Trefis.com is a great site to model up technology companies. There are some great tools — some analytical, some social, that allow investors to play around with growth/profitability assumptions to forecast a stock price.
Best investment newsletter resources
Throughout the writing of my book, Tradestreaming, I’ve been asked time and time again if there are any good resources (lists, really) of the top investment newsletters. Unfortunately, there aren’t any all-encompassing sites that investors can tap. This post is a start. Please comment or contact me if you have anything to add, as well.
Top investment newsletter resources
There a couple of firms that market multiple newsletters. Sometimes, these are just publishing firms that produce different products. Others, like Forbes, market 3rd part newsletters.
Diversified investment newsletter businesses
InvestorPlace: Philips Newsletters, a giant in the financial newsletter place, uses InvestorPlace as its flagship site to market its newsletters.
StockTwits: More blogs/trading systems than traditional investment newsletters, StockTwits’ store sells subscriptions to the blogs of many of StockTwits’ top investors and analysts.
Cabot: In the business for 40 years, Cabot publishes a variety of newsletters.
MoneyWeek: The UK’s best selling finance magazine also offers a variety of subscription investment letters.
Stansberry Research: Another 800lb gorilla in the financial newsletter space, Stansberry publishes almost 20 different subscription newsletters
Motley Fool: Of course, we couldn’t leave out The Fool — they’re got a stable of about 10 newsletters.
3rd part newsletter distributors
Forbes Newsletters: In addition to the Forbes.com site, the old business mag distributes both their own premium newsletters as well as leading newsletters like Al Frank’s Prudent Speculator and the Obeweis Report.
Financial newsletter directories
MarketWatch Newsletter Directory: Dow Jones’ MarketWatch has a database of many of the industry’s top financial newsletters.
Newsletter Access: This site claims a directory of over 9000 investment letters
Seeking Alpha’s Newsletter Authors: The financial content aggregator has a listing of all its authors categorized as newsletter authors
Investment Newsletter Benchmarking
Hulbert Financial Digest: Mark Hulbert has been following the performance of top newsletters for heaven-knows how many years. He publishes a newsletter himself of his findings on which newsletters exhibit top performance — and which don’t.
Investimonials: Users submit their own rankings on many of the industry’s leading investment newsletters.
Crowdsourced Trading Strategies
Zignals: Not sure why more people don’t know about this Irish firm but they allow users to publish trading strategies and investors to subscribe to them.
Academic Research
The Equity Performance of Investment Newsletters
Herding Among Investment Newsletters: Theory and Evidence
The Performance of Investment Newsletters
How to Start an Investment Newsletter
NewsletterGrowth: This is a shameless plug for a site that I’m incubating that really helpful for investment newsletter writers/publishers and people thinking about getting into the business to maximize their writing, marketing, and monetization of their investment newsletters. Check it out — there’s also a 20+ page ebook about how to start an investment newsletter.
What to do next
I’ve got a lot more interesting stuff to share: weekly tips, updates, special offers, etc. Make sure you sign up for my free mailing list here.
Chart.ly’s new beta screencasting tool enables analysts to up their games
…and Tradestreaming the book is a go, Houston
I’m proud to announce the official sales launch of my book, Tradestream your Way to Profits: How to Build a Killer Portfolio in the Age of Social Media.
It’s been a *long haul* and I received a lot of great 
help/support from many of the investment industry’s top thinkers. Thanks to everyone who’s listened to my ideas, helped me vet them, contributed their own perspectives and helped propel this work forward (you know who you are :-))
I think this is just the beginning of an exploration of the new modes of investment research empowered by the Internet in general and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in particular. There is a ton of great stuff going on at startups in Silicon Valley, New York, Europe and Israel.
I plan to continue to analyze tradestreaming strategies and the new technology platforms enabling this all to happen.
Bonus Material
To accompany the launch of the book, I’ve compiled an ebook entitled 
“Tradestreaming and the Future of Investing”. It’s a compendium of opinions from many of the online investing industry’s thought leaders from a variety of different disciplines. It’s a really interesting view about where we are and where we’re headed in financial communications, research, and investing.
Hedge fund analysts, financial advisors and brokers, investment advisors, investment relations professionals, Internet entrepreneurs, and all investors will find something useful and thought-provoking.
You can download it here (.pdf).
What to do next
I’ve got a lot more interesting stuff to share: weekly tips, updates, special offers, etc. Make sure you sign up for my free mailing list here.
Financial product development a la AlphaClone
Interesting case study(.pdf) from Venture Capital and Private Equity Club (UCLA chapter) on the launch of piggyback investing platform, AlphaClone.
Combining an interview with founder and CEO, Maz Jadallah, the paper includes his comments that should provide a resounding recommendation for using blogging as a lead generation tool for premium financial products:
Jadallah: Hiring a PR firm turned out to be a disaster for us. They simply did not perform well. The important point here is what does a startup do when they have zero/limited budget for marketing. Answer: blog, blog, blog, use word of mouth, run affiliate programs, cold call reporters, try to get content syndicated on third party sites!!
