One of the negatives of blogging these days, especially if you have any kind of following at all, is spamming in the comment section. I delete a number of them each day. Almost all of them are caught by the spam filter. Drugs and sexual enhancement seem to be the favorite subjects these days. Now, normally I don’t give the spam comments much though, a few have come through of late with a bit of a humorous twist. Here’s what they look like – with the links and such removed, of course. HELP! I’m currently being...

My employer, the IFR Markets group of Thomson Reuters, is in the market for an economist to work in DC as part of our lock-up group (the folks who get data and other releases ahead of time so they can do their write-up for posting purposes). Here’s the job description. Thomson Reuters International IFR markets, a provider of real-time market commentary and analysis of fixed income, foreign exchange and related markets is looking for an Associate Economist for immediate posting to our Washington,DC office. The ideal candidate...

As you may be aware, over the years I’ve been very active in volleyball coaching. What you may not know is that several years ago I developed (and patented) a volleyball coaching aid called the Precision Passer. It’s a device which hangs on the volleyball net and provides the players with a very clear, very specific target to allow for efficient, precise training of ball-control skills. You can learn more about it as www.precisionpasser.com. I developed the Precision Passer to offer coaches a much more portable, storable,...

I periodically open up registration to my online Essentials of Trading course to a new class of students. Today is one of those days. Registration begins now and runs through Tuesday (June 15). If you are looking for a good introductory course, sign up now. The tuition is only $90. This is the same course I have previously offered in DVD format, and you can click here to learn about it. The response from the students who took the course early this year has been very good. One of them called it a fantastic companion to my...

I had all sorts of interesting things I was going to be working on this week. Someone, however, decided they had other plans for me. Well, they didn”t actually have plans for me, but their hacking of some of my web sites certainly forced me to do some work I really hadn’t planned on or and certainly didn’t want. It took me a couple of days just to clear up all the malware code that this hacker inserted into key files. I don’t know what it did, nor do I particularly care. With the help of my web host I...

I realize I’m doing this a little bit early, but I’ve got a lot of work to do over the New Years weekend on the site and other projects, so I wanted to get this posted will I’ve got the time and opportunity to do so. I’m looking at the 2009 traffic figures for this site. Google tells me there’s been about 106,000 unique visitors and 234,000 page views in the last 12 months. I realize that’s no match for the most popular sites on the web, even in the trading space, but if someone had told me...

On February 17, 2010 I will be moderating a panel discussion and Q&A titled The Projections for FX in 2010: Forecasts and implications for FX Markets at the IBTimesFX Global Forex Traders Conference. It’s actually the final session of the day-long event. This will be something new for me. I’ve done presentations and been on the panel side of things, but I’ve never moderated one before. Should be interesting. I don’t know the full list of panel members at this point, but some of the names attending...

One of my co-workers is doing a fundraiser for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute over this holiday season. She’s looking to raise $1000, which would then be matched by our employer. If you aren’t familiar with Dana Farber, here’s the quick introduction: Dana-Farber provides expert, compassionate care to children and adults and is home to groundbreaking cancer discoveries. Since its founding in 1948, the Jimmy Fund has raised millions of dollars through thousands of community efforts to advance Dana-Farber’s...

A new record! That’s what November’s traffic to this little trading education blog was. The 14,177 visitors over the last 30 days is the highest seen to-date, exceeding the prior peak from back in April. The 11,670 unique visitors was also a new high. All the visitors added up to just over 22,000 page views, which isn’t quite a new high (the peak was back in February when I was running that month-long giveaway), but is not too far off. Here are the most popular posts of the last month based on page views, comments,...

A milestone was just reached for this blog. The number of RSS feed subscribers has finally cracked the 1000 threshold for the first time. For a while there I was starting to think this would never happen. The count was stuck in the 900s for a long time. As much as I love to see the page view and visitor counts for this blog rise, to my mind its the RSS feed subscriber count which is the more important. After all, it represents folks who think enough of what I’m posting day-in and day-out to want to have the posts automatically...

According to Google Analytics, October was the second busiest traffic months the site has seen since its inception, coming in just short of April in terms of visits at a bit over 13,000. It’s great to see the long upward slope of the traffic count, especially when something like 80% of that traffic is either coming in from search engines or from other websites referring people here. – meaning it’s mostly new visitors. At the same time, the RSS feed subscriber count is tickling the 1000 level and seems very likely...