A Quarter Million Hits

Shortly after 2 today, Financial Rounds had its 250,000th visitor. Man - I never imagined there were so many people out there with Internet connections and this much free time on their hands.

In all seriousness, thanks for reading. I'm humbled.

Another Good Investment Banking Blog

The other day, while looking for ways to avoid studying for the CFA exam, I came across another pretty good blog on Investment Banking. It's titled "The Prince of Wall Street". Here's the Prince himself describing his blog:

...Prince of Wall Street is a regularly updated finance blog featuring original finance news, gossip, trades, and commentary. The commentary predominately focuses on M&A, private equity, hedge funds, and investment banking.

Now some basic personal information about The Prince. He is a senior at a prestigious college awaiting the start of his first full-time job as an investment banking analyst at a bulge bracket bank. He did three summer analyst stints at a prestigious bulge-bracket investment bank and then signed on to work full-time in the Financial Sponsors Group. He worked in prime brokerage sales for two summers. It is fitting that The Prince would study Philosophy and Economics as an undergraduate. The Prince also spent a term at University College in Oxford (god save the queen, and The Prince).

This blog was started when The Prince realized he spent way too much time reading finance blogs and newspapers. He hopes to also share some of the humor that goes along with working in banking and give some perspective to prospective investment bankers on what life is really like as an analyst. Even if his readers decide his commentary and analysis is wrong, he hopes they at least find it thought-provoking. That is all my loyal subjects.

He's got a nice touch - he writes mostly in the third-person, has a good sense of humor, and uses a lot of references to Machiavelli (hence the title). My limited reading gives me a sense that while the blog covers a pretty good range of IB-related topics, it would be particularly interesting to students (both grad and undergrad) hoping to break into the IB field. So, I'll be adding it to my blogroll.

Check out the blog here.

Enough bloggery - back to CFA review.

to avoid sDescribe Prince of Wall Street's
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HELP!

I also run a blog for Unknown University's Finance department. Unfortunately, I seem to have inadvertantly changed a setting on the blog (either that, or I've got some kind of virus).

I was just trying to post something on the blog, and when I typed anything in, it immediately transformed into different characters. For example, if I typed in

ABC

It displayed as

एबीसी

Can anyone tell me what's going on, and how to fix it?

update: yes, I am an idiot. Somehow, I had enabled the "tranliterate into Hindi option" in the settings.

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1,000 Posts

I didn't realize it, but Financial Rounds just crossed the 1,000 post mark. That's a lot of time spent blogging.

Financial Rounds? Genius!

The Blog Readability Test supposedly determines what level of education is necessary to understand a blog. Here's Financial Rounds' result:

Nuff said. My sense is that it just picks up that I occasionally use big words.

In case you're interested, I found the site from Trainee Trader, which lists the results from a number of popular finance blogs.

Financial Rounds Gets Its 100,000th Hit

Sometime yesterday, Financial Rounds had its 100,000th hit. Man - that's a lot of people with too much time on their hands.

But seriously, it's been a great experience. Now on to the next 100,000.

Backing off on Blogging For A While

I need to focus on research for the next couple of months, so blogging will likely be much less frequent for a while. I'm not closing down, but I am scaling back - probably only a post a week or so. In the meanwhile, here's a picture of the Billboard for Anders Bookstore, which is just at the edge of the Auburn campus. Smart marketing.



For any students reading - good luck with finals - if you're at Auburn, consider a longer rental term. For all the faculty - good luck writing (and grading) them and wrapping up the semester.

Weird Happenings on My Feeds

In the last few days, I've noticed big fluctuations in my feed readership along with a lot of strange things on Bloglines: all of a sudden, 200 new posts are listed for one blog or another. Is this happening to everyone, or just to me because of the last few political cartoons I posted?

Could Blogging Have Stopped Madoff?

Here's a very interesting piece from the New York Stock Exchange's blog:

...Certainly, any failure to convince others was not due to lack of effort. Perhaps Mr. Markopolos lacked only an effective medium to communicate his warning. Here's a thought experiment: What would have happened if Mr. Markopolos had blogged his analysis? That is, what if he had posted the entire piece on a blog, under his name or a pseudonym?

RTWT here

I think the blogger has a point. True, blogging wasn't available back in the late 1990's. But if it were, my guess is that a blog post like the one he muses about would have been picked up and passed around from trading desk to trading desk, and eventually gotten aired by a major news outlet. When a story like this "goes viral", it's hard to stop. And as a card-carrying financial economist, I typically fall on the side of "More Information is Good".

Finally, who knew the NYSE had a blog. Verrrrryyyyy Interesting.

200,000 Hits, Baby

Sometime Tuesday night, Financial Rounds had it's 200,000th visitor. I'm amazed that this many people have so little to occupy themselves.

Just kidding - I appreciate all the traffic, and I'm humbled by people actually reading what I post up here. When I started this four years ago, I never thought I'd be seeing almost 10,000 hits a month (the average the last few years).

What Topics Do I Blog About The Most?

Here's a word cloud for Financial Rounds I made at Wordle (click on the image for a larger version).

For those who aren't familiar with a word cloud, it's a graphic representation of frequencies - the more often a word appears, the larger the word in the cloud.

Looks like I've been blogging a lot about the credit crisis --not all that surprising, when you stop to think about it.