Fun With Mutual Fund, ETF Website Traffic Data

The next time you have an hour or two—sooner if you just can’t resist—check out the mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) sites in the investing and financial management categories of SimilarWeb.com, which reports on Website traffic. There’s a free version, which will keep you more than occupied, and a few paid subscription levels.

The individual profiles help with competitive intel about traffic levels and traffic sources, including search and social (organic and paid). Taken in aggregate, they provide a fascinating perspective on how sites are networked on the Web. Also, it’s motivating, isn’t it, to think of all of these investors in search of information?

About The Data

Like Comscore and Nielsen, among others, the data that SimilarWeb reports is based on panels of participants. SimilarWeb claims to be “several times bigger than traditional panels. This allows us to learn about every Website, big and small, and overcome the statistical errors that are typical of smaller panels.”

However, SimilarWeb’s data is of desktop traffic exclusively, and therefore not comprehensive. Mobile visits are an increasingly significant chunk of asset manager site traffic.

If you use just the free access of SimilarWeb, take note that sub-domains of Websites are reported individually. Because many asset managers rely on multiple sub-domains or maintain separate domains, the rankings will under-report the effectiveness of a competitor online. And, it can be tricky to assess traffic out of context.

For example, BlackRock.com looks to have doubled its traffic in 2013. Is that the result of a very good year or is there another explanation—e.g., a consolidation of domains, for example?

The paid version of SimilarWeb allows for the selection of either All domains and Main domain. In the comparisons I cite below, I looked at All domains.

There seems to be a lot of movement in the top 100 rankings. I reviewed the data as of November 30 and as of December 31, and the composition of the list changed more than just a few positions.

Here’s a random list of what I found interesting about traffic to investing sites in general and to the industry’s most-trafficked sites. I’ve restricted myself to quoting only data that can be viewed for free on the site.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

First, how about some respect for the granddaddy and still number 1 among investing Websites: YahooFinance.com?

SimilarWeb says the site attracted almost 2 billion visits in 2013, 150 million in December alone. Yahoo Finance stays on top the old-school way—63% of its traffic comes from links from other sites, towering over search, social or even direct as a traffic source.

No asset management site whose data I reviewed comes anywhere close to that, and yet referrals can be an enduring source of traffic.

The New And The Odd

Quite a few new and new business-model sites have broken into SimilarWeb’s top 100 in the U.S. investing category. For example, Twitter skeptics, note that StockTwits ranked #15 in December. Two-year-old Wealthfront, “the largest and fastest-growing SEC-registered, software-based financial advisor,” breaks in at #94 on the list.

Does anyone else find it odd that of all the possible investing sites out there (including yours) FINRA.org comes in at #42? CFAs make CFAInstitute.org crazy popular (#63).

2013 Traffic Stable Or Climbing

The syndication of content and the popularity of social platforms together call the question: What's the future of corporate domains? When I last wrote about this topic in 2009, I cited asset management Website data that pointed to declining usage and traffic.

But the 2013 12-month view of traffic—visits and not visitors—available from SimilarWeb suggests that traffic to most sites has been stable, if not climbing.

Fidelity And Vanguard

Traffic to Vanguard.com ranks it as the first mutual fund/ETF site in the U.S. investing category—separated by about 2 million visits from TRowePrice.com, the next highest mutual fund/ETF site on the list.

Fidelity’s nearly 16 million visits trump all, but is categorized in SimilarWeb’s “financial management” category.

Winning Search Traffic

It appears that even the best trafficked sites could do much better at winning search traffic. This is lamentable given all the content available on asset management sites (and tons in the making). Most sites fail to significantly benefit from search results for search terms other than derivatives of their brand names.

Here’s an exception worth noting: In 2013 about 4% of Fidelity’s enormous traffic came from the search term: 401k. Impressive—and, of course, it helps that 401k.com redirects to a Fidelity domain.

Also, a few ETF providers are gaining hearty traffic from searches of their ticker symbols, albeit another form of branded search. Promoting their longer ticker symbols is something mutual funds have not tended to do.

A Few Social Surprises

Speaking from experience, one could lose oneself in the detail that SimilarWeb provides about social traffic.

The paid version reports the total number of socially sourced visits for the year and by that measure, Vanguard was the most effective social asset manager in 2013. But BlackRock came on strong in the fourth quarter. As can be seen reported on the free SimilarWeb, 12% of BlackRock’s estimated 400,000 monthly visits is 50,000 visits. From Social alone.

