Online Stock Trading

I’d like to think that somewhere in Mountain View, California, somewhere near Google, some weary eyed and exhausted computer technician is just finally putting his tools away after having been called in for a special emergency: multiple hard drive failures in one of their Blogger servers. Of course this is a bit exaggerated, but my mere imaginings are the small price I’d like to pay myself after the (relatively) spectacular traffic gush spanning Thursday night and Friday morning. It wasn’t a thumping quite like I’ve heard Digg can be, but it was about a 1,000 new visitors on a blog that up until then had just over 6,000 ever. Here’s an updated graphical look at the magnitude of traffic versus the days prior to the StumbleUpon foray:

Of course those magnanimous results are over with, but hopefully I befriended some new readers.

For those new readers, I’d like to identify a recap of some of my aspirations for this blog, to introduce new readers to what I consider to be some of its many merits:

The question is often asked in the world whether smart people are more successful than more mainstream people. Studies often prove that they are not necessarily “better off” in wealth, happiness, etc. While this is good news for the most mainstream people, it can be a source of soreness for all the smarties. If they don’t fit in perfectly well with the larger crowd, where can they go cozy up? Here, for one.

Why here? I hope because here I often try to take a different approach to old problems. I try to do that by looking at the picture in front of me through various lenses. In other words, I take a much longer time thinking about the things I choose to write about than you’ll likely find in many other resources, like television for instance.

That doesn’t mean that what you might find on television is incorrect. For example, pretend you were playing chess and there were 2 reasonable moves you could make. With no thought involved whatsoever you have a pretty good chance of picking the best one. But, if you really exercised your intellect you could more frequently pick that right one. The stock market is similar to this. You could, with no effort whatsoever, pick winning stocks or make wise investments, but to make those selections consistently you’d have to have some serious skill.

Another merit of this blog is also quite possibly its greatest detractor—its utter transparency and honesty. Find me another blog where a stock investor openly flaunts all successes and all failures. I’ve found several but sometimes you really have to go digging. By prominently displaying my performance (every single day) I hope to offer two things: 1) a place where you can come back to see how you’re doing in comparison to me and 2) to show, eventually, that even given serious downturns in the market, many of my strategies will significantly outperform the market overall. Of course, these last few months have been somewhat painful, but I’m committed to a long-term focus. Just wait, that damned chart will go back up .