Carl Futia says its time to buy the Euro

The Capital Spectator thinks that inflation will save the Euro

Wall St. Cheat Sheet examines the value of the Euro

Phil asks whether Euro shock-and-awe campaign is a bluff

Econobrowser looks into Eurozone to US contagion

Investment Postcards postulates that Euro bailout won’t cure insolvency problems

Complete list of recent affiliate marketing articles

• Zac Johnson writes about the dark side of affiliate marketing
• John Chow adds another post in his series on an affiliate marketing experiment
• CPATrend writes about an affiliate network worth considering
• 5 Star Affiliate Programs tells us how to leverage pay per call for affiliate programs
• Andrew Wee posts on rebuilding an affiliate marketing program from scratch
• Affiliates Point argues that newspaper online sites should turn to affiliate marketing for revenue

Prieur du Plessis says to put gold miners on your watch list

Mish talks about gold with Eric King

Phil’s Stock World discusses alleged illegal naked gold shorts

Wall St. Cheat Sheet assesses gold sentiment

BloggingStocks looks at NovaGold (NG)

Corey Rosenbloom examines gold trendlines

Ron Sen analyzes the relationship between Euro and gold

Here are a few of them:

Consumerism Commentary – Last Minute Tax Filing Tips

The Sun’s Financial Diary – Last Minute Tips for Tax Filers

My Money Blog – How Much Did Your Tax Return Cost? US Average $229 [ed note: jealous.  traders pay 3-6x that, minimum]

Zen Personal Finance – Time Is Running Out for 2009 IRA Contributions

The RCS blog is run by two MBAs who have been investing for 20 years and have lived in Asia, though both are now based in Los Angeles.  They track an index of 35 chinese smallcap and microcap stocks (”the RCS 35″), and offer insightful analysis on both the general environment for chinese OTCs and specific stocks they like.

Read their latest article:  A Golden First Quarter for Chinese Small Caps

Read more articles from top blogs on Chinese Small Caps

Financial reporting service flyonthewall.com learned that the hard way after taking liberties with Wall St. analyst reports.  After a bench trial, Judge Denise Cote of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York found that Fly broke copyright laws by cribbing a few analyst reports in 2005, and that it continues to misappropriate “hot news” by posting the analyst recommendations and price targets prior to the market open.

Read Judge Cote’s 89-page Opinion and Order regarding flyonthewall.com

Coverage: economics with emphasis on debt, government waste, and deflation

Platform: blogger

Reach: Alexa: 18,520, feedreaders: 27940

Updates available: RSS

Premium services: Shedlock is an advisor for Sitka Pacific

Frequency of posting: about 1-2x daily

Monetization: adsense, display ads (affiliate?)

Michael Shedlock (aka Mish) proves that content is king.  He writes longer articles than any blogger I know, but its all seruious analysis.  No fluff or filler.  The blog is more political than most covered here, leaning towards libertarianism.  While that’s not exactly my cup of tea, I read Mish daily (as do over 27,000 others!) because he cogently describes his viewpoint and marshalls facts, not rhetoric, to support his arguments.  Mish’s blog also elicits a vibrant community response, with many posts topping 100 comments.  Mish’s blog proves one thing: you don’t need a fancy platform, or even your own hosting package or domain, to start a successful blog.  Mish hosts his blog on blogspot, and uses only the standard blogspot.com domain.

Mish’s posts span between economic policy and investment allocation.  For example, here are his recent thoughts on municipal bonds:

I do not like Munis here. For starters, I think there will be a number of counties in Florida that go bankrupt. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (the state capitol) is likely to go bankrupt as is Detroit, Michigan.

Yes, everyone is aware of those.

However, when liquidity is flowing everywhere, as it has been since March 2009, nothing seems to matter. Indeed, it is easy to be complacent because nothing matters. The correct way of thinking about this is: nothing matters “now”.

Add in a few cities going bankrupt in California, and in a liquidity crisis I can practically guarantee it will matter. Although there may be some good bets out there, munis seem to be richly priced which means there are better opportunities ahead.

Liquidity is a coward. 2008 in the face of Bernanke’s heroic efforts should be proof enough. Should panic strike again, far better prices lay ahead.

SSRN has an interesting white paper on using blogs and other social media to “self-market” books.  The author, Arnold Reisman, provides this abstract:

The Web allows for a direct relationship between a book’s author, its purchaser and or reader, as well as the entire milieu of intermediaries. This medium for marketing one’s book is relatively new and many people are not as yet convinced of its importance. Misconceptions abound, and the entire field is in flux. This paper discusses book marketing using the WWW enabled Epidemic Theory Model approach a mode of marketing that can be used by any author irrespective of whether the book is published by a major commercial house, a university press, a small press, or was independently published. Authors who ignore the power of the web are truly missing out. Publishing houses can not be relied on what the author can do for him or herself.

Salmon writes:

In theory, I understand where Nick is coming from here. If people click through from RSS to the website, that generates more revenue for the company, especially since no one ever got rich selling ads in RSS feeds. But in practice, there’s no evidence at all that truncating your RSS feeds results in higher traffic, and indeed there’s quite a strong case to be made that it works the other way around, and that switching from truncated feeds to full feeds is the thing whichresults in higher traffic.

Not all the arguments I made back in 2007 are quite as strong today: back then, RSS was used largely by people who had their own sites and could drive traffic, while now, in the age of Google Reader, it’s moved a tiny bit downmarket, even as the key people you want linking to you use RSS less and Twitter more.

But the fact is that pretty much the only time I read Gawker blog entries is when they turn up in a search of my RSS feeds, and they’re much more likely to do that if the full blog entry is there than if there’s only an excerpt.

A spot check of the most-trafficked blogs for all three of our custom search engines indicates that financial bloggers heavily favor full RSS feeds (as I do in my own blog).  However, I’m not sure how much of that is data-driven, and how much reflects the blogger’s personal preferences. 

Do you use a full or truncated RSS feed?  Have you done any split or sequential testing to determine which better drives traffic?  Please share your thoughts.

Coverage: personal finance, trading, options, savings

Platform: wordpress / thesis

Reach: Alexa: 32,438, feedreaders: 5375

Updates available: RSS, twitter, facebook

Premium services: none

Frequency of posting: about once daily

Monetization: adsense, display ads (affiliate?)

Most of the blogs we cover fit squarely into a defined category: economic/trading blogs, personal finance blogs, or make money blogs.  The Digerati Life does not.  It is both a trading blog and a personal finance blog.  And surprisingly for a blog that straddles two worlds, it covers both fairly well (especially personal finance).

A typical trading post is this recent description of an options trading strategy:

Regular readers of The Digerati Life may already have read about using options to buy stocks at the prices you want. But it’s the combination of both techniques, buying at a discount and selling at a premium, that really makes the difference.

(In a nutshell the strategy involves selling puts to buy at a discount, then selling out-of-the-money covered calls to sell at a premium).

Personal finance posts cover savings, credit and consumer advocacy. This post, for example, shows how to file a consumer complaint with the FTC:

Have you ever felt scammed or ripped off? There were a couple of times in my life when I’ve realized that somebody had indeed gotten the better of me and my money. The unfortunate thing is that many scams are conducted by nameless, faceless individuals who are hard to pin down. But the good news is that you don’t have to take this sitting down, because the FTC offers you some recourse (and course of action). For instance, if you have enough information to identify someone or something that you’ve got an issue with, you may be able to bring this up to the Federal Trade Commission (or FTC). So if you feel that someone has scammed you or ripped you off, then here’s how to file a consumer complaint.