Source
AlphaClone, LLC: Launching an Investment Services Business in the
Midst of a Financial Crisis (Undergraduate Journal)
Yahoo Finance getting in on the real-time game
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).
NFL to Wall Street: QB is conservative (likes bonds)
Matt Cassel, Kansas City Chief’s QB, has a massive 6 year, $63M contract. He’s looking towards a second career on Wall Street when he hangs up his cleats.
What is Tradestreaming: Crowdsource your Portfolio
The wisdom of the crowds has been used to better predict world events, elections, and the outcomes of sporting events. It’s now being used for more accurate forecasting of stock prices. Instead of following experts, crowdsourcing investment ideas seeks to assess what the masses think about a specific stock. The crowd is frequently more accurate in its predictions than top analysts?.
Enter Social Media
But with the onslaught of investors publishing their thoughts on stocks and the market on Facebook and Twitter, it’s hard for investors to monitor all the noise. Determining what the crowd thinks about a specific investment is tricky. Therefore, we’ll also explore different ways that investors can effectively plumb the wisdom of the crowds to build a portfolio populated with stocks the crowd thinks are going up.
What if there was a way to leverage the collective knowledge of all investors out there and use it to make a profit? What if you could build a portfolio that took investment ideas from the throngs of day traders and couch-potato investors, firemen and police officers, lawyers and doctors—a population of millions of investors? Figure out where the herd mentality thinks profits are and damn the experts.
Tradestreaming is that way.
<– Previous: Following the Insiders I Next: Screening 2.0 –>
Top Warren Buffett resources
Warren Buffett is an investing legend to almost 3 generations now. Here’s the best way to learn from and about Warren Buffett.
About Warren Buffett
Wikipedia: Warren Buffett: everything you wanted to know about Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (book): written by Alice Schroeder, former director at Morgan Stanley, hand-picked Buffett biographer
Buffett on Forbes’ Richest People list
About Buffett’s investment strategies
Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder letters: Go to the source for inside understanding of how Buffett looks at his own business and investing in others
MarketFolly: Buffett’s portfolio: Monitor the ins-and-outs of holdings in Buffett’s investment portfolio
Buffettology: the previously unexplained techniques that have made Warren Buffett the world’s most famous investor
Buffett Beyond Value: Why Warren Buffett Looks to Growth and Management When Investing
Warren Buffett Resources
GuruFocus’ tracking of Buffett’s investment holdings
Validea’s Buffett Portfolio: Screening for Buffett-like stocks and performance
Videos
Buffett takes heat on ownership of credit rating agencies.
Warren Buffett speaks to a class of MBA students.
Looking at Magic Formula returns, Morningstar gets all apologetic over industry performance
Screening 2.0 and beyond
Readers of this site have learned a bit about Screening 2.0 — the ability to use Internet tools (many of them, free) to recreate portfolios that conform to the investment criteria of history’s best investors.
Validea’s John Reese has done much of the research legwork on the subject and has produced a premium product to help investors create Peter Lynch, Ken Fisher, and Ben Graham portfolios (among others).
The magic of Greenblatt’s Magic Formula
One source I mention frequently is Joel Greenblatt’s Magic Formula. Greenblatt wrote about his investing magic in The Little Book that Beats the Market. He also provides investors with a free website to screen for the top ranking stocks that fit his criteria at magicformulainvesting.com.
Morningstar takes a look at Magic Formula returns in a recent piece. Here’s what they come up with:
We see that the formula posted approximately a 19.9% annualized return from the beginning of 1988 through Sept. 30, 2009. Over that time, the S&P 500 Index returned 9.4% annualized.
Not too shabby.
But as a frequent shill for the mutual fund industry, Morningstar feels the need to compare this market-trumping return to top performing mutual funds. And that’s when things take an interesting turn: The article’s author, John Coumarianos, sounds surprisingly introspective in his (near) critique of active fund management.
The market isn’t efficient, as the indexers say, but its inefficiencies are apparently not easily exploitable for some of the finest pros either–at least given how many of them currently go about investing, trying earnestly to predict future profits and discounting them back to the present. Perhaps managers outthink themselves or have too much confidence in their predictive abilities instead of relying on past results.
Why funds may perform so badly as a class
The author also cites the mutual fund structure, size, and the legacy nature of a fund portfolio — making it so easy for investors to buy and sell an already outdated model — as an impediment. Does this mean that portfolio mirroring a la kaChing and Covestor (where investors sync their brokerage accounts up to a professional investor’s portfolio model) has another leg up on the industry? The separately managed account model (SMA) which institutionalizes this mirroring process does have its benefits, including better tax efficiency (all stocks are held in investor’s name and cost basis is individualized) and transparency (stocks in the portfolio are held in brokerage account).