In just two short weeks, F Wall Street will be celebrating its third anniversary. My, how time flies! And it seems as though, for three years, we’ve kicked around the idea of having a forum here. I have always been hesitant for two reasons:
- forums, in time, tend to become very unmanageable and overrun by idiots, stock pumpers, spammers, and gamblers
- there are already millions of great forums out there, from Alex’s newest forum at Let’s Talk Value to Jae’s value investing forum at Old School
In thinking about the forum idea, I believe that what you want is not a forum, but a place to exchange ideas, talk about value investing, etc – whether or not it’s in a true “forum” format. Thus, we decided to go another route and make some changes here:
- TickerTalk: Look up any ticker symbol on F Wall Street and you’ll find an area to create a TickerTalk. A TickerTalk is a short thought, idea or message about a particular symbol or symbols. For example, I didn’t have time to write an article about the Hospira acquisition of Javelin, but I’m looking at it and would like to discuss it with the community. Check out my TickerTalk on the subject by visiting JAV‘s or HSP‘s symbol page.
- Symbol Lookup: Our web designers had the fun task of going through all of the old articles and tagging them with ticker symbols so you can now look up articles by ticker. I have also contracted with a data company to bring in company data to F Wall Street. We are starting with basic data – name, CIK, etc. Now, you can visit any company by symbol and begin your fundamental research here. For example, check out Google’s page at www.fwallstreet.com/symbol/goog and you’ll find links to their SEC filings, charts, news, and more.
- Submit an Article: If you have at least three TickerTalks and/or comments on F Wall Street, you can submit an article for publication on F Wall Street. You would consider doing this if you want to strike up a conversation that doesn’t fit into a TickerTalk. It’s a lot like starting a forum post, but it (hopefully) won’t get lost in the mix when hundreds of other posts are created at the same time.
- Advertising: For three years, I ran F Wall Street without ads. I have changed that policy now as our costs have soared due to rising traffic (hosting fees) and my desire to bring in more data feeds to really help you find value investing opportunities. There is no good place on the web to do fundamental stock research. We’re changing that. I won’t bog you down with ads; however, I do need to offset the costs of the data feeds. If you want to consider advertising on F Wall Street, check out this page.
- Registration Required: F Wall Street will always be free; however, due to the ridiculous amount of spam – a natural occurance on any popular site – we now require users to create a free account to post comments or TickerTalks. If you register, however, you’ll no longer have to wait for your comments or TickerTalks to be approved. (They will still be moderated to keep discussions classy, spam-free, and on-topic.) Registration takes all of two seconds.
I’d also like to introduce you to two of our newest additions on F Wall Street:
- Joseph Carrozza: Joseph is working for Ponzio Capital this summer doing research on workouts and arbitrage opportunities. One of his jobs will be to discuss his questions and findings here on F Wall Street in the hopes of sparking up some interesting discussions. You can follow Joseph by visiting his profile here. (He’ll begin posting next week.)
- F Wall Street Team: I have hired two assistants to help keep F Wall Street organized. The team will be responsible for moderating comments, accepting articles, and answering questions.
Take the new F Wall Street out for a spin. We’ll keep adding services to make sure that F Wall Street remains the place to teach, learn, practice and discuss value investing on the web!