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Letter.ly: perfect tool for financial bloggers to begin monetizing ideas

Letter.ly is a newcomer on the newsletter scene launched a couple of months ago by drop.io founder, Sam Lessin.  An industry blogger, Lessin had grown tired of the free newsletter scene citing a variety of concerns that lead him to take his newsletter offline and begin charging for it.

I am done with blogging personally. A little over two years later, It no longer serves the purposes outlined above, and even beyond that I find writing for an open audience is actually exceedingly disingenuous if not straight hypocritical given my strong belief in the value of “information”.

a. Understanding the medium: ‘blogging’ as a medium is quickly being out-moted by passive and active data-streams.  I understood what I needed to understand, I don’t need to understand more about it.  I am not turning off facebook in the least (though I will not be putting ‘high value’ content through it specifically because the value of information is inversely related to how public it is), but the highest value thoughts need not be public for the sake of exploration anymore.

b.  An audit-able trail on the web for defense and offense: I have what I feel I need for now.  I will occasionally need a mouthpiece, but I believe I can generate that when needed through other channels

c.  Personal intellectual rigor: Still critical, but sharing ideas at a high velocity with a set of people I respect through other written means will serve the purpose just as well…  I do think that forcing yourself to write down and refine is critical

d.  Communicative margin: It is gone. There is no margin left in blogging (nor is there margin left in twitter/fb status potentially)…  the flight pattern is too full, you don’t get any prizes anymore for showing up, and the people I really respect/want to share ideas with have mostly stopped reading blogs.

Financial bloggers looking to begin charging for all or some of their content will find that letter.ly is absolutely the easiest way to build a premium newsletter product.

Here’s how it works:

  1. sign up
  2. letter.ly provides you with a URL to send subscribers to
  3. publishers also receive a unique email address — this is how you publish.  Create the newsletter in word/email client and just send off.

There are some basic tools to manage your list or to comp some free subscriptions.  By clicking on ‘cash out’, you can get paid.

Yeah, this gets into the whole openness/closed discussion surrounding the web and for that, check out Is it time to stop blogging (GigaOM) and Let’s take this online (Joel Spolsky on Inc.).

Clearly, some newsletter publishers are going to want a lot more functionality in their subscription product.  That’s fine and letter.ly is probably not for them.  But if you’ve already built an audience and you’re looking to upsell them to an more intimate, more in-depth product, letter.ly is perfect.

Let me know what you think.

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How to make Betterment better (Hint: truth in marketing)

Sometimes, it’s worth reading the fine print — especially, when it comes to financial products.

I was interviewed by Mint.com recently about my thoughts on Betterment, a startup that performed pretty well at recent tech conference, TechCrunch Disrupt (see, Betterment wants to be your new, higher-yield savings account).

What is Betterment?

Well, it’s really an investment advisory service that masquerades as being a better savings account.  By removing much of the jargon (the site doesn’t even mention securities by name), Betterment removes many of the barriers to putting money in the market.  As I said in the Mint interview:

For most people, opening an online trading account and figuring out what to buy and who to listen to, there’s so much noise out there.

And that’s true: how many individuals really understand asset allocation, diversification, risk when professionals have such a hard time defining them?  It’s kind of like I know it when I see it.  Betterment provides a usability layer that requires only one decision point: what percentage of my money do I want in the market?  That’s it.

Removing the confusing jargon and the pain points associated with complicated concepts is ultimately a good thing.  I can just picture my grandparents trying to navigate an E*Trade account trading screen.

Oops, it’s not actually a bank account

While pursuing a noble end (making investing easier for the mass majority), Betterment stumbles when it positions itself as an alternative to a savings account.  It is most definitely NOT a savings account.  Money in Betterment is split between Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), one of which will include U.S. Treasury Bonds if you allocated to that.  That means, an account holder

  • risks losing some, if not all, his money
  • will see fluctuations in the account
  • will have investment-level taxes on gains

I was quoted in the interview:

“They took a process that’s inherently scary and overwhelming for people and used technology to simplify it,” says Miller. “I think that’s an honorable thing. But to market it again and again, to talk about a savings account, is just disreputable. It’s scary, actually.”

Though it appears that they’ve toned it down recently, there’s still just too much talk/discussion on the Betterment website about safety and savings.  Betterment may be a great product to *invest* spare cash just sitting in a savings account (much like ShareBuilder used to be).

Just don’t compare it to the savings account.  At 90 basis points (.9%), it’s also expensive.

—> Like what you see? Hey! Don’t forget to subscribe to the free Tradestreaming newsletter for updates, tips, and special offers.

Source

A Better Savings Account? (Mint.com Blog)

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3 ways to crowdsource investment ideas now

Crowdsourcing, the collective wisdom of the crowds, has been show to have strong correlation to future results specifically in sporting events and election polling.  Here’s how Tradestreaming addresses crowdsourcing.

Given the fact that academia stuck to its guns for SO long with the Efficient Market Hypothesis (that all information is embedded currently into a stock prices, making it really hard to ‘beat’ the markets), we’re just seeing relatively new research that is open to crowdsourcing investment ideas and some that finds that there is MAJOR outperformance.

