Some Blog Stats

A few quick pieces of information.

After being essentially a private business observation journal for most of the two years I have written this blog, it's recently begun to attract attention.

Thanks to the Wall Street Journal's new policy of linking its online stories to blogs which mention them, I am routinely seeing traffic from the paper's online site. Some days, there will be as many as three Journal pieces linked to my blog posts.

That, combined with Google's search, thus resulted in numerous visits this weekend to read part one of my posts on SIVs and the proposed M-LEC.

With Sitemeter's traffic counter, and its javascript, I get a fair amount of detailed information about who visits.

For instance, beginning recently, the consulting firm for which I was the first Director of Research, Oliver Wyman, now the financial services consulting arm of Mercer Management Consulting, has begun to visit the blog. From the details of the first site visit that I noted, it seems to be a daily scan of the blog.

While I'm flattered that they still care about my insights, perhaps one could conjecture that they now get those insights for free.

But the real value would be in the insights that drive the options investment strategy I co-manage with my business partner. And that's a proprietary strategy for proprietary money.

Additionally, Sitemeter has informed me that employees at Bank of America in Charlotte, Philadelphia, and Jonesboro have visited roughly 10 times, in total, to read my recent posts about SIVs and my dismal experience with the frontline officers at the bank.

Do you think there's a chance that a copy of that latter post, or this post , written earlier today, will get to Ken Lewis?

Folks at Bloomberg, the US House of Representatives, and the Candian Trade Ministry have been reading posts as well. My piece on Florida Governor Charlie Crist's attempt to get the taxpayers of the country's other 49 states to pay for his voters' property insurance got a ton of readership last week.

The blog is now registering around 20 visits per day, with an average of 2 pages read per visitor. Add the uncounted visits via LexisNexis, via my business partner's Newstex operation, and there may well be as many as 50 readers per day now.

I hope these new readers continue to find topics of interest, and comments of value, when they visit.