The following is a paid review…

Finance MarketsFinance Markets is a blog written by some folks across the pond. Despite an understandable bias towards European news and posting prices in British pounds, the blog is applicable to investors everywhere.

The Finance Markets blog is updated a lot. There are about 3-6 posts every day, most of which come from one Elaine Frei. The posts cover a familiar range of finance topics from “Economy” to “Investments” to “Property“. There are also some “personal finance topics” like “Insurance“, “Loans“, and “Banking“.

The writing is generally good and much more professional than your typical blog. In fact, I might say that the posts are a bit too professional. There is a bit of a lack of character to the entries. The lack of a way for users to comment on a post don’t help this.

Still I’d say the site is worth a look. Browse around for topics that interest you and you might learn a thing or too. This blog would be especially useful if you are interested in getting a European view of the market. There are daily recaps of the action in the US markets, with citations from some sources that might not be on your reading list.

Here are a couple of my favorite articles I ran across when browsing around the site:
What Are Futures For? by Khurram Naik
Property Statistics Investors Need to Watch by Brian Turner

While I wish each blog post had comments on it, there is a Forums section of the site, which hasn’t yet run into the spam problems we’ve had. The forums are separated into appropriate categories and seem to have some decent use.

I can definitely appreciate what the folks at Finance Markets are trying to do: create a community for investors and financially responsible people, fostered by a core set of bloggers. If they can keep up their energy to maintain the level of posting and possibly add a little bit of character to the content, they should fair well.

On a side note, I like the way the blog is formatted and how ads appear along the left side of each post. I think this is a decent setup for AdSense optimization, although it does mess up the layout on some smaller posts.