How financial bloggers provide help to investors

Barry Ritholtz of Bloomberg View writes about why financial bloggers are a positive force in providing information to investors.

Ritholtz writes, “Go back in time a decade or so, and we all got our financial news from only a handful of sources. The mainstream papers and magazines dutifully reported what companies said, government agencies reported and what markets did. Blogging has added a level of skepticism to the media diet. There is a willingness to call out nonsense that quite bluntly, deserves to be called nonsense. Not that it didn’t happen before bloggers were willing to do it — but it happens much more quickly and with more depth than pre-blogging days.

“During the run up to the financial crisis, it was not the big press outlets, but rather the blogging community, that most urgently identified housing, sub-prime and derivatives as a huge problem. Much of the MSM — the blogger acronym for Mainstream Media — missed it

“2. Created a meritocracy: The readership of a blog is a function of the quality of its author’s thought process and writing skills. You cannot ‘buy’ your way into page views. Sure, there are search-engine optimization and clickbait and content farms, but they are obvious to most observers. Currently, there are hundreds of investing, technology, economics and stock-picking sites out there that have risen to prominence through the sheer strength of their authors’ ideas (You can see my list here). The impact of so many thoughtful individuals into the grand market debate has been a net positive for all involved, with perhaps an exception being plummeting cable ratings for financial (and other) specialty television.”

Read more here.