Hits

Shortly after 2 today, Financial Rounds had its 250,000th visitor. Man - I never imagined there were so many people out there with Internet connections and this much free time on their hands.

In all seriousness, thanks for reading. I'm humbled.

HELP!

I also run a blog for Unknown University's Finance department. Unfortunately, I seem to have inadvertantly changed a setting on the blog (either that, or I've got some kind of virus).

I was just trying to post something on the blog, and when I typed anything in, it immediately transformed into different characters. For example, if I typed in

ABC

It displayed as

एबीसी

Can anyone tell me what's going on, and how to fix it?

update: yes, I am an idiot. Somehow, I had enabled the "tranliterate into Hindi option" in the settings.

Could Blogging Have Stopped Madoff?

Here's a very interesting piece from the New York Stock Exchange's blog:

...Certainly, any failure to convince others was not due to lack of effort. Perhaps Mr. Markopolos lacked only an effective medium to communicate his warning. Here's a thought experiment: What would have happened if Mr. Markopolos had blogged his analysis? That is, what if he had posted the entire piece on a blog, under his name or a pseudonym?

RTWT here

I think the blogger has a point. True, blogging wasn't available back in the late 1990's. But if it were, my guess is that a blog post like the one he muses about would have been picked up and passed around from trading desk to trading desk, and eventually gotten aired by a major news outlet. When a story like this "goes viral", it's hard to stop. And as a card-carrying financial economist, I typically fall on the side of "More Information is Good".

Finally, who knew the NYSE had a blog. Verrrrryyyyy Interesting.

200,000 Hits, Baby

Sometime Tuesday night, Financial Rounds had it's 200,000th visitor. I'm amazed that this many people have so little to occupy themselves.

Just kidding - I appreciate all the traffic, and I'm humbled by people actually reading what I post up here. When I started this four years ago, I never thought I'd be seeing almost 10,000 hits a month (the average the last few years).

What Topics Do I Blog About The Most?

Here's a word cloud for Financial Rounds I made at Wordle (click on the image for a larger version).

For those who aren't familiar with a word cloud, it's a graphic representation of frequencies - the more often a word appears, the larger the word in the cloud.

Looks like I've been blogging a lot about the credit crisis --not all that surprising, when you stop to think about it.

Weird Happenings on My Feeds

In the last few days, I've noticed big fluctuations in my feed readership along with a lot of strange things on Bloglines: all of a sudden, 200 new posts are listed for one blog or another. Is this happening to everyone, or just to me because of the last few political cartoons I posted?

Another Good Investment Banking Blog

The other day, while looking for ways to avoid studying for the CFA exam, I came across another pretty good blog on Investment Banking. It's titled "The Prince of Wall Street". Here's the Prince himself describing his blog:

...Prince of Wall Street is a regularly updated finance blog featuring original finance news, gossip, trades, and commentary. The commentary predominately focuses on M&A, private equity, hedge funds, and investment banking.

Now some basic personal information about The Prince. He is a senior at a prestigious college awaiting the start of his first full-time job as an investment banking analyst at a bulge bracket bank. He did three summer analyst stints at a prestigious bulge-bracket investment bank and then signed on to work full-time in the Financial Sponsors Group. He worked in prime brokerage sales for two summers. It is fitting that The Prince would study Philosophy and Economics as an undergraduate. The Prince also spent a term at University College in Oxford (god save the queen, and The Prince).

This blog was started when The Prince realized he spent way too much time reading finance blogs and newspapers. He hopes to also share some of the humor that goes along with working in banking and give some perspective to prospective investment bankers on what life is really like as an analyst. Even if his readers decide his commentary and analysis is wrong, he hopes they at least find it thought-provoking. That is all my loyal subjects.

He's got a nice touch - he writes mostly in the third-person, has a good sense of humor, and uses a lot of references to Machiavelli (hence the title). My limited reading gives me a sense that while the blog covers a pretty good range of IB-related topics, it would be particularly interesting to students (both grad and undergrad) hoping to break into the IB field. So, I'll be adding it to my blogroll.

Check out the blog here.

Enough bloggery - back to CFA review.

to avoid sDescribe Prince of Wall Street's
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Financial Rounds? Genius!

The Blog Readability Test supposedly determines what level of education is necessary to understand a blog. Here's Financial Rounds' result:

Nuff said. My sense is that it just picks up that I occasionally use big words.

In case you're interested, I found the site from Trainee Trader, which lists the results from a number of popular finance blogs.

1,000 Posts

I didn't realize it, but Financial Rounds just crossed the 1,000 post mark. That's a lot of time spent blogging.

Financial Rounds Gets Its 100,000th Hit

Sometime yesterday, Financial Rounds had its 100,000th hit. Man - that's a lot of people with too much time on their hands.

But seriously, it's been a great experience. Now on to the next 100,000.

Another Economics Blog List

CurrencyTrading.net has compiled a list of 100 Top Economics Blogs. Financial Rounds is listed under the "Blogs By Univesity Professors" section.

