A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with the people who serve the ads on this site and they noticed a drop in my traffic. I made the observation that bull markets and other forms of feel good rallies tends to cause page views to drop. This is an observation first made by Barry Ritholtz quite a while back--bear markets are good for blog business.Whether the current lift is a bull or something else it is clear that that people are generally feeling pretty good so of course at some point there will be too much feeling good and then the market will again put a scare into people. When that happens there will be reaction like this has never happened before.
It is astounding the extent to which people do forget past market pain and then live it for the first time whenever it happens. I've told the story before of a former client (he ended up realizing he could not tolerate stock market volatility) who would call in a panic and how I would remind him that he had been through more of these than I had but of course at the time there was no ability to explore this with him (at least I could not figure out how).
The reason to bring this up is as we sit here today the market is feeling pretty could, it has been lifting for several months and of course there is no way to know how long it will continue and no reason that if it does continue for an extended period that there cannot be a large whoosh in the middle. Remember this now while you are feeling good so there is no panic later.
A reader asked about our trip in NZ. We started in Queenstown on Monday. We rented an RV for the trip and on Tuesday we drove to Fox Glacier, stopping quite a bit on the way to look at the scenery. Some parts are like the Oregon coast and other parts are like the area around Vancouver.We are on a five day loop that will take us to Christchurch before heading back to Queenstown. When we get back we are then headed over to the Milford Sound and the Fiordlands National Park. I will keep updating as we go.
10 comments:
Thanks for posting the places you are visiting and photos. I am the one who requested a travelog.
Roger,
Thanks for the great balance of interspersing your financial commentary with great photos and description of your trip. New Zealand is on my "bucket list"
If you look in april 28, when asama was killed. The postings were very high. I think that in extremes you have high traffic.
Jeff from Milan Italy
Do you ever talk to locals about investing when you travel, Roger? I'm curious, for instance, whether investors in NZ share the feelings you blogged about, or if that's a US-centric thing.
thanks for the comments all. From our visit in 2005 i get the sense that investing plays far less of a role in society here than in the US. Long story short we stayed with a friends of friends last time, they had a some saved, had someone who tended to it for them and they paid little attention. We went to a party on that trip and no one had any interest in bending my ear about investing which is not the case with social gatherings in the US. I've even talked investing while working with the Forest Service on fire related items.
Roger,
Thanks for your pictures and trip commentary along the way. I like your blog and have been a lurker for a while.
I find it interesting about your site views being down when the market is doing well. I guess it makes sense though.
By the way, I would like to commend you for a post (http://randomroger.blogspot.com/2011/07/big-picture-for-week-of-july-31-2011.html) you had last summer after the market had been slightly down about three months in a row. (I'm late I know, but better late than never.) You cautioned about that sometimes being a bad sign (I'm paraphrasing you). You were dead on by late August even though you weren't predicting as much as simply pointing out a concern. I had been reading your posts here and on seekingalpha.com for a while then and was remembering your cautionary post well by late August.
Enjoy the remainder of your trip!
thank you Mike
I think many blogs increase readership through three avenues:
1.quantity of brash content
2.aggressive web design/marketing
3.using other's free, or pirated, contributions to boost quantity content
I suspect you don't need to go this route, seeing as you are successful in several areas of life.
T
Hi Roger,
I hope you don't mind my placing this question to you as a comment to your latest blog post.
Having a busy life for the last 4 years, I have not been tracking finances or the market for over 3 years now. Although I used to actively manage my portfolio, my portfolio has been completely on auto-pilot during this time period. I also used to be a regular reader of your blog, but only now, 3 years later am I looking to your blog again.
I'm sure a lot has changed in the ETF space during the last 3 or 4 years. My portfolio is mostly ETFs (about 40 of them), with a spattering of mutual funds, and about 15% sitting in cash making nothing. So now that I'm finally ready to resume managing my account, my question to you is "Where should I begin?". There are so many ETFs out there, how can I pick & allocate to the right ones? I can't even recall the ETFs and sectors that I should be allocating to. Where can I get impartial recommendations (or at least a list) for ETFs for each sector? Are there new ETFs (or even sectors) I should consider? Have expense ratios changed? How should I go about revisiting all my current ETF holdings. What's a good way to check that they're still good ETFs?
I know this is a very open-ended newbie-sytle question, but any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
You explained the lull in your site traffic quite well--people are only interested in such things when they're not going as well. I, for, example, keep a journal but I never write in it when I'm feeling happy, only when things are going badly or simply not well.
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