Hooray! for Financial Bloggers!

Search Google for financial advice and you'll navigate through hundreds of sites proclaiming the gospel solution to your investment needs. If you can manage to get to the bottom of this information without having to sign up for endless spam mail or pay through the nose for bulletins and reports, you might come out with a few disjointed tidbits and a whole lot of noise.

Filtering Through The Noise

After spending weeks and weeks bouncing from the large general bodies of information such as the Toronto Stock Market website, TD Canada Trust Investing, The Financial Post and Globe and Mail, I discovered the Financial Blogger.

Financial Bloggers range from the self-taught do-it-yourself-investor to the financial advice professional and everything inbetween: retired CEO's, economics students, stay-at-home mommies and active daytrading techy gurus. And like many internet-based personalities, you might not even know who these people really are huddled behind their computer screens late at night pecking out anals of wisdom and uploading them to cyberworld.

Testing Success

I love to read a Blogger who submits regularly and shows transparency. "Here is what I do. Here is my portfolio. This is what I made. This is what I lost. This is what I did right. See how I screwed up over here."

I want to see the wisdom behind their investments, the reasons for their choices, the analysis they performed, the gut-feeling that moved them, the psychology behind their choices and the results.

Blogs I Like to Read

The Canadian Capitalist Ram Balakrishnan is an Ottawa based software developer with a gradiate degree in Electrical Engineering with over 1000 posts and 1 million subscribers.

The Globe's Market Blog David Berman has been writing about business and investing since 1995. He began his career at Canadian Business magazine, where he wrote full-length features on a range of topics, from goose slaughterers to broadcasters. Later, he moved to MoneySense magazine, where his emphasis turned to investing. More recently, he worked at the Financial Post as an investing writer and daily columnist. He has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto and studied journalism at Ryerson University.

The Post's Wealthy Boomer Jonathan Chevreau joined the Financial Post in 1993 and has been the personal finance columnist since 1996. He has authored or coauthored eight financial books, including The Wealthy Boomer and a financial novel, Findependence Day. His column runs in the Post on Saturdays and Wednesdays and he blogs most days at wealthyboomer.ca.

Canadian Business' Larry MacDonald Larry MacDonald is a former economist who now manages his own portfolio and writes on investment topics. He is the author of several business books, including corporate biographies of Nortel and Bombardier.

The Canadian Couch Potatoe Dan Bortolotti is a journalist who has written about personal finance for many Canadian magazines, including MoneySense, Financial Post, More, Chatelaine and Today’s Parent.

Invest in the Markets "I work full time, provide for my family, and don’t have a lot of spare time… I was taught at an early age to invest in mutual funds, GICs, Government Savings Bonds, and other forms of “safe” investments. 20 years later, my interest in the markets has developed through education, trial and error, reading and research, and even a couple years as an investment advisor for one of Canada’s major banks."

Money Smarts Blog Mike Holman has worked in the Canadian financial industry for almost two decades.

Million Dollar Journey "Clearly written, accurate, informative, not over-selling an idea, just telling you what you need to know. You shouldn’t take this as comprehensive advice, just as information on high interest rate accounts...this is one personal finance blog that is worthwhile for the average person…"

Beating the Index Mich, the author, works in software, lives in Montreal, has a young family, and is a do-it-yourself-investor with the goal to retire by 64.

Canadian Financial DIY The author describes himself as a late-50s Canadian who has been managing own investments for about fifteen years in taxable accounts. RRSPs, RESPs, LIRAs, trust accounts. Personal finance blogger since early 2007. Former career in government and corporations with a long-ago MBA.

The Earning Curve "Sharing the experiences, knowledge, and challenges of a beginning Canadian investor. My goal is to become educated and effective at maintaining healthy personal finance habits, with a focus on eventual wealth building. The goal of this page is to offer up my investing ideas, issues, and my portfolio, and allow the reader to learn from them, evaluate them, and hopefully discuss them."


Other Investor Resources Online

Business Week   The online version of the magazine, provides a porwerful stock screener.

Globeinvestor   Stocks, investing and financial news from a Canadian perspective.

MoneySense   Canadian all-around personal finance web site.

Ratio Capital   Professional Portfolio Management for Individual and Institutional Investors.

StockCharts   Charts, tools and technical analysis education.

Happy Investing!