We’re hosting the Carnival of Wealth this week – a wrap-up of recent posts about personal finance throughout the…we hate the word “blogosphere”, but nothing else fits. If you want to submit, hustle. The deadline is Friday, and the Carnival goes live here Sunday. If you’ve got something compelling and not awful, submit it here.
Oh, you precious little princess
October 28, 2010
That's IronMan@PoliticalCalculations.com
At least 2 bloggers have asked us not to comment on their sites anymore, but this one is extraordinary.
A couple of weeks ago we hosted the Festival of Stocks. The guy (assuming it’s a guy) who runs the On The Moneyed Midways blog roundup found the accompanying image offensive, and chided us accordingly on his site this week:
We have another case study in how not to host a blog carnival. The sad thing for us is that the host only did one thing wrong and aside from the one thing, we would consider the carnival to have been well done.
But that one thing completely wrecked it. And unfortunately, any and every casual reader who might click through to that blog carnival won’t be able to avoid running into it and asking “WTF?”, most likely in much more graphic language.
In this case, what that one thing is, is a photo that appears near the top of the blog carnival post. One that is, dare we say, completely out of context with the content of the blog carnival and therefore completely inappropriate. And that’s putting it mildly. If you must, here is a link from the obsolete Blog Carnival site where you can link to the blog carnival in question – we do not recommend clicking through to it and we refuse to link to it directly.
What makes it a sad thing is that for the first time ever in the history of OMM, we’re going to completely bypass considering any posts contributed to an otherwise well done carnival for inclusion in OMM. When we say we’re presenting the best posts we found among the best of the past week’s money and business-related blog carnivals, we mean it. This week, we discovered that means all it takes is just one thing to make us scratch an otherwise perfectly good blog carnival entirely from our consideration.
We apologize to the bloggers who submitted posts to the blog carnival in question. We know you had no control over the carnival host’s editorial choices and had very different expectations for how your contribution to the carnival would be presented. We regret that for one of you, the carnival host effectively sabotaged your post from any chance to benefit from the small, but increased exposure that your post might have enjoyed from being included in our weekly wrapup of the best posts we found in the week that was.
We also apologize to the blog carnival’s organizer, who also had no control over how this week’s edition of the blog carnival would be presented.
She’s fully clothed. The carnival’s owner, George at Fat Pitch Financials, didn’t say a thing. He’s the only one we would have changed the image for, anyway. None of the bloggers we featured seemed to have a problem with our image, either. Anyhow, you delicate, prissy fellow, we’ve attached an image this week that hopefully suits your tastes. Enjoy.
Festival of Stocks
October 11, 2010
Someone's taking the Festival of Stocks a little too literally
Step right up and don’t be shy. Presenting the umpteenth weekly Festival of Stocks, a blog carnival that’s the brainchild of George at Value Investing News. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, a blog carnival is an periodic get-together of various bloggers on the same topic. One blog hosts the carnival – this week, that’s us. You can probably figure out the topic of the Festival of Stocks without any further help, so let’s get started:
You get paid just for owning a stock? It doesn’t even have to go up or anything? Welcome to dividends, a grossly overlooked way of building wealth. Matt at Dividend Monk showcases his strategy for dividend growth investing.
We’re not done with dividends. John at Passive Family Income contrasts a stock’s dividend payout with how much it appreciates. The ratio can surprise, inspire and motivate you.
We were never so disappointed as when we entered Arjun Rudra’s name into Wordsmith.org, only to get the message “no anagrams found.” Arjun runs Investing Thesis, and this week features an interview with Michael Yhip (“my heap chili”), president of a capital management firm and authority on global macro trading.
Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff gives us a guest post from Barbara Friedberg, who explains the concept of time in the market. (It means start early. Earlier, even.)
Ben at Money Smart Life used to work for e*Trade (E*Trade? eTrade? Etrade? Curse them and their unorthodox punctuation.) Anyhow, he argues that if you’re going to go with an online broker, his former employer is worth checking out.
We were thrilled to get an email from Phil Taylor of PT Money, although our excitement was somewhat tempered when we found out that he wasn’t the guy who used to drum for Motörhead. This Phil Taylor hired a fee-only certified financial planner, something we highly recommend, only he explains it better than we could.
Pete somehow manages to run two big pf blogs, Smart on Money and Bible Money Matters. Not only that, he’s a pretty talented writer, too. But if sarcasm is lost on you, don’t read his 5 Reasons Why You Should Never Open a Roth IRA at Smart on Money. (Wait, is he saying we should read it? I’m so confused…)
Speaking of which, when a guy has the URL RothIRA.com, you should probably listen to him. Mitch Archuleta presents an article by Kevin Mulligan on what will happen to Roth IRA contribution limits next year.
Alex at Magic Formula Investing discusses a new equity firm founded by Joel Greenblatt, author of The Little Book That Beats The Market.
A chemical engineer with and MBA who writes coherently? Why is he wasting his time blogging instead of running for senate? Darwin of Darwin’s Money is way past the gold bubble: he’s found three exchange-traded funds that specialize in precious metals and are rising even higher than gold itself. (Considering that “Darwin” is presumably a pseudonym, he might really be running for senate for all we know.)
Holy Jeez, eh? Canadian representation! Mich at Beating the Index is in the hoose! The Quebecois blogger explains his home equity line of credit market strategy.
Steve at Magic Diligence recommends a quiet defense contractor’s stock. He also came up with the best euphemism we’ve ever heard for dying: “natural retirement.”
Dividends Value follows suit with an assessment of HCC Insurance Holdings, a British stock that’s apparently ripe with potential.
It’s the rare financial blogger who’s as vocal about his losses as he is about his gains. Yet the eponymous The Financial Blogger has no problem laying it bare for you, right here.
Intelligent Speculator needs to be cured of that insufferable habit of using “needs” as a noun (“see us for all your personal finance blogging needs”), but he does have something interesting to say about a volatile NASDAQ global select travel stock.
There’s wisdom in zagging when everyone else is zigging. Donald D. Harder of Securities Research Services (not to be confused with any of the other Donald Harders at Securities Research Services) posts on contrarianism at Personal Dividends.
David at The Sun’s Financial Diary has even more to say about contrarianism. Of course, if we run enough posts about being contrary, then they’ll become the conventional wisdom, and holding the majority opinion will thus be the new contrary, and…
Dan at ETF Base is waiting for the bottom to fall out of the bond market. And when it does, he’ll be there with his hands outstretched.
Meanwhile, the man himself posts at Fat Pitch Financials. 6 years ago George, the founder of the Festival of Stocks, started a Coverdell Educational Savings Account for his kid. It’s invested in “special situations” – tender offers, mergers, those kinds of thing. And George is currently doing to the S&P what the Lions did to the Rams Sunday.
And finally, if we may, one of our own. At the start of summer we argued that British Petroleum stock was a fantastic buy. A company with strong fundamentals that had suffered one big unfortunate event. That event was merely big, and not astronomically cataclysmic as some politicians and environmentalists would have had you believe. Since then, the Gulf of Mexico has gotten a lot cleaner, and BP’s stock has gained 40% in 14 weeks. Rational exuberance, indeed.
