Steve Rubel and Om Malik have interesting posts here and here that may foreshadow the death of business blogging (motivated by the recent cover story by BusinessWeek on the subject of the power of business blogs). I really like the following chart by Paul Kedrosky where a BusinessWeek magazine cover depicts the death of equities against a plot of a subsequent bull market Dow.
All of this reminded me of a book I read in the late 80s called, "Winning on Wall Street" by Martin Zweig. While not a sole unpinning investment philosophy to the author’s fund, one of the measures as to whether to buy or sell a stock was to measure the number of bull articles versus bear articles in the newspapers. Part of the investment method philosophy was to trade against what the traditional print media was saying.
Well here’s how one of Zweig’s funds is performing.
(Note that Zweig’s book also covers many other economically-grounded measures than trading contrarian to print articles – so I’m not really being fair). Plus here’s another one of his funds that is doing better.
So whether there’s any correlation or not to using magazine covers to predict market trends (and the fall or rise of business blogging), well all of this discussion is entertaining but a bit neither here nor there.
I guess that my view is that I think it’s too early to call business blogging dead or alive. There’s so few corporate bloggers out there, mortalities haven’t been measured, and the timeframe hasn’t been long enough yet. Additionally, bloggers like Bob Lutz (Vice Chairman at GM) show us that even if the business blogging trend dies that big corporations can capitalize and be opportunistic too.
BusinessWeek’s own weblog has a post on this meme.