Wait…everyone is blogging!

I guess the question is, if you talk about your cat…are you blogging? Can your cat blog make you smarter? Can you retire off your cat blog?

You will have to trust me that cat blogging or 99.9 percent of blogging will not make you money. I can guarantee you though that financial blogging will make you wise.

I believe that writing about anything will make you smarter, but writing about your money will make you wealthy.

In March 2009, the world was imploding financially. That was just two years ago. Morgan Stanley was calling for another 25 percent drop. Trust me when I tell you that never happened. THIS is what happened.

It is hard to make money off a financial blog because guys like Eddy Elfenbein, a wicked smart, hilarious and insanely free blog has beaten the market with his simple January 1 buy list for the last 4 years straight.

Now I just jinxed the bastard so be careful everyone before you go blow your retirement dough. But, it’s ok to jinx him because he does not make a living of huis FREE blog or fantastic email. He blogs all things financial to make himself WEALTHY.

I will be honest here so as not to offend Jim Cramer, but Eddy is NO Lenny Dykstra, though like Lenny, Eddy is ‘height’ challenged. Eddy is jewish so there is no way he played baseball like Lenny. Eddy does not owe $30 million to the banks either. Eddy does not charge for his ‘option picks’ like Lenny did for TheStreet.com and Eddy was not annointed by Jim Cramer as the second coming of well…Jim Cramer.

To refresh…please don’t let THIS happen to you unless you too are ‘The Fonz’!

Blog about your money and thank me later.

I feel like a winner.

But, I have no idea what #winning means anymore.

Did we win in Iraq?

Should Charlie Sheen really own the #winning hashtag on Twitter?

Lenny Dykstra is throwing around the word winning (must watch). This fucker is LOST. If Lenny is winning, I like losing.

If I look up ‘winning’ in Wikipedia, I get the Paul Newman movie. He seems like a winner.

I think there should be awards and prizes associated with winning. There should be some pride in #winning. Losing is supposed to be part of the growth process. Nobody loses anymore. We are all absolutely right, all of the time. I must suck some serious ass because I lose all the time.

Are you #winning?

I have seen price action long enough though to know that the tides are turning at the moment and many of the momentum names are sputtering.

I have been hunting around for a good post that describes some of the subtle changes that are afoot and found this GREAT explanation from Ron Roll @gtotoy. Take a few minutes and listen to Ron’s clear thinking about the change in the tone of the tape and how you may want to position yourself:

In my show yesterday, I talk about my $GOOG mistake, oil, the US Dollar and the importance of Angel List as a signal for high PE stocks in the tech sector.

I am being a lot more careful right now with entries. Trades over trends for the moment.

I have my opinions and I use this blog to flesh out my ideas and thinking and frankly, as close as I am to Daniel the CEO, I can only offer my opinions and the same thinking I would offer here. Furthermore, the uber smart and NON conflicted (directly) Mark Suster chimed in with a deep post on why he loves Disqus. My friend Mathew Ingram at Giga OM, with their awful commenting system :) has a great post up, so the elephant is out of the room.

Facebook has entered commenting. They are going to win a LOT of accounts.

If Disqus had a crummy product, a screwed up cap table and no cash, there would be cause for some concern in my eyes. You can’t ignore Facebook, they are like my mom with a cellphone. They are figuring shit out. Luckily for Disqus, my mom is not a user, they have a wicked cool product, a great team, sick investors (save me), the cap table is in order and plenty of runway.

If Yahoo had any mojo, Disqus would have been theirs a while back. If Facebook had style and a care about the ‘open web’ they would have bought Disqus for a more sneaky evil data set potential. As Mark Suster says in his post linked above, Google could/should buy them. A wild card could be AOL or another big media property. In the meantime, Jason and Daniel at Disqus have their plans for sure.

