Recent Blog Links of Note

On a typical trading day, I read or skim posts from about 300 different blogs using the feeds from Google Reader. After being out of the loop for two weeks, I spent a good portion of today getting caught up on what I missed.

Some of the links that gave me a good deal to ponder with respect to the VIX, volatility, options, market sentiment, and ETFs include:

• Do Black Swans Negate Options Premiums? (Surly Trader)
• 2x Inverse ETF Volume Update (Pete, StockMarketAlchemy)
• TradeMonster’s Friendly Options Play (Theresa Carey, Investor Brain)
• A Look at Declining Volume on Five Prior Market Tops (Corey Rosenblum, Afraid to Trade)
• Monday VIXology (Bob Barnes, bzbtrader)
• All VXXed Up (Adam Warner, Daily Options Report)
• Thoughts on Hedging, Volatility (Bernie Schaeffer, Schaeffer’s Investment Research)
• The Distress Index and Stock Returns (CXO Advisory Group)
• Why Is the Boston Marathon More Volatile than the NYC Marathon? (Paul Kedrosky, Infectious Greed)
• Wasting a Good Life Trading (Michael Stokes, MarketSci)

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.

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