Tags
Argo Group, birthday, blog traffic, bloggers, Blogroll, Fifty Shades of Grey, German property, Google, Hitler video, Interactive Investor, Kim Kardashian, Livermore Investments, meme, Millenials, pdosullivan, Petroneft Resources, pretty panties, Richard Beddard, sincere thanks, Sirius Real Estate, TGISVP, The Great Irish Share Valuation Project, Trinity Biotech, UK Value Investor, US Oil & Gas, USOP, valueandopportunity
Wexboy reached the grand old age of one last Friday! I’m so excited I might just sick up over your shoulder! So – where were the birthday wishes? The birthday cards (c’mon, they need the biz)? The birthday gifts? Most of all, where was my bloody birthday stripper?!
Not a bad little milestone to reach. I’ve heard the average blog never makes it past the first post or two, let alone hurdle that major 3-4 month hump. Welcome to the Millenial generation, I guess. Investment (& finance) blogs appear to last a little longer, but it seems like a majority of them still go dark within a year. Blogging is definitely a pretty relentless pursuit:
It demands time, sometimes a lot of it… But most people have an actual life. Blogging will ultimately fall by the wayside, unless you figure out how to embed it into your life in a way that’s personally useful, interesting & (most of all) rewarding. Of course, most web blogs offer nothing of the sort! But that’s the beauty of investment blogs (and likely explains their longer lifespan) – they actually possess the potential to be genuinely rewarding for both writer & readers.
An investment blog also demands brain power, or at least brain engagement. If you want to do it seriously, it requires copious amounts of research, fact-checking, persuasion, debate, cognitive dissonance, and contemplation. A bit like investing itself, really! Most other blogs appear to require the opposite – but perhaps that’s just my jaundiced eye? 😉 I’d certainly be desperate to disengage my brain if I was writing about the likes of Kim Kardashian, and her bikini waxing habits…
And speaking of a cunning stunt – starting a value investing blog certainly wasn’t one. Philip O’Sullivan pointed that out to me pretty much on day one. [Philip, come back, we miss you! All you need is time & a superhero alter-ego ;-)] Writing about investing is only ever going to attract a tiny slice of the web’s readers. And insisting on writing about value investing is going to reduce you to an even smaller morsel of that slice! Hmm, there’s gotta be a funny Venn diagram there somewhere. Oops, I meant a funny meme. Or another Hitler video…
OK, let’s celebrate with some random & perhaps even interesting stats/links:
No. of Posts: 141
Average Post Size: 1,794 words
I’m sure there are stat plug-ins for this kinda thing! I just took some sample posts, pasted them into Word, and this was the average word count result. Christ on a bloody bicycle, that implies:
Total Post Size: 252,907 words
Holy fuck! To quote E.L. James. A quarter of a million words – unbelievable! I could have written the entire goddamn Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy instead & be earning a million bucks a week now… And written it a jolly sight better too, I firmly believe! OK, maybe with a little help from this throbbing wonder. 🙂
Shortest Post: Really…when? Did I fall asleep part-way through a post, and hit the Publish button with my forehead?
Longest Post: Lord, who knows – 3,000 words? 10,000? A squillion?! Thank heavens for series…
Total Comments: 567
Average Comments per Post: 4 (& double that in spam comments)
Doesn’t quite match the wit and intellect of the usual cut & thrust you’ll see on YouTube. But what a relief – more like a nice leisurely chat down the pub.
Most Commented: 35 (by far: The New Vegas: US Oil & Gas (USOP))
No prizes for guessing that post! I have a feeling The Notorious US Oil & Gas Company (TNUC, for short) will be popping up here again…
Dumbest Comment: Hmm, how about this one: ‘THIS USOP SHARES IS GOING TO BE £100 PER SHARE AFTER ELBANA 2 GOES COMMERCIAL [WITH ELBANA 1 ALREADY PRODUCING 10,000 BARRELS A DAY]. SAM’ (Yes: TNUC, of course!)
