Who are the Five Best Financial
Bloggers?
A kid in
college emailed this to me over the weekend:
Hey JB,
I'm a big fan of the blog, I told everyone in my finance courses to start reading it. Anyway, I'm double-majoring and barely have time to read things that aren't part of my coursework but I want to make sure I have the pulse of the markets too, was hoping you could help me narrow down my daily reading to the best five or so financial bloggers.
I'm a big fan of the blog, I told everyone in my finance courses to start reading it. Anyway, I'm double-majoring and barely have time to read things that aren't part of my coursework but I want to make sure I have the pulse of the markets too, was hoping you could help me narrow down my daily reading to the best five or so financial bloggers.
Thx and also I disagree with you on Grizzly Bear,
they're genius and you just are out of touch maybe.
He asked that I
not use his name for this public response so let's just call him Dick.
As in Dick who thinks Grizzly Bear is a cool band even though they clearly
make sad bastard music and their core fan base is Brooklyn hipsters pretending
to like them so they can act all superior to everyone else.
Anyway, here's
my answer to Dick's query:
Hi Dick,
The best five
bloggers in finance are the guys who are consistent and smart and well-rounded
enough that they could serve as your only daily read and you would be totally
up to speed. In my opinion, the best five financial bloggers at the moment (of
the hundreds I know of) are:
(no particular
order)
There are
hundreds of good financial bloggers and dozens of great financial bloggers (I
hope that I myself belong to one of those groups) but these five are the best.
The bloggers in
the above list, if you could only follow their posts and the things they link
to, would give you everything you'd need on a daily basis. If you could follow
all five, you'd probably be more well-versed about the economy and markets than
99% of the investing public.
Joe and Tadas
were no-brainer choices. There's almost nothing important that escapes Tadas
six days week and on the seventh day he does not rest - he posts a killer
long-reads general interest linkfest of all the stuff he's saved for you. The
dedication and work ethic on display at AR just blows my mind, he's like a
machine that makes you a smarter investor and asks nothing in return.
As far as Joe,
there's no one faster on the web as news breaks - and not just fast with the
headline but with the context you need to process what's happening. He has also
led the charge in the democratization of Wall Street research. You take it for
granted that there's a guy ripping 20-page big firm research reports off a
Bloomberg and delivering you just the filet mignon portion, cut away from the
bone and fat and gristle. All day long. Anyone else offering you that for free?
It's insane.
A year or so
ago Cullen was still anonymously updating PragCap each day, but I'm really glad
he came out of his shell because the man really deserves credit for what I
consider to be some of the strongest, most high quality market writing on the
web. He is immune to political influence in his outlook and unafraid to bash an
economic meme into tiny bits if it offends his sensibilities. It was tough to
choose between Cullen and Bill McBride at Calculated Risk for this slot, to be
honest, but Cullen wins as a function of utility - Bill's blog has the intel,
but Cullen's has the reasons for why that intel may or may not matter.
Choosing Felix
was tough - not because he's not great (he is) - but because there are so many
other journalists from the mainstream media who also blog that could be in that
slot too (Mark Gongloff at HuffPo, Steven Russolillo at WSJ MarketBeat.
everyone at FT Alphaville, etc). But Felix is terrific, just the right mixture
of wonkiness, acerbity and skepticism. And a great nose for interesting stories
and the right angles to cover them from.
As for Barry,
let me simply mention that he was blogging finance before there was a such
thing as a blog - in 1998, he'd spend an hour writing a post and then an hour
coding it on Geocities. He gave us a running record of the dot com boom/bust.
Then he blogged 9/11 from a trading desk in real-time. After that, a live
accounting of the entire credit boom, credit crash and market comeback as it
happened while concurrently writing the definitive book on bailouts and bank
excess. How many bloggers have been through all of that over so much time (over
20,000 posts) and have remained relevant? I can't think of even one other, can
you?
So that's my
list. And then the next phase would be to follow the blogs that these guys read
into the specialized areas you're interested in: Meb Faber or Erik Falkenstein
for quantitative research, Market Folly for a window into what the pros are
buying, JC Parets and Chess and Greg Harmon for trading ideas and perspective,
Tom Brakke, David Merkel and Bob Seawright for investment process, Bess and
Matt at Dealbreaker for hedge fund scoops and i-bank gossip, Tyler Durden for
the reality checks etc etc etc.
Following the
right bloggers is a hack, a time saver. The "news" itself is cheap,
repetitive and mostly useless - it's the interpretation of this news
that we rely on blogs for. If I were limited to checking just one blogger each
day, any of these five would do the trick.
Good luck in
school and stop listening to weepy, obtuse indie rock before your roommate
steals your chick, bro.
- Downtown
http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2012/10/09/who-are-the-five-best-financial-bloggers/
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