Dear Frank,
Thanks for your mail this morning and for asking what you asked. In truth this blog is my idea of a bit of fun (we’re all weird in our own ways) but it’s also a shop window for the way I make my living, which is The IKN Weekly. It’s a report that comes out every Sunday evening (Americas time) on (mainly junior) mining sector in (mainly) Latin America. It has my portfolio of stocks in the sector, tells you when I buy, sell and keeps a record of all trades, provides ongoing commentary of the stocks covered and in-play, plus those I’m thinking about buying. In short, it’s what I’m doing with my money. I do detailed analysis of individual stocks, with charts and comments and target prices and all that jazz. The IKN Weekly also covers my thoughts on macro sector issues (gold, copper etc), keeps a handle on regional political issues (with emphasis on those that affect the mining sector) and provides snippety market comments on this-and-that company. It’s typically between 25 and 30 pages long and contains between 13,000 and 15,000 words, but can vary on either end of that size. I’ve been writing it since 2009 and this weekend will be issue 352. It’s read by a range of people, from high end pros in the mining biz who think they’re important, to retails jocks just like me. It costs U$40/month (i.e. a tenspot per week) or U$400/per year, which isn’t cheap for a newsletter but I think it’s priced just right for what it is (it used to be U$25/month and got too popular with people just looking for a pump/dump tipster and then got annoyed when I didn’t live down to what they were looking for). The PayPal button is on the blog main page (upper right) and looks just like this…
…but don’t click on that, it’s just a screenshot. I get told by people close to me that I should promote the thing more
often on the blog to its readers (the blog gets read by thousands of people a day, the Weekly gets to hundreds of people per week) and get the word out, get more subscribers, become rich like a richy-rich person and big and influential and important and all that crap, but I tend not to
care too much about marketing the Weekly because I like it as a small-end publication with a group
of readers who have tended to stick around and know that it’s not a pump
sheet or something that tries to move markets. Plus I don’t feel the overriding need to make the collection of currency a central thing in my life, my income is sufficient to cover my low-profile middle class existence (and I’ve never coveted things like Ferraris or Rolex watches). But today, instead of answering your mail directly as I usually do I’ve decided to stick the answer on the blog. I’m not really sure why, but a bit of soft advertising every so often doesn’t do any harm I suppose. Any further questions, feel free to fire away.
often on the blog to its readers (the blog gets read by thousands of people a day, the Weekly gets to hundreds of people per week) and get the word out, get more subscribers, become rich like a richy-rich person and big and influential and important and all that crap, but I tend not to
care too much about marketing the Weekly because I like it as a small-end publication with a group
of readers who have tended to stick around and know that it’s not a pump
sheet or something that tries to move markets. Plus I don’t feel the overriding need to make the collection of currency a central thing in my life, my income is sufficient to cover my low-profile middle class existence (and I’ve never coveted things like Ferraris or Rolex watches). But today, instead of answering your mail directly as I usually do I’ve decided to stick the answer on the blog. I’m not really sure why, but a bit of soft advertising every so often doesn’t do any harm I suppose. Any further questions, feel free to fire away.