Weird Happenings on My Feeds

In the last few days, I've noticed big fluctuations in my feed readership along with a lot of strange things on Bloglines: all of a sudden, 200 new posts are listed for one blog or another. Is this happening to everyone, or just to me because of the last few political cartoons I posted?

Another Good Investment Banking Blog

The other day, while looking for ways to avoid studying for the CFA exam, I came across another pretty good blog on Investment Banking. It's titled "The Prince of Wall Street". Here's the Prince himself describing his blog:

...Prince of Wall Street is a regularly updated finance blog featuring original finance news, gossip, trades, and commentary. The commentary predominately focuses on M&A, private equity, hedge funds, and investment banking.

Now some basic personal information about The Prince. He is a senior at a prestigious college awaiting the start of his first full-time job as an investment banking analyst at a bulge bracket bank. He did three summer analyst stints at a prestigious bulge-bracket investment bank and then signed on to work full-time in the Financial Sponsors Group. He worked in prime brokerage sales for two summers. It is fitting that The Prince would study Philosophy and Economics as an undergraduate. The Prince also spent a term at University College in Oxford (god save the queen, and The Prince).

This blog was started when The Prince realized he spent way too much time reading finance blogs and newspapers. He hopes to also share some of the humor that goes along with working in banking and give some perspective to prospective investment bankers on what life is really like as an analyst. Even if his readers decide his commentary and analysis is wrong, he hopes they at least find it thought-provoking. That is all my loyal subjects.

He's got a nice touch - he writes mostly in the third-person, has a good sense of humor, and uses a lot of references to Machiavelli (hence the title). My limited reading gives me a sense that while the blog covers a pretty good range of IB-related topics, it would be particularly interesting to students (both grad and undergrad) hoping to break into the IB field. So, I'll be adding it to my blogroll.

Check out the blog here.

Enough bloggery - back to CFA review.

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Financial Rounds? Genius!

The Blog Readability Test supposedly determines what level of education is necessary to understand a blog. Here's Financial Rounds' result:

Nuff said. My sense is that it just picks up that I occasionally use big words.

In case you're interested, I found the site from Trainee Trader, which lists the results from a number of popular finance blogs.

1,000 Posts

I didn't realize it, but Financial Rounds just crossed the 1,000 post mark. That's a lot of time spent blogging.

Financial Rounds Gets Its 100,000th Hit

Sometime yesterday, Financial Rounds had its 100,000th hit. Man - that's a lot of people with too much time on their hands.

But seriously, it's been a great experience. Now on to the next 100,000.

Another Economics Blog List

CurrencyTrading.net has compiled a list of 100 Top Economics Blogs. Financial Rounds is listed under the "Blogs By Univesity Professors" section.

Check out their list. Present company excluded, it's pretty good.

Questions From Ph.D. Students - Present and Future

I started Financial Rounds over two years ago mostly as an experiment, and as a way to keep track of all the good stuff I came across while wasting time on the Net. It's been fun, has made me some good friends, has helped me keep up to date with the "real" world", and has given me some laughs.

But one unexpected and very pleasant outcome has been the number of emails I've gotten from students considering a Ph.D in either finance or economics. At last count, I've had over 40 this last year alone. Some of them found this site through google, searches that led them to one of my posts about academic salaries, what's involved in getting a Ph.D., or what a professor does all day. Others found it through links from related websites.

However they got here, it's been a pleasure answering questions about the graduate admission process, what it takes to succeed in a Finance Ph.D. program, job prospects, and so on. One of the best parts of being an academic is the chance to leave a legacy. Having students go on to become professors themselves is a pretty cool way to do that. As a professor, I've had between one and two of my own students a each year eventually go on to a doctoral program, and it's been surprisingly fun to play a small part (through this websits) in other students' academic careers as well.

If you've gotten into grad school or are seriously considering it, and anything I've said on the blog (or in private emails) has been helpful, drop me a line and let me know where you're at (I'll keep things confidential unless explicitly instructed otherwise) . And I hope that you'll keep in touch. You're not exactly "my" students, but I'd be interested to see how things come out.

And who knows - I might get more fodder for blog posts.