There are a few surprises in the composition of the social traffic. For BlackRock, YouTube was the major contributor. For Fidelity, it was Facebook.

But Vanguard’s top social driver was Reddit aka "the front page of the Internet." Reddit has been a strong source of traffic to more consumer-type sites (although reportedly less so in 2013 than in 2012). Vanguard, and Fidelity to a lesser extent, got a sizable amount of referrals from the platform in 2013. Reddit traffic drove visits to PIMCO, iShares, even American Funds last year.

What SimilarWeb can't tell us is the quality of the traffic or how successful the firms were in converting it.  

What about Twitter and LinkedIn? According to the SimilarWeb data, Twitter is driving more traffic than LinkedIn but both are just runner-ups.

Here’s a kick: Yahoo Bookmarks drove more traffic to the asset managers in the top 100 list than LinkedIn. It's a good reminder that investors and others are using all manner of new and old tools to keep track of what's happening on your site.

Have fun checking all this out.

Note: Yesterday RIABiz named this blog one of the top 10 blogs (#9) in the advisory community. It’s a thrill to be included in such a prominent set of commentators, and it makes me want to try harder to deserve the honor. I recommend the full list of blogs—which also includes the 10 bloggers’ recommended blogs—to you.   

Social Media And The Asset Management Industry: What’s The Plan?

This is a different role for me. I’m not usually the naysayer in the crowd. Nay is not something I ever say. But a piece published by EY in the UK about the urgency of social media to the asset management industry worldwide has me struggling to suspend belief. 

Specifically, the EY EMEIA Asset Management Viewpoint "Asset management and social media," with a November 2013 date but published online December 19, envisions a much more evolved and involved industry in just six years: 

"The effective use of social media does not just have the potential to improve asset managers’ revenues. It also offers some unique benefits in the post-purchase evaluation phase, by giving asset managers the chance to gather feedback direct from individual investors. This is not limited to views of fund performance. It includes the opportunity to engage with investors to better understand other drivers of their satisfaction. Asset managers can then use this insight to shape their development of products and services."

So much would have to happen in order for most of this to come true. I just can’t see it. I recommend you read the full report (link opens a PDF). Here's my reaction, I'd love to hear yours below.

More Direct Sales in the UK

Straight up, let’s acknowledge that retail distribution in the UK has a different composition than in the United States. 

In the UK, according to the Investment Management Association, more than half of retail sales come from fund platforms, and that rose six percentage points from October 2012 to October 2013. Forty percent of 2013 sales came from Other Intermediaries (includes wealth managers, stock brokers and IFAs). That share fell from 45% just one year earlier. Direct sales are about 7%. 

By contrast, according to the Investment Company Institute in 2012, 82% of funds owned outside of a retirement account by households were purchased through an investment professional. 

If social media—or, increasingly, social business—is going to shape asset manager relationships with investors in the United States, financial advisor intermediaries are going to be a part of the equation. That’s one point of departure from what EY's proposes as a global vision.

U.S. Firms Are The Most Advanced

The report characterizes social media in the asset management industry “as very much in its infancy.” Every once in a while, I’ll talk to someone from a European publication and they say that the U.S. market is easily more advanced than the UK. Just 10% of European asset managers “see social media as a key element of their marketing efforts, compared with almost 50% in the U.S.,” according to Cerulli Associates research quoted in a June 2013 Ignites Europe article.

If our experience is the most advanced, I feel quite certain that EY’s plan for 2020 is off the mark.

As we begin 2014, online interaction with most U.S. asset management firms is limited to non-existent. Few of the relatively few firms that offer blogs allow commenting. The industry's most followed Twitter account, @PIMCO, doesn’t reply, retweet or follow whatsoever. The recent change to Twitter activity has been a pullback—replies from most accounts are confined to customer service responses and retweeting has virtually stopped. Across U.S. firms, some are still fighting the battle to add social sharing icons to their Websites. 

With that as perspective, take a look at what EY expects asset managers worldwide to be doing in six years.  

I’m not saying that this vision wouldn’t 1) be cool (or that most digital marketers wouldn’t be all over it!) and 2) be consistent with how social is changing other businesses. And, indeed, random tweets directed at firms suggest that some people are becoming to expect more of this. It doesn't occur to them that asset management firms should be any different. And by that I mean, pretty much the same as they ever were. 

