Thank You!

Dear Readers,

We would like to thank our loyal readership of the past few months and years. This year has provided Stock Research many milestones and we would like to thank you for allowing us to achieve them. First, we have had over 2,200 views of our blog since June 2007. Second, our articles have been published on Seeking Alpha and Yahoo! Finance quite an accomplishment for a novice investor. Our blog has been viewed by people on every continent except Antarctica. Another accomplishment is that we have a reader in every state except Maine. Lastly, we would like to inform you that our musings will now be on permanent hiatus.

On September 24, 2007, your writer, editor, and stock picker extraordinaire accepted a position with Stifel Nicolaus as an Associate in Equity Research covering Internet Consumer Services companies. I would recommend hiring a broker with access to Stifel research, or opening an account at Stifel, if you wish to continue to read my thoughts. My new position will preclude me from writing anything for this blog.

I hope that my story serves as encouragement for some of my fellow bloggers. I created the blog in order to build a portfolio of writing samples and a chain of investment thought. The purpose was to quantify my skills for a prospective employer in the financial services industry. With the acceptance of my new job, the blog reached its telos - Plato would be proud.

As I sign off, I would like to leave you all with some advice and observations of the cottage industry that is financial blogging. Seeking Alpha seems to be a popular website and does an admirable job of providing financial content. The problem is that if they wish to monetize their product, editors must do a better job of vetting articles. The recent turmoil in credit markets seems has given rise to numerous bloggers with investment advice about troubled companies. Many authors are failing to fully disclose their conflicts of interest about the stock about which they write.

Lastly, writers need to take their research to the next level. A major problem with financial blogging is that the majority fail to take the time to develop a concrete empirically supported investment thesis. Anyone can put in writing that a company will not go bankrupt or is undervalued; if you claim to be a financial blogger / researcher you need to provide data to support such arguments. I challenge the blogging community to pick up where I leave off. That point of departure is providing readers with concrete valuations and numerical tests to support an investment thesis.

As I write this letter I am filled with bittersweet feelings. I am elated that I am embarking upon a professional equity research career. Indeed, getting here has been a long and arduous journey. My saddness lies in the fact that I must no longer write for my blog. Financial blogging has a bright future which begs the question how do we monetize the industry?

Again, thank you all for reading and I hope that you gained some good insights and enjoyed my writing. I hope that financial bloggers will take up the challenge I issue above.

To show that I have a sense of humor my associate Louis Entsminger gives everyone a meow of thanks. He is my girlfriends cat.

Sincerely,
Steve Rubis

stevenrubis@yahoo.com