If I am at Yahoo today as a VP of something, I have two decisions if I care about user experience or community…Facebook or Disqus. I would lean towards Facebook comments. If you can’t beat em, join em and try to wreck Facebook from the outside in. In the meantime, you could clean up the comments that no one cares about anyways on your own site.

At Stocktwits, ideas and community matter most, so Disqus will continue to work very well. Facebook is not where people talk stocks…at least for now. From a viral loop and broadcasting standpoint it would be interesting to push everything through Facebook since that’s what Facebook wants us to do.

The social web is fascinating and the land grab that Facebook has won with seeming ease, should not be that easy considering the stakes. This is not quite like ‘oil’, but I am shocked that there is not more blood. The tech/web insiders are so quick to call bubble and attack one another with a keyboard and an ‘anonymous’ handle, but the stakes are massive right now and I am amazed that the pace of acquisitions is not much higher.

In the words of Chris Dixon, we need more ‘swashbucklers’.

I do care that it does not own the web.

I think Facebook’s valuation is creating massive stress in the system right now. There is a lot to live up to and most early insiders have long cashed out enough of their chips and will peck at Facebook for years to come.

There is a meme starting tonight that Facebook is killing one’s authenticity. I say, what took the young guns so long to see this. I have long argued that Twitter is our ID and Facebook is our EGO.

You can’t fake it on Twitter. Charlie Sheen has gone completely psycho and he can’t cover that up on Twitter. Howard Stern can’t help but be funny and original on Twitter. I would argue that every mutual fund and hedge fund manager should have to be on Stocktwits, but it’s a pipe dream and the exact opposite of what FINRA and the SEC would ever allow.

Steve nails it here though in my opinion:

There’s a pretty straightforward reason why FB is valued at an astonishing $75 billion, and it’s all about them forming a reciprocal feedback loop between Facebook.com and other sites so that you can be targeted. But for such a massively social company, Facebook’s insistence that you have one identity across the web is both short-sighted and asinine, and people I talk to are starting to realize this.

Fact is, one social network will not rule the web… People are simply way too social to allow that.

The verticalized social graphs are more important than ever…hopefully the financing to make more of them start and evolve will not dry up anytime soon.

At some point, the Rock (oil) will trample the Scissors (the FED) that is printing money to boost the economy (paper).

The rally in stocks now going on for the better part of two years is looking long in the tooth with oil above $100.

All that said, this weeks Stocktwits 50 is full of oil, fiber optic and semiconductor names. The trend is your friend and calling tops or bottoms is silly with all the momentum out there.

Correct me please if I am wrong, but I was reading that the USA has 9 cities with 1,000,000 plus people and China has 220 cities with 1,000,000 plus people. Wow.

China must be leading the fiber optic stock craze in the old bubble names of 2000 $GLW, $JDSU $CIEN $FNSR to name a few.

As hard as it is to game American markets, the Chinese, Russian, Indian and Latin American boom and bust cycles have added so many layers of complexity to the global markets. The world is more connected than ever, but while Google, Twitter, and Facebook rule the United States, they do not rule the world over.

Apple has a chance.

Oil does.

At 45, I prefer not to get TOO close to anything I don’t control.

In a bull market, the last thing you need is a ‘special situation’. In a bear market, the BEST companies ARE special situations…

I have always preferred ‘light’ investing terms like ‘The trend is your friend’ over the heavy term ‘Special Situation’. The trend is you friend has made me money In $RAX $INTU $OPEN and $LULU and $ARBA this last year, even though they were not special situations 40-80 percent ago when I was writing about them and buying them.

If you are beginner investor, you don’t have time for ‘special situations’. Look at this very simple ‘two post’ explanation of a recent ‘pump and dump’ by Tom Brakke.

Warren Buffet has time for special situations. You have time for your family and your job.

Keep it simple.

Our microblog streams are amazing for this, allowing members to exchange ideas, charts and links and to organize them by tickers and users, quickly and without friction.

