UPDATE: RSS Feeds, Traffic, Blog Comments

Wow, that is some mad feedback on such a short post. Insane!

Quite a few takeaways from all the responses:

• The people have spoken: Full RSS Feeds stay!

• Open threads/linkfests are worth doing more regularly, just so as to give all of the off topic ideas a safe home of their own;

• I don’t know if there is a way to make the market posture clearer, and not run afoul of the lawyers, our clients, and everything else. (Any suggestions? I am all ears);

•Alas, comments have to be log in based — it has freed up an enormous amount of time I would rather use researching and writing.  Pick a simple password, turn cookies on, and use Firefox, which always remembers passwords for log ins;

• I am adding category and calendar archives to the sidebar. I will ask about adding a date to each sidebar update;

• The outpouring of comments and affection is very touching; My gratitude goes to everyone who commented or emailed kind words of support. Thanks!

Now, on a personal note: Its very difficult to understand how people see you, and some of the comments surprised me — I think some are based on bad assumptions or inaccurate assessments.

For the record:

Money: I make a decent living, but I am by no stretch of the imagination rich. I have clients who are billionaires, a friend whose firm went IPO (his stock sale netted $950m), a few colleagues worth $100m, and a few buds, grad school friends, etc. in the 8 figure crowd.

They get excellent advice and I get nice outstanding Xmas presents from them.

I live in an upper middle class neighborhood, drive nice — not crazy — cars, and have a few toys. I do well by U.S. standards, but nothing great vis a vis Wall Street contemporaries. If I were more motivated by money, I’d trade more and blog less.

Being A Contrarian: Sometimes what I write is Contrarian and way out of the mainstream; Eventually, the mainstream catches up to the outlier perspective. But the content cannot ALWAYS be away from the crowd (That’s “Naive Contrarianism”), because most of the time — about 75-80% of the time — the crowd is right, and they are what drives the market. Its the 10% or so on either end that is so problematic.

Arrogance: I consider myself a down to earth person (I just spent half an hour cleaning up dog poop in the backyard). I am not coy, I know what I am accomplished in, and where I need work. I have some skills, and I don’t play aw-shucks about. On the other hand, I know many people smarter, more learned, and more accomplished than me. Mr. Market makes you humble — he treats arrogance brutally

Besides, my wife would kick my head in if I ever became that kind of a jackass.

No BS: I call ’em as I see ’em. I don’t try to be controversial, I don’t flame bait, click whore, or use SEO tricks. The site is primarily my views, what I think is interesting, plus those people whose work I respect that aren’t usually seen by the public. Everything here is either written for here, or reprinted with permission,. I don’t take othber people’s content.