Trader Mike

I’m sure Dave, the founder of StockTickr is thrilled to get his site written up in the Wall Street Journal. (You heard it here, from me, first way back in 2005!) The Journal has an article in today’s issue titiled “A New Way to Rate Stock Tips: Crop of Networking Sites for Investors Track the Performance Of Users’ Picks; Finding Your Market Soul Mate“. Here’s a snippet:

Individual investors are finding new ways to swap stock tips.

A new generation of Web sites has cropped up in recent months designed to help investors share ideas online with others who have similar investment styles, such as which Asian stocks or technology issues offer the best value. Unlike the …

The meme about the WSJ and its policy of charging for online content continues with this article by Wired — Whither The Wall Street Journal? Some key points from the article (emphasis is mine):

Because the Journal sells more ads than it can possibly run, Dow Jones, the Journal’s master, plunked down half-a-billion dollars in November for MarketWatch, which operates MarketWatch.com.

Nevertheless, the Journal faces an intractable problem. Because you have to subscribe to access both current news articles and the archive, the Journal is leaving only a faint footprint in cyberspace. As with The New York Times, which insists that readers register to view news and pay $3 per article in the archive, the Journal barely shows up on …

The New York Times has an article which explores the acquisition interest in financial news sites of late.

Dow Jones won the bidding with a deal, expected to be completed today, for $519 million, about six times MarketWatch’s 2004 revenue. The four-way frenzy among the companies to own MarketWatch outright may be the strongest sign that news and information sites, long thought to be dot-gone relics of 1999, are making a big comeback in 2005.

Many of the same companies that were badly burned by Internet investments before are aggressively bidding for these sites not just because of the growing online ad business but because, like Dow Jones, they are worried that their current Web sites will not be able to …