Where Is VIX and More Headed?
I failed to mention it when it first came out a month ago, but anyone who missed The Periodic Table of Finance Bloggers by Josh Brown at The Reformed Broker not only missed out on a great resource for identifying and classifying some of the top bloggers in the investment world, but also missed out on two elements that are often in short supply in the investment blogger space: subtlety and humor.
I got to thinking about the periodic table when I happened on Horizontal vs. Vertical Blogging from Michael Stokes at MarketSci.
When VIX and More started out, three years ago next month, financial blogging was still in its early stages and the options space in particular was wide open. In fact, Adam Warner at Daily Options Report pretty much had the entire options blogosphere to himself at the time. When I arrived on the scene, I envisioned taking ten minutes or so once a week to recap what had happened with the VIX and volatility during the week so I would be able to have some sort of archival historical overlay of my (almost) real-time thoughts on volatility. At least that was the idea…
Within a couple of days, the idea of a weekly post morphed into a daily post and not wanting to beat the VIX drum day after day, I started branching out into some tangential subject areas. I took up put to call ratios in short order, then expanded into the broader subject of market sentiment, decided to dive into the options space, adopted ETFs and particularly leveraged ETFs, and recently have ventured into behavioral finance, drafted a trader development stage model and have set out on a number of more distant tangents.
Part of the reason for the increase in breadth is to keep the content fresh and to be able to draw connections that are farther afield (e.g., VIX Data to Support Availability Bias and Disaster Imprinting Hypothesis.) Another reason is that I like the variety and never wish to be a slave to routine. Frankly, a third reason for my increasingly horizontal approach is that another wave of options bloggers has taken up the cause in the last year or so. As a result, I no longer feel that if I fail to comment on a particular zig or zag in the VIX or on another subject in my wheelhouse, that it won’t get said.
Before the month is over, I will be delighted to welcome my 1,000,000th unique visitor. So while the content on this blog has unfolded in a somewhat haphazard fashion, I am glad to see that it is resonating with a broad audience.
Going forward, I envision a broader net than might have been implied by the original tongue-in-cheek tagline: “Your One Stop VIX-Centric View of the Universe…” It’s still (mostly) the same universe, but I think it’s time to explore more of the “and More” portion of this blog. Maybe it's time to visit the lighter side more often too...
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