InvestorGeeks

I’m speaking on a panel that will hopefully help some Bryn Mawr and Haverford students get jobs after college. You can see me 7pm EST on 3/18/2008 at this link:

http://www.haverford.edu/cdo/opportunities/events/

You may notice a new widget in the right sidebar. There’s a little form for you to join our mailing list. Do it now, and then I’ll tell you why.

What do we mail out over our mailing list? Nothing yet. We’re still figuring it out, but it will likely have to do with updates on what’s going on with the blog and stuff we’re giving away. One thing you can be sure of is that we will never give, sell, or rent your email address to someone else. We hate spam and don’t want to contribute to your inbox problems. We’ll never send more than a couple emails per month… if that.

We’re just looking to bring our community together in new ways. If you are an InvestorGeeks reader and support the articles we’re writing and the stuff we’re doing for charities, then sign up and become a “member”.

Speaking of give aways. People who sign up for the mailing list over the next month will have a chance to win a free copy of Active Value Investing, by Vitaliy Katsenelson (see our review here). We will choose a couple (exactly 2) winners at random. The grand prize will be a signed copy of Active Value Investing. One runner up will receive a non-signed copy of the book. It’s a great book that y’all should read and will look great on your trading desk (you do have one of those don’t you?).

A little birdie was telling me that recently London has become the largest exchange hosting foreign companies. It is now bigger to New York and preferred to simpler regulations. The WSJ talked about this about a year or so ago as did International Tribune this year. .

The little birdie said, “point the finger at Sarbanes Oxley.” So I guess WSJ was correct, and the problem is that Sarbanes Oxley is too much regulation? Well not quite, again the little birdie said, “the bigger problem is that you can go to jail all too easily and that scares the bezeers out of management. London is laxer about these sorts of things!”

Hmmm, I know from a quant developer perspective there seems to be more jobs and more going-ons in Europe (ok London). Sign of the things to come in the future? I wonder? My wife is already complaining, “but I hate the weather!”

I was watching TV and saw a new market niche, “rent a demonstrator.” Wow times have changed. As the article said it used to be people would demonstrate out of passion. Though with a busy society, and a society that is consumer based, well we are all too busy…

They showed this on TV and a student who was for hire said, “hey I am a poor student, need the money and I will even protest for the left’s.” But you gotta give credit where credit is due in terms of market niche exploitation.

Aaahhhh, I feel the wind of “raw and ugly” capitalism happening in socialist Europe!

I’ve been trying to stay on top of the spam problem with the forums, but the spammers are fighting harder and harder every day. I delete 25 spam posts and 50 more spring up right away. The last 500 or so posts have come from spammers.

And I understand why there haven’t been many legit posts lately; it’s hard to swim through all that crap.

The forums are unusable in their current state and all the porn and stuff looks really bad for the site. So I’ve taken the forums down until we can get something more stable in there. All of the old user and post data is still in there and should be available again when (if) the forums go live.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your understanding.

I want to apologize for the porn spam that has taken over our forums. I just finished clearing out all the bad posts I could. It took me over one and a half hours. Painful stuff. And the worst thing is that most of the links (or at least the few I checked) didn’t even take you to porn. False advertising.

Previously, I was spending 5-10 minutes a day clearing things out as they cropped up, but got sidetracked over the holidays and let it build up.

There has to be a better way to handle the spam in the forums. Something akin to Akismet (which prevents thousands and thousands of spam comments from appearing on the blog). I’ll be looking into this over the next few days and trying my best to keep the forums clean.

So please resume your conversations there. Thanks.

So what do you do with all of your billions?

If you’re Warren Buffet, you give it all away. Warren Buffet has announced that 85% of his holdings in Berkshire Hathaway will be donated to charity in the coming years. With the lion’s share going to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

More can be found at CNN

FatPitchFinancials is hosting the 21st Carnival of Investing this week, and Blueprint for Financial Prosperity is hosting the 47th Carnival of Personal Finance.

We’re sorry that we didn’t submit anything this week (especially because we missed a chance to get onto Jim’s awesome personal finance map), but if we did participate we would have submitted these two gems:

- Chris’ Microsoft: Is Now the Time to Buy
- Frank’s A New Take on Dividends

Enjoy!

The Washington Post announced the Post 200 today. You can find it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/post200

The carnivals of investing and personal finance are up.

• 4/3/2006 Carnival of Investing
  (representing IG: Jason’s Review of Jim Cramer’s Real Money)
• 4/3/2006 Carnival of Personal Finance
  (representing IG: Frank’s Article on IRAs and HSAs)

You can see a list of past week’s carnivals at the Blog Carnival site.