On Twitter

Sooner or later, I feel I needed to share my thoughts about Twitter; since I have added some 1,000 or so followers in the past few days, this seems like a good time as any to speak up.

I have probably been using Twitter on and off for close to two years. From the start, I have had a love-hate relationship with the platform, for a variety of reasons. Initially it was largely a case of poor stability and reliability, then as Twitter made it into the mainstream, it seemed as if it was one too many communications channels – both inbound and outbound. As a result, I have a history of using Twitter in periodic bursts of activity, becoming disillusioned, swearing it off for awhile, then eventually poking my head back in to see if I should give it another test drive. If it sounds like a crazy process, I tried the same approach with classical music for several years and one day suddenly discovered I was in love. (Fortunately, I never took this approach to dating…)

In the last two months I have finally made my peace with Twitter. There is no longer any love or hate, but I think I have finally come to terms with how I would like to use this communications channel. The easy part is outbound communications, where I have decided to differentiate my Twitter posts from the blog by focusing on three areas, in descending order of importance (at least as I see it):

1. ‘Retweeting’ commentary and analysis (largely but not entirely investment-related) that I believe deserves a wider audience
2. Notifying readers of a new post up on VIX and More
3. Offering impromptu comments about intraday market activity

For those who are interested in following me on Twitter, you can find me at Twitter.com/VIXandMore

From my perspective, the more difficult side of Twitter has always been inbound communications, where I prefer not to drink for the proverbial fire hose in real time. I have found that I can keep up with only 2-3 dozen of my favorite Twitter sources – and only for those who tweet no more than a few times per day. So while I get only a small slice of the Twitter community, I get quality input in real time. For the other 300 or so of my regular sources of information, I can always grab their RSS feeds via Google Reader or Bloglines and read the material at my leisure.

I have tried a variety of applications which I thought might significantly improve my Twitter experience, including TweetDeck and others, but none of these has revolutionized my Twitter experience. For my purposes, the best Twitter application I have used so far is Twitterfall, which I first heard about in Traders Atwitter Over New Apps from Theresa Carey’s excellent Investor Brain blog. Part of the reason I have become a Twitterfall fan is that I can use it to set up filters for keywords such as VIX and VXX – so I can scan the entire Twitterverse in real time to see what is being said about these subjects.

Going forward, I hope to continue to use Twitter as an extension of the blog, to highlight some interesting links as I happen upon them and to offer some intraday market commentary that is probably more appropriate for a microblogging platform than for posting in this space.

Yes, I’m Frequenting More Blogs These Days

I’m sure nobody bothers to pay attention to this, but I periodically tweak the “Blogs I Frequent” section of VIX and More whenever a particular whim hits me. Since I’ve had that set of links up for almost a year, I thought I should clarify what it is and why certain blogs are there.

First, when I began blogging I had no idea what a feed was and I was under the mistaken impression that a blog would be the best way for me to keep track of links to all of my favorite blogs. That approach worked for awhile, until my news appetite expanded to the point where I needed to scroll down to access all my information source links and the ‘simplicity’ of the approach became too cumbersome for my liking. Fortunately, necessity birthed not just invention, but some technology test drives as well, and I settled on Bloglines as my favorite tool for managing feeds, as I detailed back in April.

I mention all of this because Bloglines is my primary news aggregation source 99.9% of the time, delivering 242 feeds on a relatively timely basis. Every once in awhile, Bloglines has technical difficulties and I resort to a backup system. Usually that backup takes the form of Google Reader, but there are some occasions where I prefer to fall back on the blog.

Now I trade primarily as a result of charts, technical analysis, market sentiment indicators and the like, but I don’t particularly enjoy looking at everyone else’s charts, which is why the list of the blogs I frequent has a disproportionately fundamental and macroeconomic focus and why the sequence (and invisible grouping) might appear chaotic. Ultimately, my blogroll is a somewhat arbitrary subset of my Bloglines feeds, with preference given to sites that I rarely if ever see on other blogrolls.

For all these reasons, I have recently added three important voices to my blogroll:

• Teresa Lo - InVivoAnalytics.com
  
  
• Eric Roseman - Roseman Eruptions
  
  
• Tom Drake - Putting the Pieces Together

Finally, thanks to all who have made VIX and More a part of their blogroll or personal reading list during the past year.

“Tops Aren’t Built on Fear”

One nice thing about Bloglines is that you can drink from the blogging firehose at whatever time and pace you desire. In my case, this means a week or so of posts from the 149 blogs (see the link above if you are wondering how this is possible) for which I subscribe to their feed. Sure, my head is spinning and my brain probably looks like a python that swallowed a hippo, but it has been a great way for me to get back up to speed in a hurry.

Among the many posts I came across today was one from a blog I have yet to feature in my links: Stock Trading Update. In a post from earlier today, the London-based Securities Research Services team evaluates the current state of the market as follows:

“We have been reading whispers of a major market top forming, but the long term charts just do not support this at this time. Likewise, overly bearish sentiment does not support this either (remember, market tops are not built out of fear, but on enthusiasm). Most likely, based on the charts, we are looking at another few weeks to flat, to slightly negative trading, followed by a resumption of the major trend.”

Frankly, I couldn’t have said it better myself and if you study the chart below you can see that since the advent of the VIX, tops in the SPX have not coincided with spikes in the so-called fear index.

