Mick Weinstein

Leveraged ETFs: A Seeking Alpha Expert Panel

Hi Jim - when we start at the top of the hour, you'll see a place above to leave a comment for the discussion. Those are moderated though, so it won't appear right away.

Salary Caps and Driving Innovation: What the U.S. Can Learn from the NFL and NBA

This addresses another problem entirely from the executive salary-cap at bailout recipients issue, so I don't see why the direct comparison. There's no reason to turn away from the former to consider the latter.

Also, the markets for NBA draft picks and smart graduates are entirely different (former defined by extreme scarcity), and the NBA salary cap - the team-based cap as well - has a entirely different aim than what you're proposing.

Do you honestly want to end the open bidding market for young smart people out of school? If we have a problem now of Wall St taking all the best young minds, why should we make those young people pay the price by limiting their options?

Gold: Is Now the Time to Buy?

Jeff, apologies for the earlier headline applied to this article ('Why It's Not the Time To Buy Gold') - we've switched it back to your original. We try to apply the most accurate headline we can, but at times the change we make fails to capture the author's intent. Please feel free to contact me or your editor whenever you aren't happy with how we've handled your articles, and we'll deal with it right away.

To address a few other things that came up here: (1) I can assure everyone that the Seeking Alpha editorial team has absolutely no bias or agenda with regard to the direction of gold or any security, (2) in deciding whether to publish a submission or not, we do not discriminate in any way against more popular authors, and (3) Editors' Picks are chosen by the individual editor who publishes the piece, based on the following 3 criteria: rigor of research, uniqueness and quality of the argument, and shelf-life of the article (since EPs stay linked from our sidebars for awhile, we prefer to give them to articles that are not very time sensitive).

~ Mick Weinstein, Editor in Chief of Seeking Alpha

On Oct 14 11:09 AM Jeff Nielson wrote:

> Hi Zell.
>
> No, they don't edit my text (or that of other contributors) - there
> is simply too much volume for them to do that.
>
> However, whenever my popularity on the site starts growing too quickly,
> all of a sudden they refuse to publish most of my submissions.<br/>
>
> Then, once I 'cool down' in their stats my stuff starts appearing
> regularly again - although I no longer EVER get an "editor's pick".
>

ETFConnect Is No More

Very entertaining scene, Roger, but I imagine it was closer to this:

Nuveen Exec: 'We're in the CEF business, and some CEFs compete with ETFs - so why does our website provide data, including comparison data, on ETFs?'

ETFConnect Editor: 'Because we provide a popular service that places Nuveen and our products in front of our precise target market on a daily basis, and we get incoming links that make us an important part of the online discussion on exchange-traded products.'

NE: 'But some of these ETFs look a lot better than our CEFs. And I'm not interested in the online discussion - I'm interested in new CEF investors.'

ETFC E: 'If our CEF products are compelling, our position in the online discussion will draw many new investors to them.'

NE: 'Ahem... let's kill this.'

Lessons from a Market 'En Fuego'

Roger, your description of your investment process at this strange moment in the market, with lessons for all investors, is very much appreciated as always.

FINRA Fires Next Shot in War Against Leveraged ETFs

Is there any evidence that this will solve any significant systemic problem?

Why Yahoo Finance is giving Google Finance a noogie

I think the main factor is 'status quo bias' (a force James Surowiecki refers to in his excellent recent piece on healthcare reform: www.newyorker.com/talk...). Many of us set up our portfolios on YF in the mid- to late-90s, when it was far and away the best site to do so, and it takes an awful lot to move your central news and data portal for your portfolio away from there, after that. It has incredible sticking power, like the bank where you do your checking. They need to really drop the ball badly, or face a categorically better competitor, to lose their top spot.

Malware seen *only* when I've clicked through a link to an SA article

Thanks, we are aware of the malware issue and are documenting our effort to remove it on the instablog of our CTO, Koby Menachemi:
seekingalpha.com/insta...

News Links: The John Henry Fight of Man vs. Algorithm

Fascinating data point on Bit.ly and its product idea - and absolutely agree that the hybrid approach to algorithm/human is the sweet spot.

What If: The New New York Times

Agree, and this is just a slightly more radical form of where they'll end up anyway, even if those top journalists stay put.

How (and Why) to Replace the A.P.

I find your idea of pooling ad sales resources among publishers toward landing the best price for the linked-to article's ad to be very interesting, but that would require a much more formal association among publishers' sales teams, which currently see each other as competitors. And would it handcuff editors - eg. if the editor wants to link to a source with which her sales team doesn't have such an arrangement, what would she do? But intriguing, indeed.

Investing or Marketing? The Real Reason Lightspeed Invested in Ning at a Crazy Valuation

I wonder how much of this goes on in general in VC investing - hard to imagine the best funds engage heavily in this, but as Fred Wilson has stressed, one of the current problems in the field is too many players who shouldn't be there, competing for resources.

Dr. John Hussman

It was from Hussman's June 8 letter:
www.hussmanfunds.com/w...

Who Uses Online Discount Brokerages in Canada?

I wonder what the numbers are like for US clients of online brokerages... any reason they'd be significantly different?

SA Editor's Corner: Claims of corporate fraud on Seeking Alpha

Separately, Freya, the Editors' Pick tag does not mean that every factual claim within the article has been researched by our editorial team. It simply means that the editor who posted it thinks it is an exceptional post. While we try to check any facts that look suspect to us at the time of submission, we rely much more on our readers to dispute facts in articles, via our article dispute process:
seekingalpha.com/artic...