Starting a blog with a few friends from school and want input
Me and a couple college buddies are constantly emailing each other articles from all over the internet about market topics and writing multi-page opinions on them, so we decided that we should just start a blog to make it easier to keep track of our findings. Reaelistically a big part of doing this is to just gain experience analyzing the markets and organizing my thoughts on my findings. Also I would assume it would look great on a trading resume if we had a pretty legit blog.
Short background: I am a rising senior at a non-target university with a solid GPA and internship experiences in accounting at a medium-sized private firm and wealth management at a smaller private firm. A friend I am starting the blog with has an investment banking internship in Beijing at a boutique bank and another friend has an internship with one of the top financial data processing firms. We also have a friend with a marketing internship who is going to be our web designer/blog manager.
Obviously with our level of experience as undergraduate students we are not expecting to make a blog that institutional investors go to for trading insights, we are merely making it to help develop our financial know-how. We figure it will be directed mainly towards college students who want some fresh outlooks on where they might want to put their money, or just college students trying to learn more about the markets. This seemed most logical because we ARE college students so it would be easier to connect with our readers.
Has anybody out there made a similar blog that might have some tips on what worked formatting/content-wise in terms of getting repeat site visitors?
Also, any college students out there who have any input as to what YOU might like to read about in a blog? Right now we're trying to decide if we should pick an equities sector, pick a few select emerging markets to cover, broadly cover the market and simply have the topics relate more to college students, etc. We're quite up in the air right now but really want to have it fully up-and-running before school starts in September.
Thank you whoever has any thoughts on this matter. Hopefully somebody can help throw me in the right direction and the blog will be up and running in no time!
seekingalpha.com?
Yes I'm aware of seekingalpha.com. That and PEHub.com seemed to be the best models out there but those sights are much more general than what I am looking to develop. I was hoping somebody might have some input as to a specific topic (i.e. the high-end and wholesale retail sectors) that they might want to read about and has low coverage. By this I mean if you Google financial blogs or something to that nature, a huge percentage of them are really shittily-made personal finance blogs about interest rates for savings accounts and other BS. Other than that there is stuff like theStreet and the two mentioned above that are really broad because they have so many contributors.
I'd go for it.
It would offer something more personalized than seekingalpha.com towards college students and young ppl who just want to make a buck or two
That's the angle I was going for. College students are generally way more risk tolerant (esp. if it's like my school and it's all daddy's money that was given to them to play around with) and would be interested in the same types of articles/ideas we would be writing about. I'm glad you got what I meant/agreed with the need for something like this. Hopefully it will be up soon after we do a few weeks of offline reporting to see what direction it is headed before it's public. I'll post a link to it here then..
I'm not a fan of seekingalpha really. A lot of contributors on that site are poorly informed and will mislead an investor.
I'm not a college student but I just wanted to say what I would have liked to see back then (as a reader not a blogger)... If you're going to straight up talk investment ideas, break down the blog by region and then go even further with a breakdown by the type of market/instrument, investment objective, risk apetite, $ range of investment, etc. If I have a long-term investing horizon with low to moderate risk, I don't really want to sift through a bunch of quick plays on growth stocks...Just make it organized and make it easy for people to find what suits them? Maybe even go as far as have each person register and set up their own "investment profile". Then use that information to match them up for suggested posts/picks. Make it user friendly basically and clean.
I would also make sure that you have all your legal sh*t in order too with disclaimers and so on. You don't want people coming to you saying "dude I lost the $100 grandma gave me for ramen by blindly following your advice, give it back".
Good luck with it.
Hahaha I like your example of the typical jackass that would blindly follow investment advice from the internet, but trust me I have thought of that and there will be plenty of footnote disclaimers. Not trying to get sued, just trying to beef up the resume and broaden my horizons...
I really liked your idea about separating it into 'buckets,' lets call them, for different levels of risk and different investment objectives. That seems like the most effective way of separation in terms of keeping it simple enough to find what you need while still having enough detail about one specific topic. I really appreciate your advice, and from the sounds of what you have to say about seekingalpha.com and hearsay from classmates/friends I've spoken to about my idea it seems as though there is some solid demand out there for what I am trying to offer.
It just kills me to see all these intelligent kids around me at school that are such bafoons with their money. When you're talking investments and growing wealth, ignorance is not bliss; ignorance in this case usually means failure.
You'd probably do better to create a blog that aggregates information, as opposed to generating new information. When I was in college, I ignored the student "investment ideas" and read the journal. It's a good idea, but if you're putting disclaimers into everything, why should I bother reading it? Find a way to channel good info and you'd do better.
Just my opinion.
how many college students would put money into investment ideas? My college spending was a lot more geared on food/rent/going out/buying stupid shit.
Agree with UFO and derivstrading as well...This would be a difficult project and will probably be hard to put together a dedicated community of hardcore finance dorks in college.
To be honest I think these guys just want to put something on their resumes. Whether it's actually functional or not probably won't matter.
Flake is spot-on. We understand we probably won't create the next TheStreet.com while taking 20 credits a semester with a job and memberships of many clubs all while on the full-time job hunt, but we're going to do our best. As I said in the original post this is mainly just for our personal development/resume but at the same time, if I'm going to put anything on my resume why wouldn't I make it the best thing possible? Hence why I came here to ask if any college student had any random input as to what they might be interested in reading or what they don't find enough.
Kids in college who are investing probably won't follow your advice anyway. Everyone is a hothead (not saying you won't find that outside of college) and thinks they can make it big in the markets without taking any advice. Its an interesting idea to market a blog to college kids, and it could work, but do remember your audience.
Blogging is a great idea to test out ideas and to work out your writing style. I think you'll naturally find a niche as you start exploring different ideas and find one that really interests you. Best of luck with this, make sure you make a twitter I'll follow you.
Thanks Libor. We were already planning on making a Facebook page and a Twitter account for the blog, hence why one of us is the "website manager," so it's actually maintained. Definitely necessary in the 21st century.
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