First Annual VIX and More Blog Disclaimer Awards

After the events of yesterday, I decided to add a disclaimer to the blog. I consider it some sort of small victory that I was relatively comfortable being disclaimer free for three months, but after a brief meeting with legal (my wife), I decided to state formally what should be acutely obvious to everyone who reads anything on these pages.

So I got to wondering how other bloggers have tackled this issue. It turns out that most have a disclaimer whose content seems to be a function of the legal status of the entity they write for, professional licenses held, number of months as a blogger, etc. No real surprises here. Some appear to take a fine toothed legal comb approach to the disclaimer while others appear to try to cover the bases with a broad brush stroke.

After looking at all 32 bloggers on my “Blogs I Read” list and another 100 or so whose feeds I subscribe to (if you have not yet tried Bloglines, you are really doing yourself a disservice), I am hereby announcing the winners in the First Annual VIX and More Blog Disclaimer Awards:

First Place – David Merkel at The Aleph Blog (scroll to the bottom for the disclaimer, but make sure you eventually review the even better content above it) covers all the bases succinctly, with some appropriately self-effacing prose

Second Place – Bill Rempel a.k.a. NO Doodahs!, for striking the right balance between the necessary cautions and a candid yet humorous non-legalese tone

Third Place – Ron Sen at Technically Speaking, Market Analysis and Theory, for his pithy and pointed “Educational use only. Never intended as advice.” tagline he appends to each post. Make sure to catch Ron’s consistently excellent charts and analysis, including fairly frequent commentary on the VIX.

Honorable Mention – uglychart.com – for someone who excels at presenting the lighter side of investing, uglychart is all over the legal disclaimer like a first year associate. Other sites may edge him out in the word count department, but uglychart still prevails on style points. (I have no idea why uglychart is suddenly ending up on all my lists. I’ve never even had any contact with the guy…)

Winners are entitled to download the JPG of the black hole in the Circinus Galaxy above and are encouraged to do whatever they can to capitalize on any notoriety and/or commercial opportunities this award may make available to them.

Bloglines and the Information Waterworks

Not too long ago, a fellow blogger wondered about how I was generating so much content. Obviously, he doesn’t get around to as many blogs as I do or he would have pointed a finger elsewhere...but maybe that’s the point.

He had a couple of theories that I am somewhat reluctantly republishing here:

• you are a white-collar criminal serving time for securities fraud, writing from prison
• you are a real-life Rain Man savant, writing from a mental hospital, "defi-defini-defi-defi-No Deal Howie..."
• you are a secret Wikipedia project: you're not a single person, but a collective of anonymous contributors writer under a common pseudonym
• you're a speed-freak plagiarist, frantically copying and pasting from sources I've just haven't got around to reading
• you're a Vatican finance old-timer with a terminal illness, cramming for sainthood

Before I talk a little about my process, let me officially respond to his list of possible explanations.

I am not (yet) in prison for securities fraud, never was a fan of Wapner, do not believe in the wikiBorg, and have long since parted ways with the Vatican. On the other hand, I have always believed that KMart sucks, have an unusual talent for doing complex math gymnastics in my head, and confess to a minor linking fetish. I am also somewhat binary, believing that it is better to do something 100% or not do it at all. Putting in 50% effort is usually a waste of my time. It helps that this subject (VIX and sentiment) is new to me and brings a freshness and passion that I would not get rehashing some of my well-trodden investment paths. I do like to write -- and I haven't done much more than PowerPoint bullet points for the past decade or so.

Back to the process…

Ironically, one of the reasons for my starting a blog was to have a convenient place to find all my favorite links. del.icio.us, while an interesting tool, just never captivated me. The “Blogs I Read” section of my blog has gone through several iterations. Originally it was a list of sites that I found had information that was most valuable to my trading. As time wore on, it evolved to include mainly blogs that update their content at least once per day and gave me some good insight into specific areas of interest (e.g., options, energy, market sentiment, etc.) I capped my list of favorites at 32 only because that is the number that fits neatly on to the screen of my primary monitor. The problem was that some of the most treasured content was being updated on an irregular basis and I was having an internal debate about how to allocate those 32 slots to content that was refreshed regularly and therefore sometimes had a shorter mental gestation period versus some of the gems that seemed to sprout occasionally from those who post only once or twice a week. Well, I was damned if I was going to have my full blogroll require any scrolling and yet the dilemma of regular content and irregular gems (along with the many 'dry holes' when I click on the links) was making me reconsider the entire venture.

Long-time bloggers and RSS/Atom aficionados are probably scratching their heads wondering why I didn’t just subscribe to feeds to solve my problem. Well, while I may have been an alpha geek in 1989, I haven’t been nearly as techno-savvy over the past few years, so I dragged my feet.

The solution turned out to be Bloglines. I must say that Bloglines has enhanced my enjoyment of the web more than any other application than I can recall using this decade. For those who are still unfamiliar with subscribing to feeds or for those who already have feeds and are looking to optimize your experience, the two obvious options are Bloglines and Google Reader. For what it is worth, I went from constantly clicking on 32 web sites that were usually not updated to getting all new content on one page, with all photos, charts, etc. Now I spend less than half the time I used to in this process, capture the feeds of over 100 web sites, and never have to worry about missing out on the gems. I urge you to try both products and decide which one works better for you.

Some links to get you started:

• CNET review of Bloglines
• Detailed comparison of both products, from someone who just switched from Bloglines to Google Reader
• Someone who thinks the two products are just about even
• The Google folks say Google Reader is slowly gaining on Bloglines
• …and a Bloglines forum with some thoughts on why to stick with Bloglines – or not