David Jackson

New Instablogs Worth Watching

Miles, my pleasure - it was a great post. Boaz is our contributor relations director - I'll ask him to contact you.


On Nov 24 11:04 AM MILESCFA wrote:

> David, thanks for the mention. I guess you're going to force me to
> write a bit more. It would be nice to have more tools, especially
> a quant engine like Zacks, so I'll contact the necessary dept, but
> it would be nice if I knew someone who could expedite my becoming
> a contributor. I wonder, do I know anybody.. ?

A Guide to Oil and Gas ETFs and ETNs

Thank you! I've moved it to the Discontinued section.


On Nov 19 09:29 AM Czech wrote:

> FYI: DXO no longer exists.

A Complete Guide to Precious Metal ETFs

Since this article was written, a new gold ETF with some interesting differences vs. (GLD), (IAU), (UBG) and (DGL) was issued - (SGOL).

A Complete Guide to Precious Metal ETFs

CEF trades on US exchanges, even though it's a Canadian fund. It's a closed-end fund, not an ETF.


On Jun 01 05:13 PM ETF Grind wrote:

> I would put it in, but I don't think we're allowed to discuss non-us
> funds on SA.
>
> I tried to advocate the XFN too, but that didn't go though.

The Complete List of Commodity ETFs and ETNs

See also: Commodity ETFs and ETNs seekingalpha.com/artic...

A Case for Investing in Closed-end Funds

I've always viewed the use of leverage by CEFs as a negative, particularly in bond funds, as it's sometimes hard to tell which funds use leverage and which don't, and that means it's hard to understand the risks. But your point is correct and thought-provoking - the cost of leverage for a CEF is lower than the cost of leverage for an individual.

It would be interesting to hear your views on particular CEFs. Often, discounts to NAV persist for a long time. Do you see any CEFs trading at a deep discount now where there's a catalyst for the discount to narrow?

Remarkable Twitter Usage Stats

Tim, the only circumstances under which we delete the bios of contributing authors are:
- if they are illegal, pornographic etc.
- if the author behaves in a way that requires the deletion of their entire identity on SA (normally only professional spammers or people who are consistently abusive).

Contributing authors are able to update (and therefore delete) their own bios. But we rarely see authors delete their own bios. If no bio is in place, it's usually because we are waiting for the author to provide it. In that case, we insert the standard text that you quoted stating that "xxx is a new contributor to Seeking Alpha who will soon submit a bio." In this case, it looks as though the author might have deleted his/her bio, and our default text therefore appeared.

Note, however, that Seeking Alpha contributors can't delete their published articles from SA, or change the name under which those articles are published. This is one of the ways that SA provides accountability to readers, in contrast to the websites and blogs controlled by the authors themselves: readers can evaluate authors' track records, and authors aren't able to "cover their tracks" or delete articles retroactively.

It was that feature that enabled you to (correctly) point out that in this case the author isn't new.

We'll look into it.

Portfolio Thoughts

Nice to read something smart in (sort of) real English. :-)

BTW, if you tag this post with stocks TLT, GLD etc., it will come up in the instablog listings for those ETFs, and be seen by anyone who has a portfolio set up containing those ETFs.

Newspaper Circulation: Less Really Is Less

Great coverage as usual, Ken -- thank you. A quick thought: the circulation declines are accelerating perhaps because of the recession. Even if you liked reading a physical newspaper and didn't feel it was "a print-out of yesterday's news", it's harder to justify the cost in a recession when you know you can read the news online for free.

Five Charts to Rule Them All

This has one of the best titles for a stock market article ever!

Bond Wars Update: International and Junk

iShares Lehman 20+ Year Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) and SPDR Lehman Long Term Treasury ETF (TLO)


On Oct 11 01:55 PM cma wrote:

> Are there any ultra-long bond ETFs?

ETF Investing Guide: Understanding the Core Portfolio

Thank you Rob!

Why Comments Matter

This couldn't be more correct. On SA, for example, we find that the comments often add as much -- or sometimes more -- value than the articles themselves. The quality of the comments is a combination of two things: (1) the articles themselves tend to elicit high quality comments, and (2) our users help us to police comments by reporting abusive comments, and our editors actively moderate comments.

We're in the process of making our stats publicly available. Here's release 1.0 of our comment stats:
seekingalpha.com/listi...

Dr. John Hussman

Fascinating quote. Can you link to the source?

All the news that’s fit to trade

Interesting post, Zack.

A key issue is the correlation between companies engaging in PR and them having a good story to tell. If companies do PR when they have a good story, then it makes sense that their stock trades up, but impact on the stock price, bid-ask spread etc. can't necessarily be ascribed to the PR. So any study of the impact of PR needs to compare companies with improving fundamentals that did PR versus companies with improving fundamentals that didn't do PR.

Do you know if the studies cited by Dick Johnson did that?