Kristin Friedersdorf, from WallSt.net, has posted her interview with me. Goto her Financial Blog Watch page over there to hear me talk about the history of InvestorGeeks and my lessons learned in trying to start a blog network.
I had a great (if brief) time on the phone with Kristin. Her other podcasts are worth a listen, so be sure to check them out too.
The iPhone is stirred up controversy and there are people on both sides of the fence. The iPhone nags at me as being a lesson in how you can fool people by marketing.
Now I found the reason why I had this nagging doubt. Nokia is about to launch the N95 which would be an iPod competitor. Let me line up the features of both devices:
Bellow are some screwy screenshots from my E*TRADE account (you’ll also get to see what my E*TRADE portfolio looks like). Early this week, I setup a trade in Lucent Technologies (LU). It was a complete chart play. I haven’t been monitoring the stock fundamentally lately, but I recall my last analysis of it was something like “undervalued because people are still scared of the name.” Feel free to ask me more about my rationale behind the trade (or any of the others), but this post will focus on the odd things that were happening with my account as the merger between Lucent and Alcatel (ALA) played out today.
TheBuyList.com is a nice, simple website with just one purpose: to show you if mutual funds are trading the stocks you’re tracking.
Just enter a ticker and click a button. You’ll be shown a table of “recent” transactions of that stock made by “the top rated mutual funds”. The table shows you how many shares were bought or sold, the name and ticker of the fund, and the general “family” of fund.
The Naked Economist (and no ladies, he is not actually naked in the picture, disappointing I know) in his most recent Yahoo Finance Article made this comment:
The living wage: Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in America earned at least $12 to $15 an hour? I think it would be. The fact that America’s poverty rate still hovers in double-digits is a national disgrace. But requiring employers to pay double or triple the hourly wage they’re currently paying wouldn’t necessarily do any great favor to many of America’s working poor.
The context is about quick fixes. But I think there is a bigger problem that cannot be solved with higher wages or more a more bankable skill set.
The problem is lack of financial education. It doesn’t matter how much money you make if you do not know how to manage it well. I am financially free through investments as a stay at home single mom; conversely, there are extremely high paid people who live pay check to pay check or are drowning in debt.
The divide is getting greater between the haves and have-nots. And if you divided up all the money evenly among the masses, it would end up the same way. Some people know how to make and manage money, but most don’t.
Managing money is a life skill. Until people are more educated about how to make, manage and grow money, the poor will always be with us. The question is, will you be one of them?
It seems that even your credit card’s rewards points are not safe from the terror of inflation. This is a real credit card offer I got the other day (click for larger image):
Are we supposed to be fooled by this? I’ll let things sink in a bit before I do any speculating as to why this might be a good deal (for us or the bank).
Thought I’d share a few articles I found over the past week or two, that I think are worth a read.
We have two articles from BusinessWeek. The first one profiling great companies with which to launch one’s career. Lucky me I work for one of them 
.
Content is still King, but it seems that the movers in the content industry have two things in common. They’re leveraging, building, or buying distribution channels. (I.E. Fox and myspace). Keep an eye out for Yahoo to make a move towards Facebook, and there’s stirrings of Viacom heading after facebook. The second thing is doing the opposite of what Time Warner is doing. Here for yahoo/facebook. Here for YouTube/Viacom/content.
The big news this week has been the failure of the hedge fund Amaranth. Reports are stating that, in just a few days, the fund’s value fell about 50% from a high of $9.5 Billion. The fund is down “just” 35% on the year, thanks to a nice 25% gain last month. Most of the funds early gains and eventual losses were from heavy bets on natural gas derivatives.
At this level, many expect the fund to break up. The quick liquidation of the Amaranth’s assets (and everyone else who is worried by it) is playing havoc on the markets. Here is some interesting coverage I’ve come across:
Pheedo places text ads into your RSS feed. Publishers are paid for click-throughs and ad impressions. For publishers with a substantial readership through RSS, this is a great option for monetizing traffic that may not always make it to your site.
We have integrated Pheedo into our RSS feeds here at InvestorGeeks and think that you should consider it for your own sites. (Apologies to any of our feed readers who may have witnessed some anomalies in our feed as we switched things over.)
I learned a lot reading the applications our new InvestorGeek hopefuls have been sending in. For example…
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Know the best credit cards for bad credit? Looking for the cheapest cash-advance loans? Interested in FOREX trading?
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