Welcome to Balhiser Investing. We help investors become better investors. You will find a blog covering a wide range of investing topics: strategies, experiences, investing psychology, savings, financial analogies, ETFs, stocks, bonds and more.
Balhiser Investing provides diverse, independent investing perspectives from investing basics (getting started, credit scores, how stock and bond markets work, investing in mutual funds) to esoteric (option-writing strategies and closed-end fund arbitrage).
We want to take your investing game to a new level. Our goal is to make personal finance clear and accessible to regular people who want to be better investors. From low-cost, fire-and-forget mutual fund and ETF portfolios, to techniques to help tame the part of the brain that always thinks it can beat the market. We provide thoughts and ideas for long-term investors.
Investing Timeline
Money and Investing: How it all began.
- 2000: Learned my friend who was an engineer is now making a very nice six-figure salary in finance after completing his risk management master’s from Carnegie Mellon.
- March 2000: Wondered if I could lock in my gains on unvested company stock options (A) worth $70,000. Noticed put options six months out would cost about $4500. Decided I didn’t know enough about options to buy the puts.
- August 2000: My options were now worth $0.
- September 2003: Started taking graduate courses in finance. Confirmed that my put option insurance strategy would have worked… netting me about $65,000.
- 2004: Started getting unsolicited job offers in finance even though I hadn’t even graduated.
- May 2005: Received Graduate Certificate in Finance.
“Big-Time Investing Advice”
- July 2008. balhiser.com came online.
- October 2008. Balhiser LLC formed.
- July 2009. 50th investing post on Balhiser Investing Blog
- October 2009: Celebrated one year of independent investment info, advice, and strategies.
- December 2009: Diversified by entering the residential real estate market.
2010
- Jan: Applied for business line of credit. Despite excellent collateral, >75% equity, solid business plan, a strong credit report, and positive cash flow position, loan was rejected.
- Jan: Secured $10K private loan.
- Feb: Signed 1-year lease on a Balhiser LLC investment property.
- Apr 5th: Published 75th finance blog article. Invest Like a Vulcan
- Sept 17th: Established the Σ1 Fund, a proprietary-trading hedge fund.
- Oct 25th: Published 100th finance blog article. Computing Beta Again
2011
- Mar: 1-year lease signed renting Balhiser LLC property to new occupants.
- May 12th: Published 125th finance blog post… Are Options, Futures, and Derivatives Useful?
About the Finance Blog
I hope to post weekly or more often on a wide range of investing topics ranging from: strategies, experiences, investing psychology, savings, etc. Talking stock about stocks or bonding with bonds. ETFs are a big topic as are mutual funds and index funds.
The Balhiser.com Investing Blog seeks to provide a diverse perspective with articles ranging from investing basics to advanced personal finance topics. Whether your interest involves 401Ks, ETFs, diversifying your assets, or more advanced topics, this finance blog is a great place to start.
I love comments and feedback. If there are topics you’d like me to blog about just send a comment to a related (or even unrelated) post.
Disclaimer
Balhiser Investing is a financial blog full of my personal opinions, many of which are related to money and finance. I am a blogger, but NOT an registered investment adviser or representative. This finance blog is my foray into “the press”, and exercise of my First Amendment right to be part of a free and open press. All opinions, ideas, stories, suggestions, predictions, and other notions are general commentary and may not be right for your (perhaps anybody’s) specific situation.
Please be aware that I am but a person with a keyboard and an internet connection. I make typos (often) and glaring errors (occasionally). If you find either, especially factual errors, please let me know and I will do my best to fix them. What I am saying is that errors and omissions have and will continue to occur in this finance blog. Similarly comments or guest blog entries are also likely to contain occasional errors; same with the content I link to elsewhere on the Web.
So please enjoy, but use care and common sense. Don’t buy or sell something just because it is mentioned in this blog. Do your own outside research, seek out other people’s opinions, consult your financial adviser, and form your own opinions.
Balhiser.com 
Hi,
I am Merion Fedrick. I just went through your site:http://balhiser.com/ . It was nice. Mainly the pages related to finance are exactly what I am looking for. I am a web master and my site targets the same market as yours. However, as you know only good sites are not enough to increase the site PR and traffic. A healthy and normal link exchange plays the most important role for that. Therefore, I am interested in link exchange with you. I think it will be beneficial for both of us, as it will help to get more visitors in our sites. With that, if you want we can exchange articles. I will try to give you the links in my content so that you can get some extra Google values.
If you are interested, please contact me through mail: marion.fedrick@gmail.com. I will try my best to fulfill your requirements.
Waiting for a quick and positive reply.
Thanks,
Marion Fedrick
LikeLike
Hi Marion,
I am interested. I’ve been busy with sigma1.com which takes off where balhiser.com leaves off… delving into more in-depth, mathematical (quantitative) finance topics.
I’m interested in blog rolling in general. What site?
– Dave
LikeLike
Hello Admin,
This is Jason. I am a professional blogger and loves to write on various financial topics. I’m writing to you because I want to take my author identity to the next level by supplying informative articles to personal finance bloggers. I don’t believe in writing promotional articles, instead I feel informative stuff are something users are most interested in reading.
I would hereby like to request an opportunity to write a guest post on your site, ofcourse free of charge. You can send me your preferred topic, if any, and I would be happy to write an article on it. I can show you some of my past work that have attracted good number of visitors.
I must say, you are doing a great job on with your blog .
I would be happy if you could answer either way!
Sincerely,
Jason Holmes
LikeLike
Hi Jason,
I am very interested in your proposal. It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and I am slowly catching up on my email.
I’m interested in expanding the balhiser investing blog beyond just one-way conversation. I also find that I have more ideas than time to write about them! Finally, I’m finding that my attention has been wandering away from personal finance towards really narrow, esoteric topics like arbitrage, long-short strategy, options strategy, and portfolio risk management… a big YAWN for most investors.
Anyhow, here a few topics that I’d be interested in publishing. 1) “Fire your traditional broker”… ending a unhealthy financial relationship. [alternate title: “Is your Broker Relationship Healthy, or is time for a Change?”] 2) “Small Investor’s Paradise (part II) — How the little guy wins with low-cost ETFs, and free ETF trades!”
3) Vanguard: It just keeps getting better.
Those are just a couple off-the-cuff ideas. Please feel free to propose your own.
Thanks for your interest. I hope we can work something out.
– Dave
LikeLike