I reckon the Caps Lock knocks off about 10 IQ points. But miracles could happen – maybe the voices gave him some remarkably prescient insider info?!
Top Commenter: Richard Beddard
Good on ye, mate! Though I’m actually ignoring the real top commenter – yes, Wexboy – that’s a really bad case of intellectual self-abuse.
Most Amusing Search: ‘pretty panties‘ (Top 3, seriously!)
Most Pitiful Search: ‘what is exciting about Avon’s restructuring?’
Top Referrer: Search Engines
Here’s my personal Search Engine market share survey: Google 96.3%, Yahoo/Bing 3.3%, AOL 0.4%. But you knew that already..!
Message Board Referrers:
ADVFN 23%
LSE 17%
Yahoo 10%
Fool 6%
Top Blog Referrer: valueandopportunity (awed thanks, sir!)
Top Clicks: Wexboy files
I’m delighted to see readers actually digging into the info/data!
Top Blog Clicks:
Philip O’Sullivan’s Market Musings (now sadly defunct)
Top Views by Country:
| Country | Views |
|---|---|
 United Kingdom |
40% |
 Ireland |
20% |
 United States |
16% |
 Germany |
5% |
 Netherlands |
2.4% |
 Spain |
2.0% |
 Canada |
1.9% |
 France |
1.1% |
 Switzerland |
1.1% |
 Italy |
0.7% |
This Top 10 looks pretty similar to my last country post – the main change being a steady increase in US readers.
No. of Countries: 129, & growing!
Latest Country: Gambia
Traffic Trend:
From a base of 100: Overall, there’s been roughly a quadrupling of traffic in the past year. I’d actually presumed there was a general & steady increase in monthly traffic, but the chart tells a somewhat different story. Traffic actually started off better than I could have expected in Nov-11. This then led to a big jump in traffic in Feb & Mar-12 – presumably reflecting more widespread discovery of the blog, plus the surging popularity of The Great Irish Share Valuation Project series. We then see the usual summer lull, followed by a big bounce-back in September (also, again, a TNUC phenomenon!). Finally, Oct & Nov-12 have been seeing steady gains – we may even see a new peak in monthly traffic soon.
Most Popular Read Post: The New Vegas: US Oil & Gas (USOP)
‘Popular’ didn’t seem entirely the correct word for the whole TNUC incident!
Best ‘Short‘ Post: Oh, c’mon! It’s TNUC, again! Down 39%, & teetering
Most Popular Series: The Great Irish Share Valuation Project (by far)
Least Popular Series: US Economy, Government Finances & Debt
Now, was this because the series presented an unpalatable truth, or just ‘cos I’m crap at (writing about) macro-economics?!
Most Popular Stock: Argo Group Ltd. (ARGO:LN) (down 30%)
Least Popular Stock: Trinity Biotech (TRIB:US) (up 44%)
[More to come on Argo soon.] btw This is not an isolated pattern. There really does appear to be a fascinating inverse correlation between a stock’s post popularity & its subsequent price performance… Must keep an eye on that!
First Post: Sirius Real Estate (SRE:LN)
Last Post: German Residential Property V – A Buy!
OK, you gotta admit: It’s rather fascinating to see German property turned out to be my Alpha & Omega. Purely accidental, but persuasive, eh?!
Worst Stock Performance: Petroneft Resources (PTR:LN) (down 69%)
The fact Richland Resources (RLD:LN) is a close second should be pretty instructive for us all. Resource stocks – the ultimate crap-shoot!
Best Stock Performance: Livermore Investments Group (LIV:LN) (up 80%)
Of course, a blog is nothing without its readers: Most of all, I want to hear about your own experience(s) with the blog? Please share!
Stuff like: What do you particularly like (or dislike) about the blog? What stocks have you particularly liked/held in common? What’s been your favourite post in the past year? Is there a post, a stock, an idea that inspired a portfolio purchase of your own? What have you disagreed with most? Is there a piece of investing wisdom, however tiny, you’ve gleaned from the blog?!
