On the eve of Independence Day we wanted to take a moment to discuss this site. We have been quite pleased with the feedback we have received and the increase in readership since our launch back in October. We want to thank all of our new (and existing) readers. We always appreciate your questions and comments.

Brett Steenbarger over at TradingMarkets.com has an excellent post up on a timely topic, “So you want to write a market blog.” He should know since he authors a couple of excellent blogs. His observations on blogging are spot on including a good piece of advice:

My best advice is to clearly identify *why* you want to do a blog.

With the number of investment and trading blogs increasing on a daily basis we have been receiving a number of “link exchange” requests. While we are flattered by the attention, our policy here is not to engage in explicit link exchanges. Our blogroll is in large part a function of the frequency with which we link to these sites. We can recommend every site on our blogroll without reservation.

We are always on the lookout for new and interesting sites and are happy to receive emails that point to specific posts from new or existing bloggers. While we cannot guarantee that every post will be highlighted we can guarantee that we will read every one of them.

If you are interesting in dipping your toes into the blogging waters we can recommend wholeheartedly our blogging platform: WordPress.com. This is the free and hosted version of the popular WordPress blogging software. The software is intuitive and easy to use. Despite the rapid growth there have been few outages. Additionally, upgrades and new features seem to pop up on a daily basis. If (and when) we commercialize this site we will be using WordPress.

Barry Ritholtz highlights a really cool website entitled, Websites as Graphs that allows you to input a URL which then displays the link pattern. You can view the results from this blog here. While the finished output is cool, watching the graphs develop is maybe even more mesmerizing.

Thanks again for your interest in this site and we hope you have a pleasant Independence Day.