Investorial

I’m lucky to count Larry MacDonald as one of Investorial’s readers. Larry is an economist, author of several business books and currently runs the Investment Ideas blog at Canadian Business Online. He is currently doing a series rounding up Canadian financial blogs. So far he’s profiled bloggers such as Canadian Capitalist, Bill Cara, The Dividend Guy, Yaser Anwar and many more. I have been consistently reading many of those blogs, and am discovering new ones through this process.

Investorial was lucky enough to also get mentioned by Larry in the round up. I guess I’m more well known for being (more…)

A quick update on the various mash-up experiments involving social networking and stock picking since I last reported on it. TheStreet.com has bought into a venture founded in part by one of its writers, James Altucher. You can read about the StockPickr.com joint venture from James himself.

Two things of note. A contrarian investor like myself by nature does not subscribe to the theory of the “wisdom of crowds”. I didn’t sign up to try out the StockPickr service, because I don’t anticipate putting it to good use. Having a big backer in TheStreet.com will certainly catapult StockPickr to the top of the social stock picking offerings (more…)

Investorial is my un-imaginative amalgamation of “investments” and “editorials”. You may or may not enjoy my ramblings about “the good, the bad, the ugly” in the investement / financial media. I have also been trying to carve out new dimensions in my financial writing. I’m currently a blogger with two financial blogging networks - InvestorGeeks and AOL Blogging Stocks. I thought I’d share with you a few of my posts elsewhere. I won’t claim they are “good”, but I don’t think they are “bad” and hopefully they’re not “ugly”!

InvestorGeeks
I approached Chris, Jason and Frank on 06/06/06 to join the devil’s pact! It’s a thriving community of investing geeks (or the next motley fool?) and its my home for discussing investing techniques and principles. Here’s a sample! (more…)

Did you notice anything new or different about Investorial’s homepage today? I’m test driving Yahoo’s new stock chart badges. Yahoo generated buzz last month that they would be allowing webmasters and bloggers to incorporate such a feature on their sites. Amist all the hoopla today regarding the overhaul of Yahoo!’s homepage and the Yahoo Finance site, you should also know that the anticipated stock chart service is now live!

First thoughts? The design and colors look really nice, and it’s very easy to customize the badge to fit your needs. Although I still feel there needs to be more customizable options and choices. You can built as many of these badges as you like. If you frequently post with stock ticker symbols, you might consider embedding one of these badges permanently to your articles.. This way, new readers can keep track of what’s happening with the stock tickers easily.

Currently, only symbols from the NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX exchanges as well as indices from Standard & Poor’s can be included. I tested and could not add the Dow Jones to the chart. Yahoo will look to add new exchanges in the future to allow users to include foreign stocks.

You can check out Yahoo’s new stock chart service here! (You must have a Yahoo login to use this feature, but I believe most people do! )

Update: I’ve taken the stock chart badge out. It was simply taking up too much screen real-estate for the little purpose that I have in displaying it. I will however review and revisit the design and placement of the stock badges for individual articles!

First, I want to thank the InvestorGeeks co-founders Chris, Jason and Frank for bringing me into the fold. InvestorGeeks was founded in October 2005 (around the same time as Investorial) and is

“focused on building a community of investors and acting as a launch pad to discover new resources [..] creating real dialogue, sharing ideas, and encouraging criticism.”

Those ideals were very similar to my own and so I approached Chris early this month about the possibility of expanding that community. The result was an open call to investor geeks out there, and I’m happy to be among the first group of new writers. (more…)

You can’t really blame MarketWatch for trying to integrate Digg on their articles and pages, but you can certainly question their blind-blanketing treatment for the site. If you have been surfing around the MarketWatch, you may see a section at the bottom of articles to entice people to submit them to community web-sharing sites such as Digg, del.icio.us. And why not? Digg has become of one of the web’s most visited site boasting very high traffic. Here’s a screenshot of the link area as captured from one of its pages.

The page from where I captured this was actually (more…)

Billionaire Mark Cuban is no stranger to sharing his personal views about the stock market and its players. While he is busily waiting in anticipation for a Dallas Maverick NBA World Championship, he is still working on other ventures in the background.

One such venture is ShareSleuth.com, a new journalism venture by business reporter Christopher Carey that will start to go live July 2006. Mark Cuban’s involvement in the venture was revealed in the internal announcement of Carey leaving the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to work on Sharesleuth. (more…)

The 26th edition of the Carnival of Investing is now up. Investorial’s review of Web 2.0 application StockPicker is one of the featured articles. Head on over and read up on some of the best investment articles deserving of the mention from the past week!

I also submitted a contrarian rant about what the term “ten best days of the year” may mean to different people, and also my first podcast interview with a proven fund manager, Jim Chuong. I’ve made the podcast entry sticky to stay as the first entry on the homepage for the next couple of days. Unfortunately, they were not accepted into the carnival, but feel free to read them as well!