My post last week about Andy Gluck attempting to kickstart an Advisor Blogging Revolution gave me a good idea, which is to spotlight some of the advisors who are already blogging. There aren’t many yet. Google research and asking around uncovered less than ten advisors who have blogs. I’m in the process of contacting them with a set of questions about why they started blogging, how it’s working out for them, etc.

The first advisor who got back to me is Kurt Brouwer, who has an excellent site called the Fundmastery Blog:

1. How would you describe your business?

Brouwer & Janachowski is a fee-only financial advisory firm, now in our 21^st year.

2. When and why did you start blogging? Who set the blog up for you?

I began reading blogs in 2001.  Over time, I began getting all my news and industry information online, from web sites as well as blogs.  I had previously written books and articles and blogging seemed like a good fit for our firm.  We like to keep our clients informed and we like to share information on investing and other topics. I started our blog in April 2007.  I did the first iteration myself on the Wordpress site.  After six months, we moved to a hosted site.  My friend, Tom Lydon, who runs a very successful blog called ETF Trends, gave me some good advice and contacts for technical help.

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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I hope everybody had a nice break and is looking forward to the New Year.

I gave up on my old computer a few weeks ago. It lasted four years which is a record for me. I built it myself and was constantly playing with the hardware, installing random shareware from the Internet, and doing other things that should not be tried at home. So over the course of time, the machine has developed progressively worse problems.

Games wouldn’t install because of something to do with my CD-ROM drive brand. Windows XP would randomly GPF. For the last year, when I would reboot, I had to let the processor cool down for about twenty minutes before it would boot back up–this was the most annoying computer problem I ever had. But the last straw was installing Linux on a dual-boot partition and the machine stopped loading Windows XP.

XKCD feels my pain:

Rather than fix it, I decided it was time for a new box. So I popped out the hard drives, stuck them in external drive boxes and retired my old machine to the “parts” shelf.

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*Updated Below*

I’ve always been mystified there aren’t more advisors with blogs. It seems like a great way to communicate with clients. The advisor could post articles about company direction, new hires, and market/strategy commentary. Your operations head could post updates on quarterly reports, download delays, and changes to model portfolios.

A blog doubles as a marketing tool, giving prospective clients a taste of how nice it would be as a client of your firm. It’s cheap, convenient, and identifies your firm as a progressive company with fresh ideas. But in our industry virtually nobody has a blog, just a small handful of investment advisors.

That’s about to change.

Advisor Products is a company that creates newsletters and hosts web sites for thousands of independent investment advisors and brokers. I’m sure everybody in the industry has heard of them by now. They’re working on a new release that adds advisor blogging to their product. Overnight, 2,000+ advisors are going to have the ability to communicate with their clients (and prospects) using personal blogs. Advisor Products’s CEO Andy Gluck–a long-time pundit, well known for spotting industry technology trends–may be about to kickstart an advisor blogging revolution.

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Investment News prints the story of an advisor who attempted to upgrade to a Vista desktop, only to find out that much of his software doesn’t support Vista yet. He had problems with his Iron Mountain backup solution, as well as software for his Palm synchronization:

From the article:

“First, Iron Mountain told me they were not Vista-compatible [and that] I’d have to use my other desktop XP computer — the one that died, mind you — to salvage what was on Iron Mountain’s site.” On top of that, the company wasn’t offering any backup options for Vista PCs, so Mr. Krasney was forced to drop the service in favor of Washington-based Backup.com.

His travails didn’t end there. He was also stymied by a lack of synchronization support between his Palm Treo 650 mobile phone and the new version of Microsoft Outlook in Office 2007.

I also know that Advent APX doesn’t support Vista yet, although Schwab PortfolioCenter added Vista support with their 4.40 update. NaviPlan supports it too. Anything web-based should be ok, since that’s dependent on the browser, not the operating system.