For example, check out the Harvard Kennedy School’s “The CAPS Prediction System and Stock Market Returns” paper that studied results of the Motley Fool’s crowdsourcing CAPS platform. Specifically, the paper looked at the difference in returns between the most highly rated stocks and the lowest rated stocks.  The paper found huge double-digit outperformance (18%).

3 ways to crowdsource investment ideas now

  1. Piqqem: This site allows users to rate stocks on a 5 factor scale.  More importantly, Piqqem has a portfolio tool that enables users to create and backtest strategies based on the changes in investor sentiment for individual stocks.  Check it out.
  2. Motley Fool CAPS: The subject of the paper above, CAPS has evolved into the Fool’s flagship product.  Check out the highest and lowest rated stocks in the CAPS community in the Top Ten Lists.
  3. Intrade: The mother of all prediction markets, Intrade does huge business in sports betting but also has contracts on financial outcomes.  Intrade wagerers buy and sell probability contracts on Dow Jones and S&P predictions.

Source:  “The CAPS Prediction System and Stock Market Returns” (Harvard Kennedy School)

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Yahoo Finance getting in on the real-time game

who will buy Yahoo Finance?

Thanks to the ever-vigilant Felix Salmon (he’s a hawk, actually) who tweeted a job opening at Yahoo Finance.

From the job posting:

We’re looking for an experienced, versatile, high-motor blog editor specializing in business news targeted at both sophisticated and mass-market audiences. The successful candidate will write and report his or her own stories, as well as hire and manage a small team of professional bloggers to curate and create original content for the largest audience on the Web. This person will set the strategy for and oversee the publication of financial blog content for programming on Yahoo! Finance, the Yahoo! network and consumption on the Web at-large.

The move in context

So, like Forbes which recently announced its intentions and strategy to unload its Investopedia property and embark on a more real-time blogging/curating model, Yahoo Finance is moving towards its own real-time financial content aggregation model.  Whether you agree with Fobes’ decision or not (and Paul Carr most certainly doesn’t calling it the “death of a thousand hacks”), Yahoo Finance’s move is different.

Forbes and Forbes.com have always been about content.  Forbes has always employed professional editors in a mixed outside-inside model for content, blending its own staff reporters with content contributed from asset managers and thought-leaders in their field.  Never known for its ability to break stories, Forbes really was about highlighting interesting opinions from experts in their verticals.

But Yahoo is different than Forbes

Yahoo Finance is a different animal.  While Yahoo Finance hasn’t changed much in the past 10 years (much to my chagrin), this move changes its tack.  Remember, Yahoo Finance, as a giant financial portal, has always been about aggregation of both data and information, taking feeds from tens of information and content providers.  By the way, check out ValueCruncher’s CEO’s, Mark Clare, great breakdown of Yahoo Finance, its past, its business and potential to disrupt providers like Bloomberg in the future.

Yahoo Finance is still the 800-lb gorilla in online finance as evidenced by its majority of traffic in the online finance category (see graph to the right). What’s made Yahoo Finance so strong was an early-mover advantage and a site that just worked quickly and had enough information on it to act as a proxy for a research terminal (Why Google Finance still sucks at its news offering is beyond me).  With a deal it consummated with Seeking Alpha in 2007, Y! Finance dipped its big toe into the wild and woolly financial blogosphere.  Now, with the job posting mentioned above, it appears that Yahoo Finance is changing its strategy.

How this may play out

This is a risky strategy.  In essence, the financial portal is pitting itself opposite all its content partners — many of whom pay the portal for the firehose of traffic it throws off.   I’d be less willing to partner with a company that is introducing a product to compete directly with mine.  And this is a common problem with channel marketing for any platform — and Yahoo Finance is certainly a finance platform — in that the platform, given where it sits in the whole matrix of supply-demand, can always just mimic other offerings that are working.  This is the fear of developing any tools that work on Twitter of Facebook – that the social media platform can quickly just put you out of business.

Such is the life now for Yahoo Finance content partners.  If (and this is a big IF) the Yahoo Finance offering is a combination of serious, professional editorial oversight with smart curation with a good understanding of what’s important to Y! Finance readers (a-la Abnormal Returns) with thought-evoking and decision-supporting articles, Yahoo Finance can evolve itself from a financial resource to a must-see, must-read site for both individual and institutional investors.

What if it doesn’t work

If, however, Yahoo Finance doesn’t do this right and takes a half-assed, half-baked approach, the results could be pretty serious: both for the company/site and for content, in general.  As Steve Lubetkin argued with me yesterday in the comments on PRNewser’s article Is Steve Rubel the Future of Forbes, aggregation using free, contributed — outside content — risks turning everything into an “echo chamber” where the biggest voices (those voices appearing everywhere) drown out newer, more creative content by people who take content creation really seriously.  If Yahoo Finance’s own content offering isn’t managed well, it could cause other partners to leave the site, taking their money and their contribution to the estimated few hundred million dollars in annual revenue Yahoo Finance generated.

What this all  means for aggregation sites?  We’ll have to see how it plays out.   There’s most likely room for multiple aggregators if they end up focusing on slightly different readerships (a retirement investors reads different content than a day trader).