There is no trade in this post

Nope, no trade today. Today is a rant.

About what, you ask? Well, the posts with no trade!

I read several very good bloggers daily. One of the benefits of my time zone is that I have time most mornings, long before the markets open, to read the daily reviews and commentaries from the previous trading day. And I have to say much of it is either repetitive, or so obscure as to fall into the "interesting but useless bit of knowledge" category.

Take Felix Salmon, for instance. He is knowledgeable and well connected. He writes for portfolio.com and is a regular feature on SeekingAlpha.com. What I don't understand about his writing though, if he's going to spend the time to put out a clearly written article on some topic, why is there no focus "on the trade"? Take his recent bit on AIG head Martin Sullivan.

Felix Salmon quotes the Wall Street Journal, and then provides a couple of sentences of his own, another link, and not much more;

The WSJ's headline says it all: "AIG's Chief Faces Worries Of Investors and Directors" - which means that board members are now grumbling to the press, rather than to the CEO directly. When that happens, it's all over - especially with Hank Greenberg grumbling loudly on the sidelines...

That's all well and good. I'm all for shining bright lights on executive level cockroaches, but how about a little thought about how the street may look at this. Where is the best trade likely to be, and what are the risks?

His most recent article is all about record prices in contemporary art at the auction houses. All very interesting I suppose but the vast majority of readers of the financial blogs are never going to be trading those markets. Where is the trade?

Another of my love/hate relationships is Mike "Mish" Shedlock. Mish is another well informed and opinionated writer who can provide some astonishingly insightful analysis. And his network of connections is so vast that he receives internal documents and screenshots full of information that no CEO would ever release. His ongoing analysis of the WaMu mortgage pool known as WMALT 2007-0C1 is financial buccaneering at its best! And that's the love side of this relationship. I am deeply envious of his network of connections.

On the hate side of this relationship is the Mish fixation for real estate, and Spanish real estate in particular. Over the last couple of weeks the vast majority of Mish posts have been real estate related. Never mind that there is no trade there, it's getting repetitive. And why the fixation on the market for vacation condos in Spain?

What nobody has ever come up with about that market is the "Mediterranean Mentality" and the "money under mattress" phenomenon. My mother-in-law has been in Germany for over 50 years and she still keeps a sum of money under the mattress. Never mind that the money under the mattress is a decoy for the money under the loose floorboard, there is in fact quite a bit of money "under the mattress".

With the introduction of the Euro the Spanish had a problem. What to do with all the Pesetas under the mattress. That money was largely undeclared income, untaxed, and difficult to dispose of. A lot of those Pesetas got thrown at real estate developers, because contractors and trades people will accept cash payments. The vacation condos were built, and sold, and paid for in Euros. I can assure you, those Euros went right back under the mattress.

The fact that the vacation condo market is oversupplied at the moment doesn't bother the Spanish people one little bit. Sure, a few contractors and trades people will have to find something else to do for a while. They survived Franco, they'll survive this too. All because there is money under the mattress.

There. Today I've contributed an "interesting but useless bit of knowledge", that has no worth as far as a trade goes. But that's the point of todays post. There is no trade in this post.

That's not to say there aren't trade-focused bloggers. Brian Shannon at AlphaTrends.com is probably the poster boy for "trade-focused". On a daily basis he provides a "Stock to Watch" prior to the opening of the markets, and after the market he provides a round up of the days action, all in easy-to-follow video format. In fact, Brian Shannon is the number one in subscribers in financial videos, as posted on YouTube.

As you can see, it can be done. Not that I would care to give up reading the likes of Felix Salmon, or Mish. They and many others have some fantastic insights into the markets. I just wish they could put at least some focus on "the trade".

I'll stop now. Rant over.