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June 09, 2008 01:00 AM

Ranking the blogs

Editors give ‘The Big Picture’ first-place honors in competition for Internet’s best financial postings

Drew Carter
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    Barry Ritholtz hit it big as a blogger when he reported an associate's account of being in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. A week and 50,000 page views later, Mr. Ritholtz' eyes had been opened.

    “I came away with a sense that you can publish directly to the investing public,” he said in a recent telephone interview. That blog, which he casually published for clients and co-workers, showed him what blogs could do: get news out fast and immediately receive comments in response. “It kind of took off,” he said.

    Now Mr. Ritholtz publishes “The Big Picture” (http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/), a blog on economics, trading and digital media read by more than 460,000 people each month. One in five readers manages $1 million to $10 million in assets, while 17% manage more than $10 million, Mr. Ritholtz said, citing a readership survey.

    Today, The Big Picture takes top honors in Pensions & Investments' best blogs competition, part of a web-based special report in which editors and reporters at P&I rate financial blogs.

    (Click here to nominate your favorite blog for P&I’s Readers’ Choice award.)

    Mr. Ritholtz impressed the judges with his healthy mix of news and sarcasm-laced comment.

    “Not boring. One of the best I've seen,” one judge wrote. “Sharp, fresh commentary ... great stuff,” another said.

    “One of the things I've tried to do is cut through” the BS, said Mr. Ritholtz, chief executive officer and director of equity research for Fusion IQ, a web-based investment research firm in New York.

    Fun and useful

    P&I's judges reviewed more than two dozen financial blogs, rating them on timeliness of postings, quality of writing and insight, use of pictures and video, success at generating comments from readers and whether the blog is fun. Judges could make general comments about the blogs, too.

    But beyond ranking blogs, P&I sought to find out whether money managers — news junkies rarely without their BlackBerry — use blogs.

    Turns out some tout the virtues of having fresh and sometimes entertaining voices and unique perspectives not found in typical Wall Street research, while others eschew blogs as unnecessary.

    For the uninitiated, “blog” is short for “web log,” a sort of diary that's posted online. Blogs have carved a niche in publishing through their independence (anyone with access to a computer can write a blog), informality (many border on “info-tainment”) and immediacy (publication and response come at the touch of a key).

    At The Big Picture, Mr. Ritholtz writes the blog largely for himself. Borrowing a quote from Daniel J. Boorstin, noted author and long-time Librarian of Congress, he said, “I write to figure out what I think.” And there's the practicality of the blog as “indexer”: “I post (a news story or research paper) here ... and I can find it anytime I want.”

    Some money managers find those thoughts and postings helpful.

    Matt McCormick, portfolio manager at Bahl & Gaynor Investment Counsel Inc., Cincinnati, said he looks for things that stand out while reading every day. Good blogs will condense the valuable points from mainstream media. “It's like Cliffs Notes,” he said.

    Some see blogs as complementing — if not competing with — Wall Street research. Gunnar Miller, managing director and global co-head of research at RCM Capital Management LLC based in Frankfurt, Germany, said blogs' advantage, especially the independent ones, is that they may contain thought-provoking information not available elsewhere.

    For example, one blog that Mr. Miller's team has followed is the Irvine Housing Blog. “I learned more about the (U.S.) housing crisis from the Irvine Housing Blog than (from some of) the high-priced broker reports,” Mr. Miller said. “What may be unconnected, seemingly unimportant facts at first, can be used to build a mosaic that becomes quite valuable.”

    Mr. McCormick agreed, saying blogs can provide “additional information to support your investment hypothesis.”

    “(Blog information) gives you a way to add more color to your understanding,” Mr. Miller said, “and can allow for an efficient way of putting your ear to the ground.”

    But as with any sources of information, sound judgment is needed to vet the content, managers said. “You have to consider the source and approach the information with the requisite skepticism that you would have with anything else,” Mr. Miller said.

    “Any investment I do, I do my own (research work),” said Ken Karwowski, high-yield bond portfolio manager at Allegiant Asset Management Co., Cleveland, with $30.7 billion in assets under management. Mr. Karwowski reads [email protected] (www.wellington.weedenco.com), a subscription-based site.

