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KICKSTART IT BABY My Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for a finance activism school was a great success. I managed to raise double my initial target, which is a good sign. I also learned a few useful things about the process along the way, which I thought I'd share with people who're thinking about running their own crowdfunding campaigns. Here they are: Choosing a platform There are plenty of articles on what crowdfunding platform to choose , so I won't repeat those here in any detail. I used Indiegogo because it offered the flexible funding campaign - which means you get to keep whatever money you receive even if you don't hit your target. That was appropriate for me because the perks I was offering were limited edition copies of my forthcoming book ( The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance ) and in a sense I was pre-selling them at a premium to fund the School. Thus, even in the event of the campaign failing to hit its target, people still would have ended up with...

I've taken a leap into the world of crowdfunding this week as I launch   my first Indiegogo campaign . I'm aiming to  raise seed funding for a London-based School of Financial Activism . Please do click on the link to take a look at the campaign, and if you feel inspired, I'd love for you to contribute to it! As I've already mentioned in a previous post, I've got a book on the financial system coming out called The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money . I want to launch the School of Financial Activism as a way to build on themes I've developed in the book, and to help everyday people grapple with and challenge the financial sector. As a reward for contributing, I'm offering four uber-cool limited edition series of the book, as follows: The Junior Trader series : 100 softcovers, signed and delivered The Hardass Cityboys : 25 hardcovers, one for each of the 25 wards of the City of London, along with a discount voucher for the ...

USE PEARLTREES INSTEAD BRO I've been experimenting with Pearltrees as a tool for financial education. If you've never used Pearltrees before, it's a cool technology for arranging information, sites and other media into organisational trees. I used it in my last post on Goldman Sachs to show how the company is arranged, and this week I've been experimenting with it as a tool to visually represent the FTSE 100 index. The FTSE 100 is an index of the 100 largest publicly-listed companies in the UK, constituting a major chunk of the UK economy. You can explore the Pearltree in the box below, but for greater functionality, go direct to it here . FTSE 100 and Food Producers / Support Services / Mining in Mega-Indices / (suitpossum) Click on the various pearls to explore the diagram. Clicking on an individual company launches a pop-up window with information. As you can see, it's a pretty simple and intuitive way to present an otherwise abstract list of companies, allo...

Hiss... In 2010 Rolling Stone's  Matt Taibbi infamously referred to Goldman Sachs as a  Vampire Squid , a term that has since then become something of an overused meme (even Taibbi has expressed ambivalence about it). He's but one individual who's tapped into disturbing imagery to describe Goldman though: For example, the other day I picked up  Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs came to Rule the World   by Steven Cohan, repleat with a golden snake on the cover, poised to strike. The sentiment was echoed by Alesio Rastani , the trader who upset everyone by saying Goldman rules the world. I have no doubt that Goldman is a powerful company, and yes, they've been involved in some corrupt-as-hell deals (check out Senator Carl Levin's scathing report about them), but I sometimes suspect that the public hype around the company merely helps to reinforce it's existing self-image - presented in sanitised form in their graduate recruitment videos - as a reposit...

I know what you're thinking: How on earth would I be able to read, let alone rank, 100 blogs? The answer is simple: I have a METHODOLOGY!... and it's about as scientific as a model used to work out the value of a junk-bond backed CLO. Yes, I've taken something completely subjective and added a spurious quantitative element to it. Given that this is standard practice in the financial industry, there should be no problem. The Methodology A category like 'financial blogs' is somewhat loose: I've included blogs that focus on analysis of financial news, blogs that waffle about trading and investment strategies, and more general economics blogs that provide analysis relevant to financial markets. Personal finance sites though, are excluded, so no Mint.com. The methodology is based on 3 voting rounds, during which points are scored. Let me explain... Voting round 1: The List-Makers As a starting point, I sought to identify four pre-existing 'best of' lists that...

BEAR STEARNS (2008) DIMON: "A PIECE OF ART CLOSE TO MY HEART" I have many artists in my family - for example, my mother creates psychedelic textile art , and my uncle  Stidy is a political cartoonist  - but I feel over the last few years that I've been giving too little attention to the dark arts of art. So, welcome to my first exhibition. It all started when I was messing around with one of those demotivational poster generators . I was reflecting on the sad greatness of the now departed Bear Stearns, and Shakespeare came to mind with the speech of Mark Antony , when he says "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears, so that I can sell them to an investment bank that wants to securitise them". One thing led to another, and I created my first masterwork. I called it simply,  Bear Stears , but it is now known amongst collectors as  'ear 'ear . When I first put it out for auction on Ebay, the piece wasn't well understood, it's meaning opaque ...

I have no family in the UK, so I always exhibit strange behaviour on Christmas day. Last year I wondered around the City of London and took photos of empty bank offices, after which I attended a wedding of two Occupy protesters on the steps of St. Paul's cathedral. This year I wandered around Brixton and took photos, including one of the  Space Invader mosaic above the chicken & chips shop on Coldharbour Lane, before going home to watch THREE whole films on the fall of Lehman Brothers. GANDALF VISITS MORDOR Lehman has always held a special place in my heart because I had two interviews there in 2008, mere weeks before it collapsed. I sat up on the 36th floor and was questioned by men whose job it was to ascertain the robustness of my character. One of them said "you may have heard things in the press about us being in the shit, but these are the exaggerations of melodramatic journalists". A week later I was having another interview there, but little did I know t...