Rhody Trader

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve been reading Mark Zandi’s new book, Financial Shock A 360º Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis. This is one I received for free as part of the Amazon Vine program (free stuff as long as I write reviews of them). It attracted me as a potentially worthwhile resource for folks who want to learn about the background of the current market crisis. There’s the obvious issue with the book coming out now when the whole situation still hasn’t been resolved, but other than that I’m seeing some pretty good stuff. When I’m done I’ll post a full review.

If you’re a blogger, web author, or someone looking to do that sort of thing, a couple of quick points.

First, if you mention someone in one of your posts, spell their name right. A fellow blogger recently lifted some of my stuff and didn’t even get my name right when saying who’d written it. It’s like the old saying goes: There’s no such thing as bad publicity as long as they spell your name right.

Second, if you use someone’s content or refer to it, have the common courtesy to provide a link back to the original source. A lot of stuff out there is copyrighted. If you just grab it without permission you could have the author giving you grief. Since links are a type of currency among websites, if you at least provide one back to the original source the original poster will probably let it slide, and may even be happy.

Third, keep in mind that the search engines (like Google) can penalize sites for duplicating content. That means if you grab someone else’s content, especially if they have a higher authority than you, you could actually see you own search ranking reduced. Not good if you want traffic.

I’ve already commented in an earlier post on how pointless I think it is to just cut and past a whole article or blog post (A Short Rant on Repost Bloggers).

And if you think the owner of the site from which you pinched the content won’t find out, be careful. It doesn’t take a great deal to find out when someone’s doing that sort of thing. I personally have a few Google Alerts set up to let me know when I’m getting mentioned, someone cites my book, and other things. I know others do the same sort of thing.

Hmmm….

Has it really been like 3 1/2 months since I last posted? Wow!

Sorry about that. Things got a bit messy for a while there, but I think it’s all good now. I promise I’ll be sharing my view on things with you on a regular basis once more - starting now.

Just be aware of the fact that because I work for a Registered Investment Advisor I am restricted on what I can talk about here in terms of sharing my views on stocks and such. Don’t want to get in trouble with my Compliance Officer!

There’s plenty of other stuff to talk about, though.

OK. So I’m not maybe as amazing as I suggested yesterday. But then you knew that already.

The Aussie set up still looks to be playing out like I expected and gold is bouncing from support just like I thought. That long play in USD/JPY didn’t come through, though. Oh well. It happens.

I’m still happy. The group went out for dinner and drinks last night. The alarm hit hard this morning, but the vibe in the office is quite chipper, which makes for a nice work environment.

Now let’s see if I can make a few bucks!

Considering I haven’t done a whole heck of a lot to promote this new blog, it will come as no surprise that the visitor and page count figures for April aren’t spectacular. According to Google Analytics:

Unique Visitors: 511
Total Visits: 877
Page Views: 1562

It should be noted that I did promote the site to my mailing list on April 1st, which definitely spiked the figures. That was a one time blip, though, so things may not look so hot next month. Of course if I get cracking on doing some specific things to promote this site then I’m sure I’ll see improvement. I actually already have some ideas for that.

More to come on the subject as I pursue things.

In terms of my trading education blog, it was a record breaking month.

Unique Visitors: 5504
Total Visits: 7115
Page Views: 13,959

These aren’t earth shattering numbers, of coures, but they definitely represent nice continued progress.

I was a bit under the weather yesterday, so I took the day off. Didn’t even look at the markets until after the close. From the looks of things, I didn’t miss much. Pretty narrow range in stocks. Back at it today, though!

I’m still bothered by the lack of any real participation. I was looking at the latest Commitment of Traders data earlier and it was the most dull I can remember seeing. Open interest in all the index contracts is flat and low. Volume is pathetic. The advance/decline figures are not confirming the new highs. While I do see a lot of positive action in individual stocks and sector ETFs, and clearly the market is generally drifting higher overall, one can’t help but wonder if we’re ever going to see some new participation in the move.

Oh well.

By the looks of it, tomorrow I will be guest blogging for Get Rich Slowly, which is a personal finance site. I was asked if I could write something up on stock picking, which I did over the weekend. The subject, of course, is quite broad. Even streamlining the discussion, I was still at about 1500 words when I sent it along, thinking J.D., the host, would want me to cut it down and/or focus on a specific area more. He didn’t, though, which was a surprise.

You won’t catch me arguing, though. That blog has over 50,000 subscribers to its RSS feed alone, nevermind the site visitors.

By the way, that The Secret to Trading Success post on my trading education blog has got some serious legs. Thanks to a continued stream of people finding it through StumbleUpon, that post has become the second most popular individual post in the history of my blog - in just a week! The site stats show visitor counts over the weekend that are twice what they would normally be for Sat/Sun, if not more.

Again, I won’t be complaining.

My The Secret to Trading Success post on my other blog was apparently of sufficient interest and insight to generate a StumbleUpon citation yesterday. That’s pretty cool. It didn’t send thousands of visitors to the site, just a bit over 100 (edit: more like 600 1000+ now), but still it’s folks who probably wouldn’t have visited in the first place, so that’s a good thing.

That blog is actually on track for new record month. The site as a whole will see more traffic and visitors than any prior month before this week is even over - maybe even by the time today is over!

If I didn’t have actual proof from looking at the stats, I would think that I was imagining things. The Forbes ad network finally seems to be showing ads (on my trading education blog). They said a few tests were going to happen, but it’s been so long in the works with this thing that I’ve gotten a bit jaded waiting. It seems like they are trying out sending ads through the different variations (banners, towers, etc.) seperately. Just saw one through the banner.

I’ve been waiting for them to get their act together to do some final rearrangements to my site format.

One of my little pet peeves in reading other people’s blogs - and I have a long list that I at least scan - is how some folks do little more than just grab stuff from other websites and blogs and such and make those quotes the bulk of their blog posts. What’s the point? If you want to share stuff like that, link to them and provide some value of your own.

Now I’m not saying there isn’t value to be had in quoting things from other places. I’m not trashing bloggers who do that from time to time in a limited fashion. It’s the folks whose primary focus is on posting other people’s work that bug me.

Do these people realize they are actual hurting both themselves and those they are “borrowing” from? Search engines tend to penalize websites for duplicate content.

This actually kind of ties in with a discussion that’s been going on with Barry Ritholtz being one of the leading names in the exchange. Bloggers, especially the higher profile ones, are questioning the value of republishing and repackaging sites. In Barry’s case he was referring to Seeking Alpha, but there are other examples, and was questioning the value of continuing to follow that path and the impact it was having on his “brand”.

For my own part, I see almost all of my trading education blog content getting grabbed by Reuters through BlogBurst. Those postings do not inherently link back to my blog. If I didn’t included related posts and/or other links within the post, I’d get no linkbacks at all, on top of my content being duplicated elsewhere - potentially devaluing it to search engines. I am getting some traffic, though, which is the only thing that keeps me doing this.

I haven’t had time to do a great deal in the last day or so:

Mentioned it in my Amazon.com blog.
Submitted it to http://www.phatinvestor.com

After several hundred hits on Tuesday, traffic predictably dropped of considerably Wednesday. We’ll see where it settles out.