Time Magazine Best 25 Financial Blogs

I am honored to make this front page of Time Magazine's Best 25 Financial Blogs.

It has been over a year since we published our feature "The 25 Best Financial Blogs." A great deal has changed. Some of the blogs on the list are gone or no longer have regular posts. Others have grown and become better.

This is a list of independent blogs. However, several major media outlets have excellent blog sections. David Gaffen at WSJ.com, Fortune.com's Apple 2.0 blog, BusinessWeek.com's Fine On Media, and BloggingStocks at AOL (24/7 contributes content to this site). Obviously, these blogs have a level of financial support that independent blogs do not enjoy.

Their writers are paid salaries. They have greater exposure due to their relationship with larger websites. They are excellent, but really should not be compared with websites operated by one person or a small group of individuals. Nevertheless, they should be recognized for their own commentary as well as the exposure that they give to independent blogs.

Financial blogs end up being either labors of love or ways to promote small money management or paid newsletter businesses. It would seem to be a tough way to make a living. ...

After we narrowed the number of financial blogs down to about 50, we tracked posts for several weeks before picking the final twenty-five.

Original content was our most important measurement: specifically, content that was well-written, well-researched and crisp. Blogs that were mostly aggregations of content from mainstream media did not make the cut. This meant that the majority of the copy had to be directly written by the blog's author(s).

24/7 Wall St. also looked at how well read the blogs were based on the number of other blogs that linked to each websites on our list. These figures were provided by Technorati, the internet's leading blog search engine.

The list is stated to be not in any particular order but I am pleased to be selected for the lead.

1. Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis (7,903 links). Although Mish (aka Mike Shedlock) is not an economist by training, he adroitly gets into the thick of economic data. Mish uses observations made by those in major media, so-called experts and government officials and serves up analysis based on his impression of their relevance and validity. The author is not afraid to attack conventional wisdom.

7.The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz (11,223 links). Ritholtz is one of the most well-respected market and economic pundits and bloggers who manages money as his day job. Multiple posts a day on subjects as diverse as criticisms of the business press, digital media, and key economic indicators. An excellent job of using relevant and interesting charts, tables, and graphs.

14. Calculated Risk (11,057 links) is among the most thoughtful and thorough financial commentary on the internet. Period. Tears apart poor economic assumptions. Gets to the heart of the elements that move the economy and markets. Big focus on housing and economic analysis.

I regularly read Calculated Risk and The Big Picture. Calculated Risk actually created the initial template for my blog several years ago. He started his blog a few week earlier. We are friends and talk on the phone semi-regularly, helping each other out as best we can.

In terms of traffic as ranked by Gongol, Big Picture and Calculated Risk are numbers 1 and 2. That order sometimes changes.



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I thank all my readers for their support over the years and a special thanks to Calculated Risk and Barry Ritholtz, the former for setting up my blog and for being a good friend, the latter for publicizing my blog in the early going before anyone ever heard of "Mish".

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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