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In Matt’s Ron Paul Endorsement, he subtly mentioned that we are printing money. After a conversation with one of my non-finance friends, it occurred to me that most people don’t realize that we keep printing money.  This friend said that he hadn’t heard about us printing money–surely that would have made the news.

In his Tough Times A’ Coming post, Matt pointed out that the Congressional Budget Office says our federal budget is unsustainable.  I think this is a real recipe for disaster, most people don’t understand how we “print” money and we are in terrible shape with our budget.   So, I decided that I should write a post on how the US government prints money and causes inflation.

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*Updated: Added Fund Raising Graph*

I’m throwing my hat in the ring for dark horse Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. I did a post last month on Congressman Paul when he raised a record $4.3 million dollars in one day. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time researching his platform and investigating the feasibility of some of his ideas, like eliminating the Fed, eliminating capital gains tax, and re-legalizing gold as legal tender. It’s radical, but they are legitimate ideas that may fix some of our country’s problems.

There are many reasons to like Dr. Paul. He’s the only Republican anti-war candidate. He has never voted to raise taxes, or voted for an unbalanced budget. He also voted against the Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act, and Iraq invasion. Since this is a blog for wealth managers, I’m going to focus on the fact that he is a respected economist who sits on both the Economic and Financial Services Committees. He is famous for being the only Committee member to ask tough questions of Greenspan and now Bernanke.

I’ll start with the first of two videos, an interview with Ron Paul on CNBC after he interviewed Bernanke on the latest rate cut:

Whether you agree with him or not, when is the last time you heard a presidential candidate speaking intelligently and authoritatively on economic policy?

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America just got rocked with two big announcements that bode poorly for the future. First, Morgan Stanley is predicting a recession; we’re in the early throes of it already.

From the article:

We’re changing our calls for US growth and monetary policy.  Since the shock of tighter financial conditions surfaced in August, we’ve incrementally reduced our outlook for future growth.  But the time for incremental changes is over.  A mild recession is now likely: We expect domestic demand to contract by an average 1% annualized in each of the next three quarters, no growth in overall GDP for the year ending in the third quarter of 2008 and corporate earnings to contract by 5-10% over that longer period.  Three factors have tipped the balance to the downside: Financial conditions continue to tighten, domestic economic weakness is broadening into capital spending, and global growth — for us, long the key bulwark against a downturn — is slowing.

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Google AdWords ended up being a more difficult than it first seemed. I started out bidding on various AdWords at around $1.00 per word. After a day, Google told me the bid went up to $5.00 for certain words. Then after another day, Google told me the bid went up to $10.00. Most of the ad words I was bidding on had few (if any) other bidders so I wasn’t sure what was going on.

I still don’t have a firm grasp on Google’s reasoning behind their pricing. They purposefully don’t tell anybody what the algorithms are so people can’t game the system. But my impression is that they’re getting the exact opposite result. The spammers are the only ones who really understand the system well enough to use it effectively. Ordinary people who just try to run a campaign have huge problems because things seem to happen by magic instead of logic.

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I just ran across MicroPlace and thought wow, that’s a great concept.  You give them money and member institutions lend it out to emerging market entrepreneurs. You get to see pictures of the people in third-world countries who receive the loans. It’s an eBay Company so it has the air of legitimacy, although I have some doubts after delving deeper into their business model.

MicroPlace is similar to Prosper (which Matt wrote about here and here); Prosper is a general lending program available to everyone in the United States.  These people have many reasons to borrow money: house financing, credit card repayment, boob jobs, etc. After making a loan, you can expect a 6 - 20% return on your money.

With MicroPlace you are investing in entrepreneurs in emerging market countries.  Interesting idea. Looking at a list of the countries on MicroPlace, I found Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Soviet Georgia, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan and many others. You can drill down and see the pictures and profiles of the entrepreneurs. (Don’t worry, I’m sure the guy from Ecuador isn’t actually in a jail cell.)

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