Six Months of Prudent Speculations

October 21^st marks the six-month anniversary of Prudent Speculations.  It has been a great adventure and it has helped me to solidify my own personal investment thesis on many of the stocks that I personally follow.  In the six months that I have been operating the blog I have had nearly 15,000 visitors from every state of the Union and from over 90 countries. 

While it has been difficult at times to keep the blog as up-to-date as I would have liked with my commitments to the real world, it has nonetheless been well worth every ounce of my effort.  Prior to starting Prudent Speculations, I had been a long time reader of financial blogs via SeekingAlpha.com and as a result I have come to greatly appreciate all the work that the bloggers in the investment community put forth so that we may all be a little more educated on the relevant topics of our times.  For all those that have ever thought of starting a financial blog to talk about investing, the economy or their general opinions on the state of the financial markets, I would highly encourage it as we all benefit from each others efforts.  Below I have compiled some of my favorite articles, for those new to Prudent Speculations, these articles would be a great place to start if you ever wanted to get a sense of the type of investor that I am.

Top Five Blog Posts by Number of Visitors

1. Resource America: Unfairly Punished by the Credit Crunch
2. Finding Value in Atlas America (ATLS)
3. Finding Morgan Stanley’s Suitor
4. The “Texas Ratio” and FirstFed Financial
5. Multiple, Margin Expansion at Dow Chemical    

My Favorite Blog Posts

1. What Have You Done Jamie Dimon?
2. Midstream MLPs: Defensive Sector Crashing with the Market
3. Defining the California Ratio
4. Quest Resources: A Marcellus shale Sleeper Play & More
5. Understanding First Marblehead’s Bank
6. From Blue Chip to Mediocrity: The AIG story   

Notable Mentions of Prudent Speculations in the "Official" Media

1. Portfolio.com’s WaNo
2. Portfolo.com’s All the Way to the Banks
3. Thestreet.com’s Is Cramer Underestimating Atlas Energy?
4. Yahoo Finance’s The Week’s Best Stock Blogs

In the next six months, I hope that I will be able to expand the number of postings that I have been putting up while maintaining the same kind of quality that I believe has been a characteristic of my postings during my first six months.  To all of those that have subscribed by Feedburner, Email or SeekingAlpha, I want to let you know how much I appreciate you taking the time to read my ramblings on a semi frequent basis.  Feel free to reach out to me at the blog's email, which can be found on the left sidebar.  

Going forward, in an effort to provide a public forum by which my performance can be tracked, I have set up a virtual account at the updown.com, a widget can be found at the bottom of this webpage that should show the performance of this mock account.  Generally speaking, I will divide the mock account into 20 separate holdings.  These stocks will be ones that I have talked about in the blog and others that I find attractive.  Please shoot me an email for the updated list of stocks in the mock account.  Best of luck to all in these trying times and I hope that you continue to make Prudent Speculations a part of your investment research.