Check out their list. Present company excluded, it's pretty good.

Questions From Ph.D. Students - Present and Future

I started Financial Rounds over two years ago mostly as an experiment, and as a way to keep track of all the good stuff I came across while wasting time on the Net. It's been fun, has made me some good friends, has helped me keep up to date with the "real" world", and has given me some laughs.

But one unexpected and very pleasant outcome has been the number of emails I've gotten from students considering a Ph.D in either finance or economics. At last count, I've had over 40 this last year alone. Some of them found this site through google, searches that led them to one of my posts about academic salaries, what's involved in getting a Ph.D., or what a professor does all day. Others found it through links from related websites.

However they got here, it's been a pleasure answering questions about the graduate admission process, what it takes to succeed in a Finance Ph.D. program, job prospects, and so on. One of the best parts of being an academic is the chance to leave a legacy. Having students go on to become professors themselves is a pretty cool way to do that. As a professor, I've had between one and two of my own students a each year eventually go on to a doctoral program, and it's been surprisingly fun to play a small part (through this websits) in other students' academic careers as well.

If you've gotten into grad school or are seriously considering it, and anything I've said on the blog (or in private emails) has been helpful, drop me a line and let me know where you're at (I'll keep things confidential unless explicitly instructed otherwise) . And I hope that you'll keep in touch. You're not exactly "my" students, but I'd be interested to see how things come out.

And who knows - I might get more fodder for blog posts.

Blog Advertising

It looks like blog advertising is becoming more popular, but a lot of companies are still leery. Instapundit points us to this Wall Street Journal article, "Many Advertisers Find Blogging Frontier is Still Too Wild":

At their best, blogs are an advertiser's dream: the diary-style Web sites that feature running commentary and reactions are tightly targeted niche markets where avant-garde enthusiasts regularly return to read, post and send in tips. Well-placed blog ads can boost a company's image as cutting-edge. Plus, they're inexpensive: $350 a week, for instance, for premium positioning on Mr. Denton's high-profile inside-Washington blog, Wonkette, which got 2.2 million "page views" last month, a measure of how many times a single visitor looks at one Web site page.

But many companies are wary of putting their brand on such a new and unpredictable medium. Most blogs are written by a lone author. They are typically unedited and include spirited responses from readers who can post comments at will. Some marketers fear blogs will criticize their products or ad campaigns. And, like all new blog readers, companies are just learning how to track what's being said on blogs and which ones might make a good fit for their ads.

As a result, advertising on blogs is still in the early stages. Although advertising on Web sites was a $9.6 billion business in the U.S. last year, according to Interactive Advertising Bureau there is little data to date on blog ad-spending. Blogads.com, a service that matches bloggers and advertisers, says its business has grown from 28 ads in September 2002 to 1,685 ads last month.

Click here for the whole article (free link)

No one has offered to advertise here yet (sniff, honk).

Blog Bubbles

Stephen Kirchner at Institutional Economics has a tongue in cheek post about the "Bubble in Economics Blogs". He writes:

As of March 2005, Professor Bill Parke is tracking 72 economics blogs at his Economics Roundtable. So we seem to be adding around 34 new economics-related sites to the blogosphere every year. This is clearly unsustainable and conclusive proof of the irrationality of bloggers! Some economics bloggers are even purchasing Google ads in a desperate scramble for market share.

Clearly government intervention is required to bring order to this sector of the blogosphere and prevent a blog boom-bust cycle from developing. As a solution, I propose the nationalisation of blogs, starting with John Quiggin, who can then educate us all on the merits of public ownership of the means of blogging.

Click here for the whole article. I just hope I make it before the meltdown. That way, I can argue for government funding...

Daniel O'connor at Catallaxis is blogging on Business Blogs in Business Schools. He writes:

As for my $.02, I suspect that right now somebody is writing that article for HBR, emphasizing the strategic role of corporate weblogs...

...perhaps even framing a continuum that stretches from one extreme, with those who use blogs to increase transparency and accountability with corporate stakeholders, to the other extreme, with those who use blogs for more opaque and deceptive ends.

Serious corporate marketing blogs that give away valuable content and/or provide a window into the operations of the company, along the lines of what LexBlog is already doing for law firms, seem to be approaching the tipping point beyond which growth will be parabolic.

The HBR article will be that tipping point for the corporate world, imho.

Now, believe it or not, as I clicked over to LexBlog to make sure I got Kevin O'Keefe's url right, what do you suppose I found as his most recent post?

want to find out? Click here.

I'm not of the "blogs are going to take over the world" mindset. To my mind, blogs are merely another way of getting info out over the internet. Having said that, they are changing the way that information is disseminated, and are mking it easier for smaller outlets to get a voice. The software available makes it easy for people to publish their information, and to link to other sources. In addition, if you're using an RSS aggregator, you can check an amazing number of sources in no time at all. For example, I use a free service called Bloglines. With it, I can monitor about 40 sites I regularly (or occasionally) check in about 5 minutes.

If you haven't already done so, check it out (and put me on your list).