That original blog was called Random Roger's Big Picture. It has disappeared when I started my side-gig at AdvisorShares, I migrated the site to a different server and then when I left AdvisorShares, that was it. I can see all those old posts in the blogger template but cannot see the site. Much of that content is still on the internet at Seeking Alpha though.
Back in 2004, there were very few bloggers, it was a new thing. Barry Ritholtz started before me, that much I know and we became blogging buddies talking every so often. Bill Cara was another blogger who started before me that I had a little contact with. Eddy Elfenbein and Cullen Roche came a long shortly after me, sometime in 2005 I believe and Tadas Viskanta from Abnormal Returns also started in 2005. Josh Brown was still a few years away from getting started. Because of how new and how few blogs there were, my blog was featured or mentioned in just about every financial publication, same as the other handful of blogs back then. My blog was the Forbes blog of the year for 2004 in less than three full months of blogging which should tell you how thin it was back then.
I mentioned Seeking Alpha above. They were brand new at about the same time. I started to contribute posts to them in 2005, the first article there was about TIPS ETFs. I'm not sure, but I have may have been the first outside contributor to Seeking Alpha. There were articles that may have been written just by Seeking Alpha staff or friends of founder David Jackson. Either way I was very early there and for quite a few years had the most followers at about 85,000. The way that number went up though, I don't know if it was a real number or not. After about 2200 articles for them, I had a falling out when I tried to promote a short book I wrote in a post of mine and they deleted that part from a post of mine. After all I'd been through with them for so many years, the fact that they did me dirty on the book, I was done.
The site is unrecognizable to me now. I'm sure they are making a mint and I know that some of the writers make a fortune for their content. I think what they want (because that's what their readers want I guess?) is articles that just hand out stock picks which is not what I want to write about. A few months ago I tried to submit something to them to see what the process would be like and the feed back was essentially to make it more actionable which I took as what stocks should people buy. I did not try to resubmit it after that.
Blogging led to several opportunities. The first one was writing for TheStreet.com from 2005 to early 2014. That was a big monetization of my writing. The other meaningful monetization was my side gig AdvisorShares which lasted for about four years until 2018. In between those two, I had a great opportunity managing an ETF through AdvisorShares. Amusingly, the fund had symbol RRGR. Phil Bak helped secure the ticker symbol for us at the NYSE. The performance did well but we failed miserably at raising assets. It was a great opportunity that didn't work out. There were two or three other small writing gigs where I contributed articles in the promise of getting paid when, more like if, the site ever had any revenue which they didn't.
TheStreet.com also led to my appearing on stock market television more times than I can remember. I'd been on Fox News (before there was Fox Business) two or three times and was a regular on CNBC Asia via telephone. Then an article I wrote for TheStreet about solar ETFs got me onto CNBC with Melissa Francis and then I was C-team regular for a couple of years or so. They started calling every week wanting me to come on to talk about things I didn't know about (not their fault, they couldn't have known) and I saw no upside plus back then, going on the air meant driving down to Phoenix which I didn't want to do. My highlight appearance was one of my early ones in the spring of 2008, I was very bearish on domestic financials. Another highlight was in 2015 (I think), right after the Fitbit IPO. I was the bear and crapped all over the stock for being a gadget destined to be replaced by an app.
Taking the gig at AdvisorShares pretty much was the end of my having a meaningful blog audience. Posts went from having hundreds or thousands of views down to dozens. Where bloggers try to monetize their writing, it's hard to beat a four year gig that paid a full time salary for part time work. I was very fortunate the way that worked out. Obviously, I have great fun with blogging and where I had several opportunities from it in the past, maybe I will again in the future.
One theme to some of the things I've done over the years is to be willing to do things for free and let the opportunity find me. That has been the case professionally as well as with volunteer firefighting.
In Part 2, we'll take a look at personal development or lack thereof as the time has gone by.
The information, analysis and opinions expressed herein reflect our judgment and opinions as of the date of writing and are subject to change at any time without notice. They are not intended to constitute legal, tax, securities or investment advice or a recommended course of action in any given situation.
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