Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Blogger Deleted My Long Post Scheduled for Publication on Thursday

A very long post scheduled to be published tomorrow was deleted by blogger.com before publication. Although the long post had been saved many times, it was lost entirely after I accidentally moved my wireless mouse slightly to the right which caused a page shift. When I returned to the post, there was nothing left but a blank space and a considerable amount of time was just wasted preparing that post.

I  am not going to write it again. I discussed several recent earnings reports, a few sells, and a number of other items.

I have experienced similar problems with blogger. I found that this latest obvious software flaw to be extremely irritating. Consequently, I have decided to publish only one post a week, probably on a Friday, and to omit discussions of several items that are routinely discussed by me.

I am going to omit discussions of a large number of transactions after the next post, and all earnings reports for positions owned by me, except for those that have already been written. I will then have more time to conduct research and to manage my own money and that of family members. Since I will not be discussing most transactions after the next post, I will not even mention them in the text. Instead, I will select a few transactions to discuss in each week's post.

There will be a post on Friday of this week, unless blogger deletes my draft, and another one next Friday (11/02/12) 

7 comments:

  1. You will be sorely missed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'll miss your daily insights, but I understand your decision. You put a lot of time and effort into your blog which obviously comes at the expense of time spent on research etc.
    Thanks for all the work you've done, and thanks for sharing it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wow....
    Noooo, please do not do that!!!
    You are an integral part of my daily routine....

    I understand your motivations, but maybe you could reconsider and still continue, maybe with a little less
    time invested every day, but pls, pls, continue your daily
    blog!!!!

    Why let a technological bug change something of so much value???

    I guess it is needless to say, but your blog is UNIQUE.
    You actually do have a mission in the web-space....
    If there is anything I could do to help you, I would.

    Pls, pls, reconsider. We will all miss it very much,
    and I hope you will see that YOU will be missing it too???

    ReplyDelete
  4. The post that was scheduled for today was actually longer than the one posted earlier yesterday. I was only making a grammatical change before finishing it when a slip of my finger led to the post being deleted entirely-gone forever. I have run into similar problems in the past. There was one major prior deletion and several deletions involving over 30 minutes of effort.

    I may reconsider in two to five years. I will publish a daily post tomorrow, which was already mostly written when the deletion occurred last night, before going to an entirely different weekly format.

    I attribute some of the investing mistakes that I have made to writing this blog since it distracts so much from research and thinking. So this blog has cost me more than just a lot of time in my opinion.

    I have over 400 securities that I own and several hundred more that I monitor. When I add the securities that are owned in my late father's trust which I manage, my mother's accounts and those of my much older brother, the number is close to 1500 owned securities with a worldwide, broad allocation approach. It is very hard for me to keep track of all of those securities even without writing a daily blog.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'll be sad to not see as many posts by you, but yeah, it's definitely understandable. There's really nobody else who spends as much time and effort into researching and explaining their research as you do. Thanks.

    --Philip

    ReplyDelete
  6. I will add to my original comment only this, I lost my edits many times in many places. Can be extremely frustrating. These days for longer posts I typically edit in a separate desktop text editor and just copy to the web when ready. Local s/w tend to be far more robust than anything java or cloud based. (On my iMac I use MacJournal which backups everything I do every minute or two automatically and can automate posting to blogger sites) )

    On a different note, I've been a reader here for a few months and after noticing a major increase in the average length (and breath) of posts recently I realized this could not go on for much longer, simply because of the time needed to support anything that extensive. And was hoping that maybe this exceptional OG/LB/RB/HK team would slow down a little but could keep this investor diary going, maybe skipping earning reports, company events, updating numerous gateway pages, etc. Just keeping the record of basic transactions, buys and sells (with some basic commentary thrown in occasionally) would be sufficient, most of us can follow your rationale w/o it being discussed explicitly. This would preserve the basic value of this blog that is an honest reporting of investment strategies by one of a few intelligent investors out there. Being able to follow your daily struggles was invaluable.

    Left now with that jerk Cramer and his ilk.

    ReplyDelete
  7. The new weekly format may turn out to be more helpful. Tomorrow's post will be the last daily post for at least two years and it will be both dense and long.

    I have had a few complaints about the length of the daily posts, and for some readers, the weekly format may end up being more useful and far less time consuming for me.

    I will discuss the general format for the new weekly post tomorrow.

    Certain items will be outside the scope of the weekly post. Earnings reports will be one omitted item except when it is material to a buy or sell which is discussed in the weekly post.

    Frequently in the daily posts, I will use a discussion of an earnings report to highlight why the security is being held. Tomorrow, I will discuss several matters relating to MBVT's report that is instructive on important general characteristics to digest in regional bank reports including the safety of the dividend going forward. What data is relevant to making that judgment? A similar type analysis was done with WASH in an earlier post this week. Those types of discussions will be a thing of the past except when I discuss a new buy or sell. They are frequently long and involved and many readers probably skip them anyway, even though I view them important both for the specific company and in general.

    I will have anywhere between 500-1000 trades per year in my personal accounts. I will discuss maybe 200-250 a year now. So all LT selections will have to be omitted, even though they are important to a couple of readers who have made large sums on them. Needless to say, I am not going to buy 20,000 shares of a stock characterized by me in that way.

    Possibly in a couple of years, I will mention how some of these strategies are doing. I will continue to track them since the LB requires monitoring and close adherence to all risk reduction rules.

    ReplyDelete