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Personal Finance: A million dollars for you to play with - UpDown

http://www.theupdown.com

That got your attention didn’t it? You were probably fantasizing about all that bling and bong you could buy with a million bucks. Unfortunately, its virtual money (kinda like Linden dollars) you are given to play the market with. Its similar to Motley Fool Caps where you create a portfolio and you are competing with other registered users to see who brings in the most moola, greenbacks, dough, or whatever you want to call it. HOWEVER, here’s the BIG difference, you have a chance to earn real money. Yes, real money. Yeah, now we’re talking. According to their site, here are three ways you can earn some real money:

• Beat the market to a bloody pulp: The money is determined by the spread by how much you whoop the market’s booty and the consistency of your track record.
• Become a stock analyst: Well sort of…its similar to mystery shopper except you wear the mystery stock analyst hat. You write up a well received stock analysis which in turn may generate some more cash for you.
• Become a mouthpiece for them: Refer people to the site and you get a bonus. Also, when your referrals earn some real money, you get a cut of that too.

Hey, maybe your chance of getting a million dollars might happen although if you are that good, you might as well play the market with some real money.

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Personal Finance: Blogging Stocks

http://www.bloggingstocks.com

Blogging Stocks is an investment weblog owned by AOL/Time Warner. Its reports on the latest financial/business news, financial book reviews, profiles Web 2.0 companies, and as the title suggests, it discusses stocks. They are very prolific in their postings so if you find you like the site, be sure to subscribe to a feed. Its been compared to Seeking Alpha a website focused on investing coverage. My personal opinion is Seeking Alpha is more of a pure investment site which can be more geared for you finance geeks. Blogging Stocks is more diverse and lighter in its coverage to cater to a wider audience.  It also has less of the investment goo to keep you finance marathon runners happy. You can filter the business and investment news by selecting groups of companies categorized by the alphabet. At the bottom of the page it also provides a snapshot of the latest postings of various companies such as GE, Microsoft, Walmart, Google, Ebay, and Apple.
An interesting and differentiating area for Blogging Stocks is their Money Faceoff section where they compare famous individuals or organizations each other from a financial and business standpoint to see who comes out ahead. They also have a poll to allow visitors to vote for their pick. The latest one I read was on the Oprah versus Martha Stewart face off. If they were in a fight, I would have to put my money on Oprah even though Martha might have honed her combat skills during her time behind bars.

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Personal Finance: Consumerism Commentary

http://www.consumerismcommentary.com

Consumerism Commentary is a popular personal finance blog covering a wide range of personal finance topics. If you look at the topics/tags on the left side of the page, you’ll see what I mean. One day they may talk about credit cards (guide to the different AMEX cards) and the next day its about getting free fortune magazine online subscription. I also found out there is a Tupperware product designed just for salads with a dressing chamber and utensils. Since I’m a meat and potatoes kind of person, I’ll pass on this. Now, I don’t know that many personal finance blogs that meander into that territory but its still related to personal finance since its about bringing food to work. There’s also tips on how to have romantic outdoor dates for under $30, one of them is canoing on a river.  Just be sure you map out the territory so that you don’t hit some class 6 rapids, if you do you can forget about going on that second date.

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Personal Finance: Looking for what other people are buying? - Motley Fool Caps

http://caps.fool.com

Motley Fool CAPS is a site for social stock picking.  I don’t even know if there’s a phrase called social stock picking but it sounds good enough.  At least its not social nose picking.  From what I read in their FAQ section, the site works by having registered users called players who pick stocks and make a guess on how well it will do.  The players might be some monkeys throwing darts on the stock section of the newspaper, I’ve heard they fare as well as humans.  Once the players make their guesses, CAPS calculates how well they did in their guesses.  The players get a rating and the stocks do too.  As a player gets more credibility by making more and more accurate guesses, they have more weight on the rating of the stocks.  So the benefit for the rest of us fools is we get to find out which stocks have the highest ratings as well as the peeking at the top player’s selections.  The site also holds contests where you can win some money.

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Personal Finance: Social Networking of Stocks - Stockpickr

http://stockpickr.com

Stockpickr is a site where people interested in investing can join and create portfolios of stocks.  They also maintain a list of stock portfolios of professional institutional investors such as Warren Buffett.  Its a place to create your own portfolio, find out what other people are choosing, get some stock ideas, and ask questions about investing.  Once you create your portfolio, the site will track the prices and balances of the stocks you selected in your portfolio.  If you are one hell of a stock picker, your portfolio may make it to the top performer list. It also has integrated analyst opinions, downgrades, upgrades, most actives, and blogs on the latest stock news. The site is tied to Jim Cramer of Mad Money fame and Street.com.

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Personal Finance: SeekingAlpha

http://seekingalpha.com/

SeekingAlpha is an investment analysis site that provides the latest information on the stock market. They get their information from many sources, sift through it, and post the ones they think is worth paying attention to. According to their About page, they are not really in the business to provide news as much as analysis and commentary about investments. They have over 200 contributors that submit articles to their editorial staff.

The site covers the following industries and geographical regions; Internet, China, Energy, Gadgets, Media, Gold, Telcom, Biotech, Japan, and India.

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Personal Finance: Aggregator for Personal Finance Blogs - pfblogs

http://pfblogs.org/

Yes, blogging about personal finance has become so popular that there’s an aggregator for personal finance blogs. It pulls from a bunch of personal finance blogs, its a quick way to scan for the latest blog entries from multiple personal finance blogs. Its also a good site to discover new personal finance blogs. The list on the right pane of personal finance blogs is not the end of it, there’s a link to the entire list. If you have a personal finance blog that you would like to have at or near the top of the list, you can become a friend of pfblogs by becoming a paid member.

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Personal Finance: pfblog

http://www.pfblog.com/

This is the king of personal finance blogs with a large following. The blog is a running log of the author’s goal of saving and investing to reach $1 million by the age of 40. The author is an ex-pat who lives with his family in China. For the voyeur in all of us, the author posts a monthly update of his net worth as well as an annual checkup on his finances. The monthly update and the annual review are presented as balance sheets along with the details of his expenditures and income gains of that period. His site also shares investing and personal finance topics that he comes across such as from Morningstar, MSNBC, WSJ, and etc.

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Personal Finance: The Simple Dollar

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/

Its a personal finance blog maintained by Trent Hamm, the blog discusses a wide range of personal finance and savings topics. Trent discusses how he got to the point which he calls his financial meltdown that was the turning point in his financial life. Its a touching and motivating personal account that is a must read if you decide to check out his blog. One of the good things about this personal finance blog is he shares quite a bit of personal information which gives it a personal touch.
He talks about making your own detergent to save money (now that’s hardcore), discussing money with your children, investing such as comparing the different options between putting the money in an index fund vs a HSBC savings account, and a variety of other financial topics.

Trent maintains on his site that he’s not a financial advisor nor should his discussions be taken as financial advice, nevertheless it’s still refreshing to read his blog since his insight gives more perspective as he’s someone whose going through the same struggles as you. He’s just an average hard working guy taking the steps to plan for his family’s financial future like the rest of us.

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