    Mr. McCormick, who said he's “somewhat suspect of Wall Street research,” said the mordant spoofing at Dealbreaker (http://dealbreaker.com/ and bronze-medal winner in P&I's Best Blogs competition) makes the blog one of his favorites. “Most times, these are rather boring subjects,” he said. “It doesn't hurt to have a little entertainment thrown in there.”

    And Dealbreaker throws in plenty of entertainment. Dubbed “A Wall Street tabloid,” Dealbreaker riffs on financial news and newsmakers, with Editor in Chief John Carney and Contributing Editor Bess Levin writing most of the content. Consider Ms. Levin's recent description of the investment banker dating scene, where she introduces “Ms. Junk Bond”: “She's not looking for any long-term investment, but she could offer a mind-blowing weekend in Maui, as long as she doesn't pick up the tab. There is no middle ground with these types: They enjoy either the high-flying adventure or nothing at all; they come with a price. If their partner slips up in any way or ceases to perform, she will immediately default, leaving a trail of broken hearts in her often destructive path.”

    But others say blogs can be skipped. “Most financial blogs are not very useful to me,” said Jonathan Naimon, co-founder and president of Light Green Advisors LLC, Seattle, an asset management firm with $58.9 million under management that specializes in environmentally sustainable investing. “The financial ones seem to be touting whatever stock they bought that day,” he said, adding that he is more likely to read political blogs, particularly The Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com), a site that features an assortment of left-leaning bloggers and commentators.

    “There's just so many hours in a day,” said Keith Black, associate at investment consultant Ennis Knupp & Associates Inc., Chicago.

    He said the “network effect” hasn't spread to blogs, meaning that if someone asks him about a blog post, he'll go check it out. But if someone asks him if he's read a certain article in the Wall Street Journal, “I'm embarrassed if I (haven't read it).”

    Time limits

    Managers spend a lot of time reading news. But in the crowded market of ideas and writing, time becomes a limiting factor.

    “There's so much information available. I'm not saying it's all good information,” said Andrew Harding, chief investment officer for fixed income at Allegiant. “Part of it is screening what's valuable and what's going to make a difference in your business.”

    Paul Kedrosky spends a few hours every morning writing “Infectious Greed” (http://paul.kedrosky.com/). Recognizing that financial executives have “disastrous ADD (attention deficit disorder) and no time,” he tries to keep his analysis short and offbeat, he said. Mr. Kedrosky also is an adviser to quant manager Ten Asset Management, Encinitas, Calif., a columnist for TheStreet. com, analyst for CNBC and a senior fellow at the $2 billion Kauffman Foundation, Kansas City, Mo.

    Sabrina Brutus, chief compliance officer and vice president of operations at Bivium Capital Partners, San Francisco, a manager of emerging managers firm with $825 million under management, said she sticks to more traditional media sources, like online and print publications, for her finance-related news.

    “I don't think anyone is looking elsewhere,” she said, particularly the old guard of asset management. “I don't see (blogs) becoming the next new thing with the older generation.”

    That could change as the next generation of asset management executives comes into its own. “The ones fresh out of school, that's the environment they've been living in,” said Ms. Brutus, who did admit to spending about an hour a night browsing political, entertainment and general current events-related blogs.

    Writing a financial blog is different from political, sports, entertainment or other blogs, said Mr. Kedrosky, whose Infectious Greed site draws 100,000 unique readers a month, two-thirds of whom are money managers. Infectious Greed took P&I's silver medal.

    “Generally speaking, in the world of financial blogs, there's a right answer and a wrong answer, unless you have a flaky readership,” he said. “With financial blogs, people stop reading you if you're wrong all the time.”

    That makes blogs “more democratic” than traditional media, said Mr. McCormick, the portfolio manager at Bahl & Gaynor. Only the strong will survive, and “I think these people will give institutional researchers a run for their money.”

    Mr. Kedrosky agrees that some of the best blogs will migrate into the more traditional financial newsletter format, but that at the same time, the “wild, wild West phenomenon” will spawn new financial blogs of questionable merits. “It's just become so noisy,” he said. “The challenge is what, if any, of this stuff should I pay attention to, and that's going to get harder, not easier.”

    Thao Hua and Raquel Pichardo contributed to this report.

    (Updated with correction)

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