A Wealth of Knowledge: An Exploration of the Online Financial Community

As I was sitting down this week to do my daily perusing of the internet to see what is happening in the world and the economy, I realized that my blog is lacking any reference to the vast financial and economic online community, the goal of which is to keep its readers up to date on all that is happening in the economy. With this in mind, I chose to explore the internet and develop a robust linkroll of resources to complement my own posts. In order to ensure I only included the best sites, I used the Webby and IMSA criteria when evaluating these external sources, evaluating them by their content, structure, visual design, functionality, interactivity, depth, and activity. After extensive research, what I found were twenty resources that provide unique and valuable insight into finance and the economy. I have included links to them in my linkroll on the right. These sites can be broken into four categories: news, government, research and opinion, and private equity/investment banking. In order to further educate my readers, I have chosen to give a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of each.

The news sources offer up to date commentary and reports of what is going on in the world. They are laid out similarly, but are often difficult to navigate due to the abundance of information on their pages. For the most part, they also lack in-depth analysis of current issues. Among the news sources listed, American Banker is the least known. Its site is simply laid out and reports the major economic headlines as well as giving an analysis of that news. However, its navigation bar was vague and is grouped into odd categories like mortgages and retail delivery. The Wall Street Journal is the best known of the news sources, and its U.S. Business site’s “What’s News” section (see left) offers brief summaries of the headlines for the day. However, the reader looking for headlines across a broad scope of industries and economies will become frustrated, as the website is segmented into over ten categories, each of which has between five and ten sub-categories. Those looking for more general news should go to CNNMoney.com. Its homepage has headlines spanning a wide variety of classifications, but due to the large quantity of headlines it covers, the site is cluttered with news that is often trivial or unhelpful. While the previous three sites are more traditional news sources that give a report of what happened earlier, Yahoo! Finance and Bloomberg Market Data offer real time updates on the market and major news. The two sites complement each other well; Bloomberg Market Data has detailed data of the market’s performance with no explanation of why while Yahoo! Finance focuses on top stories that affect the market with data on only the major U.S. indices.

When reading the previous news sources, readers may notice references to various statistics as indications of the health of the economy. Rather than wait for one of these statistics to be referenced in an article, The White House Economic Statistics has every statistic that offers any indication of the health of the economy. However, these statistics are not always intuitive, and the site offers little explanation of the significance of the different numbers. A simpler way to gauge the health of the economy is to go to the Federal Reserve website and see what the recent developments are. They give a good indication of how the economy is faring, but the data is incomplete, for the Fed only offers information on things it has done, not those it is considering doing. For those more concerned about the future performance of the economy than its current health, Barack Obama and John McCain’s economic policy pages give a hint as to what the regulatory environment will be for business in the next four years. Though Barack Obama’s page is much better organized than John McCain’s, I find both to be overly flashy and lacking a concise summary of what they want to do.

Some of the least flashy pages are the best sources of news or in-depth analysis of various news items. These sites are the ones I have classified as research and opinion. Economy Society is business consultant Bill Birnbaum’s forum for discussing his predictions for the future of the economy. His blog has interesting information and opinions, but its credibility is reduced by how cheap the website looks. Focusing on more current issues, Rogue Economist Rants and The Common Man’s Politics provide alternative perspectives on many issues. Their major problem is that they lack credentials. The Common Man’s Politics provides no credentials for its author, while Rogue Economist Rants only offers vague credentials for its author as having experience as a banker and consultant. The final three blogs in this category do not suffer from such a lack of credentials. Financionomics is written by an MBA candidate with a Post-Graduate degree in Economics, Freakonomics is written by the bestselling authors of the book Freakonomics, and The Conscience of a Liberal is written by Paul Krugman (see right), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics on Monday. Of these three, Freakonomics is my favorite, because it comments on such a wide scope of issues and makes bold statements whenever it can. These blogs are hard to critique, and my only complaint would be that their entries tend to be shorter, as they do not seem to ever settle on a single topic.

Outside of the resources focused on the market and economy, the sites that discuss private equity and investment banking are the most interesting to me, as those are the industries in which I plan to pursue a career in the future. DealBook, peHUB, and Financial News: Private Equity News are all fantastic resources for updates on recent mergers and acquisitions activity as well as other developments in the industry. Their main shortfall is how difficult each one is to navigate. A last resource anyone interested in investment banking or even finance in general should be aware of is Thomson Reuters League Tables. This resource provides information on the number and size of deals each major investment bank has announced or completed, and is used to rank investment banks as well as determine trends in the investment banking industry. It is a bit difficult to navigate and its files are often slow to load, but to investment bankers, the information it holds is well worth the wait.