I've got two new, to me, sites that I think are very worthwhile and tie in, with more expertise, with a lot of what I have been writing about all these months.
The first site is called Trade Foreign Stocks. It is run by Duncan Ellis. I just found out about the site yesterday but I used to work with Duncan in years past. He and I had similar jobs on different trading desks. He, of course worked on the global desk. The site is so comprehensive, I can't imagine the work that went into creating it. In addition to current data there is all sorts of content about ETFs, country funds and so on. The site formatted strangly on my screen. The menu was off to the far right. If any of the gloomy things I wrote about last weekend come to pass, foreign investing will become more important. This site will help us learn and know more.
The other site is a part of the Seeking Alpha blog complex called The Utility Stock Blog. It is brand new but worth reading. Funny thing, as I went to this page just now to get the link I saw that there is also an Energy Stock Blog. I'll have to check that out later. The knock on utilities at this point would be that rising rates pulls money away from the group and into bonds. That might be the case but I think the more important theme for the time being will be the element of safety offered. Utilities make up about 3% of the SPX, I continue to weight the group at about 4%-5%.
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5 comments:
Thanks for the link. Trade Foreign Stocks is certainly a content rich site but some visitors may give up since the formatting appears to be fixed at a screen width of 1024 and the main menu is fixed on the right. Neither of those is considered good site design practice and, in combination, would likely provide a less than ideal navigating experience for most; unless they happen to enjoy interacting with passive aggressive (site) personalities I suppose.
Roger,
Thank you very much for linking my page. I am new to this blogging game, though old to the analytical game. I am very theme oriented, and as I develop more in-depth research on trends and themes over the next few months, I hope to connect them to the individual stocks (i.e. which utility stocks fit into which themes and trends).
I hope to add more depth and thought to the page as I get better at the format.
Sandy Cohen
RW .. although a right menu is unusual, I find nothing wrong with the design per se. A site designed with a 1024 screen width is far better, IMO, than the blogspot / blogger templates (such as Random Roger) which leave vast amounts of screen real estate unused on either side of the page. Most users (at least in the US) of financial sites such as this do use monitors with at least 1024 resolution, if not 1280 (as I do) or higher. Calling the TFS site (and implicitly, its creator) names ("passive aggressive personalities...") is most unkind, I think.
Wow! The power of Random Roger!
My traffic has gone up tremendously. Thank you very much for linking to my site, and for the review.
I am not a webmaster by trade. The content was my priority when I set the site up, as I had spent many years explaining the working of foreign markets to clients and know there is a need to de-mystify foreign trading and increase the comfort factor.
However useful the content is though, if I can't communicate it to people because the experience is not user-friendly, then I need to improve its presentation. I take rw's comments to heart. Be assured that I will be working on it.
Thanks again!
DE
Apologies for the perceived harshness of my closing phrase, a bit of design jargon snuck through - all sites may be considered to have 'personalities' and those lacking interactive transformation capacity are generally considered 'user hostile' even when they are otherwise handsome - but no aspersion was intended _personally_ towards the site developer regardless. I use 1280 screen res at work and 1024 at home myself but that is not the case for the typical user. If the intended audience is strictly the financial industry and if that industry has standards for site design that include fixed hi-res screen widths w/ correspondingly dependent navigation tools (w/ no fallback) then so be it.
OTOH simply switching the left and right-hand columns would probably help many users considerably at the Trade Foreign Stocks site even if the rest of the design parameters remained the same. A fall-back top/bottom menu bar (which could be relatively thin) is also an option. When a site is as content-rich as this, it seems a shame to discourage users from exploring it easily.
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