Finally, a big thanks to each & every reader!
Wexboy 
Read your last post about some german real estate stock an thought “o man this shit is good”. Got yourself a new reader.
Completely agree with your point about writing your investment thesis on paper because,
1) you or your reader notices a) that you dont have one or b) its complete crap
2) you have the get the facts right which is the point when you notice a) if you have or b) have not made your homework
3) you have to actually think what you are doing. Writing complete sentences is completely different thing than taking notes (which i have been concentrating too much…)
ps. Great that you published the fact that bloggers can see how readers found their blogs. (Have been stalking ex’s blog with ‘personal’ search words secretly – at least to this point I thought so. Sometimes you just cannot win…)
Thank you, my man!
To this day, it amazes me: When I think abt a stock I like I seem to be incapable of focusing on negatives – I only see the positives! But when I write abt a stock, the negatives pop into my head straight away (the ever-present reader, I guess!).
Well done to making it to a year. I guess I am six months benhind you. The real oddity is that when one writes about any resources stock today – however dire it is – folks rush to read your copy. Wite about a company with cash paying a 6% yield growing at 10% pa and trading at TNAV and no-one gives a damn.
I fund the odd post on bikini lines a pleasant distraction but horses for courses.
Well done again
Tom Winnifrith
Thanks, Tom – I certainly think we enjoy the same fun with our posts. We must convert that into far too many drinks some day.
I really don’t get the whole junior resource stock obsession, don’t these losers know in just about every instance lottery tickets & scratch cards would be safer & cheaper..?!
Cheers,
Wexboy
Happy Birthday, Wexboy and thanks for your informative and entertaining missives. Might it be time to re-visit your most commented blog? —
http://www.investegate.co.uk/u.s-oil-and-gas-plc-(usop)/mkw/eblana-1-operational-update/20121115114512M7494/
…or http://goo.gl/LqZGG if that didn’t work.
They’ll be calling you Hexboy now…
Thks, mate! Hexboy – tht’s a gd one! Nt me, guvnor, I suspect some de-rampers must have fucked up the well, wrote the RNS & collapsed the share price. Wht other poss explanation cd there be? Maybe GXG shd launch an investigation! Oh, right…
USOP again? Euuchh… Nothing to add or subtract from my Sep USOP post, anyway. Frankly, the timing or content of any subsequent (good or bad) RNS was irrelevant – share price was bound to collapse regardless.
Very nice collection of stats. Not surprisingly about ‘The New Vegas: US Oil & Gas’ really. Of course, I am especially fond of your humorous writings on several companies. There is a real art to how to write a good post and you got the knack of it! My favorite post has to be your post about a child turning up at your front door with a hen. 🙂
A couple of (off-line) friends swear they actually hear my ‘voice’ in the blog!? That’s not to say I’m humorous, at all – meeting my friends tends to involve restaurants, bars & alcohol, which may be a touch more relevant 😉
I’m fascinated by the whole ‘Hins!’ ‘phenomenon’. I just checked, it’s pretty far down the rankings, but it really seems to grab some people. I prob have a few more of those in the memory banks, but not sure if there’s any kind of finance/investing ‘angle’ to them!
Thanks Wexboy for sharing your insights over last year and hopefully you can persist .. We all know that investing without adequate research is one of the quickest ways to the poorhouse but how much research and investigation is enough. Certainly your analyses set a standard in that regard .
DF
Thanks, David – well, I’m a persistent bugger!
Writing forces you to be more thorough in your analysis & research. So I thoroughly recommend every investor do their own personal stock write-ups, even if they’d never dream of blogging – I reckon you still get most of the benefit.
Super work, great help in pointing us amateurs in the right direction when deciding to invest hard earned funds!!!
No problem, Hugh, good to hear – at least you know I’m already on board the roller-coaster if an idea makes sense for you..!