More recently, we’ve begun rolling out a WordPress based blog platform so that many of the most knowledgeable members of our community can stretch out a bit and express themselves in longer form.

This has taken off faster than we imagined and we now have 40 amazing bloggers!

So we’ve built a StockTwits Blog Network Home Page where we pull together all of these voices.  Here, readers will be able to find the latest posts from our network blogs all in one place.

The critical point is: the writers own their URL’s and their content while we facilitate publication.  We believe there will be network effects.

We promise to organize amazing original content from technicals to fundamentals to global macro to options and market education.

We have also rebuilt the navigation bar at the top of every page inlcuding the blog network.

The new nav bar can now be found across all StockTwits sites and will make navigating from one to the next incredibly easy.

I got started out making cold calls for a brokerage firm pitching Blockbuster and Compaq shares (R.I.P) and let me tell you…I love me some social web! Before the phone, nothing was harder than door to door. Before the door to door…strapping notes to a pigeon carrier was a bitch.

I can’t think/vision horizontal…if I could, I would have gobbled up my invites into Foursquare, Twitter and Zynga. It really hurts financially. It’s embarrassing at this point to know I missed these three, but it is not much different than passing on an Intel job out of grad school and all the trends in early tech I would have likely ridden.

I think vertically. It feels more manageable…less out of control. In the end, I am a control freak. I will never be first and won’t hang around to shut out the lights.

But I digress…

There is MONEY in verticals and no shame in them. If you catch big enough trends, a vertical investment could even become horizontal. In fact, the vertical may be the new horizontal. We have one dominant social network, a dizzying amount of social graphs to be sliced and diced, and a silly trust in the web. You need silliness to cross a chasm. Their was silliness in telecom in 1999. Without that silliness we would not have the cheap bandwith we have today.

Which brings me to AngelList, a subject of great debate this past weekend in the blogosphere.

I have been a big fan of AngelList from the moment I discovered it. I forget how to be honest, but it has quickly gathered momentum.

It is not because of any one person, though Naval and Nivi are insanely talented (here is a great interview with Naval). The general idea of AngelList is not new, but the TIME and technology is right. If the market crashed, this idea could indeed go back into hibernation. My bet is, we are finally at a ‘tipping point’ for this idea.

AngelList has the makings of a big vertical idea that could in fact get horizontal. It is already the best way I know to eavesdrop into the early stage market. I doubt it will be contained to just one segment of the market. From all the weekends writings on the subject, I like this part of Dave McClure’s ramble:

Angel List Fucking Rocks. Period. it’s the single greatest innovation in our industry in the last 5 years (aside from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, & Quora) and it’s great for almost all participants. and while social proof can be abused / misused, so can gasoline… doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fill up your gas tank and go back to riding horses. if you want to effect change, either Engage Fully, or Compete. inaction/boycotts are rarely useful & should be largely be ignored.

Some serious truthiness from Dave.

It does not feel that long ago when the Canadian dollar was worth about 60 cents. I have written about this trend since 2006 and a lot in 2007. I have had money in my homeland for years waiting for this moment. I am proud of sitting tight with this trend.

Now above par, the ‘Loonie’ feels like it could easily trade at 10-20 cents more than a dollar. Though manufacturing and exports are fu#@ked with the currency move, cities like Toronto and Vancouver will continue to see a web and start-up boom as talent gets relatively cheaper to maintain. Finally, these great cities will become start-up nirvana as they deserve to be. Maybe even Montreal.

Canadians will be driving over the border to fill up their cars with cheap oil and their driveways with cheap Porsche’s… the problem for Americans is there are 5 people in Canada and they have been doing this for 5 years so they are full up.

I remember filming this ‘Loonie’ episode for Wallstrip trying to change a $20 Canadian Bill for US Money. I got a couple packs of raspberries. Here it is:

If I went back to the streets of New York today, I wonder if I would get the same looks. It’s time to try…