What the Wall Street watchers read … and the things they hate
March 7th, 2010
A fascinating insight into the reading habits of Reuters’s prolific financial blogger Felix Salmon has been published by Atlantic Wire (part of Atlantic Monthly Group). The column also touches on how he spends his working days.
Felix may not realise it, but he gives away some valuable trade secrets in the piece — in addition to revealing how extraordinarily “wired” he is. The New York-based blogger, a former employee of ultra-bearish economist Nouriel Roubini, says:
The meat of what I read at the office is from my RSS reader. I use NetNewsWire and have God-knows-how many hundreds of subscriptions … I find myself clicking on the feeds with fewer unread items. When there are really good bloggers who don’t post very often, I will read everything they write. John Hempton, Epicurean Dealmaker, Mike Konczal, Steve Waldman …
I have my laptop running TweetDeck. I have two screens for my official Reuters PC running the Reuters terminal, e-mail and messaging services. And then I have two screens connected to my Mac Mini, which is where I do my real work. The right-hand screen is for the feeds coming in on NetNewsWire and Twhirl, and the left-hand one is for e-mail, web browsing, iChat, PDF documents and drafting blog entries.
At the end of the piece Salmon, whose Reuters blog is dubbed “A complex alchemy”, reveals he’s no fan of The Economist. He writes “I definitely don’t read The Economist. I don’t like that kind of air of omniscient, Balliol College superciliousness.” Ouch!
Separately, Felix Salmon yesterday put the boot in to Pullitzer prize-winning New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson, effectively accusing her of writing garbage given her inability to distinguish between credit default swaps and currency swaps. In his blog post The NYT jumps the CDS shark, Salmon writes: “The NYT has pretty much given up any hope of having the tiniest bit of credibility in the debate over CDS.”
In another article in the same Atlantic Wire series, the Liar’s Poker author and Bloomberg columnist Michael Lewis reveals himself to be something of an information technology Luddite. He says:
I don’t tweet, I don’t Twitter, I couldn’t even tell you how to read or where to find a Twitter message. I don’t actually see the point of limiting communication to a haiku. I find the whole effusion of communications technology bewildering …. I have an email address and I’m thinking of shutting that down
I look at aggregation sites sometimes, like RealClearMarkets. It’s run by libertarians, clearly, but they do drag in everything that’s written about finance.
Actually, if you were to draw a pie chart of where I get news from, I bet I get a third from whatever people in Berkeley—specifically the parents’ at my kids’ school—are outraged about. I’m surrounded by people who are alive to what’s going on in the world and who are quick to be outraged by it.
To read the original Atlantic Wire articles, click below:-