Biz journalist starts investigative site

Roddy Boyd, a former business reporter for The New York Post and Fortune magazine, has started his own site called The Financial Investigator.

Boyd said he seeks to fill the vacuum left by the “collapse in critical investigative reporting on the financial and operational prospects of publicly-traded corporations.”

On the site, Boyd writes, “The investigations are launched in an unscientific manner. If I think it is interesting, I’ll look into it and that’s that. More likely than not, I’ll drop it. I don’t have any criteria for investigation, other than a potential subject being  A) Something that can be supported by a document, and B) Something that, information-wise, is not really “out there” in the market yet, but C) is important for investors to know.

“I have complete editorial control of this site. I have no partners, colleagues or advisers. No one sees or gets tipped to the stories prior to publication, save for a lawyer (if necessary.) I won’t take donations or advertising. I use GoDaddy’s web-hosting services and the template and software were all publicly available. Still, perhaps the sense of what FI.com is about is now more apparent: This is a modest operation.  I bear the costs of running the site.

“I do not have any sort of investments in the securities of any company I write about, nor for that matter, in anything at all (save for my house.) My father manages a hedge fund. While I think the world of the guy, he has never yet helped me on a story nor have I asked him to. There is a reason for this. He trades some combination of convertible securities, Treasuries, futures, options et al., based primarily on his view of rates and volatility. Perhaps I should be even more direct: He doesn’t do fundamental long-short equity trading and after more than 40-years in the business, does not appear ready to start. In brief, none of what he or his colleagues do is conducive to helping me uncover the things I write about. I’m very happy to keep it that way.”

Read more here.