Blog Recommendations

I ran across a really great blog called Accrued Interest, and it had a well-written primer on CDOs. The blog only deals with bonds but this provides an interesting perspective that is quite different from equity investors. The author in the blog is quite knowledgeable and I suggest everyone bookmark the blog and check out some of the past articles. It's a treasure trove of valuable information.

Another blog I should mention is Calculated Risk. This one deals the housing situation and generally has thoughtful posts on the subject. I find most of articles, along with the user comments, to be super-bearish but that can be a good thing to a contrarian like me :) Housing-related stocks are some of the key ones I'm tracking right now so I generally check out that blog regularly. SeekingAlpha also has a good run down of housing articles in their periodic "Housing Bubble and Real Estate Market Tracker" posts.

I don't think I mentioned this before but Controlled Greed is one that I hit daily. My purchase of Takefuji (TSE: 8564) was influenced by that blog (so if it turns out badly and I lose everything, I need to hire a hitman to send after the author of that site ;) ). The author of Controlled Greed is sort of like me in that he is quite eclectic and covers all sorts of things, all over the world. But I don't quite have a track record like him--in fact, the poor year I'm having pretty much establishes that I'm nowhere near a talented investor like him :| I would say the investing style practiced at Controlled Greed probably resembles a cross between value investing and sector/trend investing (I'm not really sure though since it is hard to pigeonhole* into a box, and I've only followed that blog for about an year). One thing about Controlled Greed is that you just never know what the post for a particular day is going to be. Many other blogs become repetitious if you keep visiting them but I can't say the same for Controlled Greed.


(* Investing styles are far more complex than they seem. There are many seemingly diverging styles within a broad category. For instance, when I started investing I thought Warren Buffett was a pure value investor (with a touch of growth investing). I also thought that Buffett was similar to Benjamin Graham. Right now, I realize that he isn't a pure value investor and he is nowhere near Graham. Benjamin Graham was more quantitative and methodological whereas Buffett isn't. As an example, Graham would run screens and build a large diversified portfolio; Buffett never did that as far as I can tell. But that's not the real big thing I realized; the big thing is that Buffett is nothing like the rest of the value investors out there. As Charlie Munger has alluded to, what Warren Buffett practices is really focus investing (I'll be reading a book on that soon). One can argue that focus investing is just value investing but the differences can be stark when you compare the popular form of value investing versus focus investing. Buffett and Munger hold a concentrated non-diversified portfolio whereas most value investors have a hard time doing that. For what it's worth, I'm trying to follow focus investing (this is very risky if you don't know what the hell you are doing--like me :( ))

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 4, 2007 at 12:43 AM

    Thanks for the praise about my blog. But don't worry about hiring a hit man if Takefuji doesn't work out. I just might do the job myself ;-)

    ReplyDelete

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