The interactions EY envisions would require wholesale changes. These go beyond considering social media "a key element in marketing." They would revise how everybody within the firm does business. Legal/Compliance would have to greenlight the establishment of forums for asset managers to respond to criticism or negative stories. And the money managers would have to participate, with Customer Service, Sales/Marketing and IT all in the mix as well. Systems would need to be overhauled, if not built.

Most important: These changes would have to be preceded by agreement that the business needs to evolve in this direction, and development of a business-transformative strategy. (For more on this, read Altimeter Group's The State of Social Business 2013.) 

All of this by 2020? No way. I know of few firms working on plans to more broadly include financial advisors in strategic direction, product development and feedback, let alone investors.

As Time Marches On

Much of the EY argument hangs on the emergence of inflows from Generations X and Y and increasingly social investors. In the United States we see plenty of industry random discussion about the implications. Two recent examples: Fidelity believes the advisor’s role will evolve to “validator.” Finect looks for social interactions to drive more transparency—in the selection of advisors and products—in 2014. 

But I see no call to change. It's outside the traditional industry participants where do-it-yourself wealth management sites are working on offering some of what EY proposes.

I was eager to read this EY report. To date, firms have been following their own paths on the social networks, publicly sharing very little about their strategies. There has been no industry articulation of what the promise of social business is for investors or intermediaries, no shared roadmap.

The EY report—unless maybe it’s a straw man?—isn’t it. Is anybody else working on one?

22 Content Highlights To Remember From 2013

“And, the audience sprang to its feet and cheered…”

If you’re in the online content business, such physical signs of positive reinforcement are hard to come by. But, know that what you do is appreciated and often celebrated.

The following list contains 22 pieces of content. I cheered these gems when I learned about them at one point or another in 2013 and they've stood the test of as much as 12 months' time.

As in previous Rock The Boat Marketing annual content highlights (last year’s), this is an idiosyncratic compilation across multiple digital marketing subject domains. Most of these I like for their content, some for their design, their delivery or the evolution they represent. They're presented in no particular order.

Want to play along next year? Come join me on Twitter where the majority of these highlights were surfaced by the awesome information hounds I either follow or am led to. In 2013, I also explored more content on LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest—follow me on those networks or just check in once in a while on this site's Resources page.

1. How Google Reads Minds

The results that Google presents to you the searcher are based on how it “understands” the words you type into the search engine. You know what you want but your search query may have literal meanings that you don’t intend.

This excellent Vertical Measures graphic from April details what Google has in place to read your mind, and how that's evolving. The screenshot below is just a slice of the full infographic.

2. No Money Manager Is An Island

Part of being social is taking part in the broader community. Quite a few mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms seemed to acknowledge that this year with how they managed their social accounts. We saw more accounts following others, more sharing of others’ content and an occasional #FF (Follow Friday) recommendation.

No less than PIMCO’s Bill Gross acknowledged that investment and economic insight takes a village—and people showed a lot of interest in who influences this influential money manager. From August, this is one of PIMCO’s all-time most favorited tweets. It would have been too much to expect him to use the Twitter handles.

Gross: Strategists/writers I follow? Dalio, Durden, Bianco, Arnott, Aitken, Santelli, Grant, Grantham, Inker, Marks, Quaintenance & Brodsky

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) August 9, 2013

3. And We Are Doing This Why?

“…The silence around the economics of content is deafening,” says Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner in this July post 16 Ways to Turn Content Marketing into Business Value. Skinner then proceeds to break down what he names as catalysts of content marketing value: brand, next click, relationship, reach, data. 

Many firms aspire to be content factories today, which is all well and good. Before you plow ahead into production, read the Skinner post to make sure you’re aligning what you’re doing with what drives value.

4. While You're At It, Throw In Some Sincerity, Too

It’s a good idea to present yourself as authentic and transparent. But, um, as this Tom Fishburne cartoon from June suggests, you may need to bring that in-house.

5. DIY Dashboard Help

Marketers need to be more analytical. That drumbeat got louder and louder as the year progressed. If you’ve ever found yourself looking for Excel training applied for marketers online, you may be happy to learn about this Excel dashboard series. Written by Annie Cushing and augmented by a video or two, it started in June on Search Engine Land and then continued on Marketing Land. 

6. Showing Signs Of Life On Google+

This November update isn’t on the list because the content is break-out. It’s a little more Facebook-y than I like for Google+.

But it’s an example of how the largest mutual fund company is not just experimenting but succeeding (relatively speaking) in engaging people on a social network that most investment companies have decided to ignore.

More than 700,000 people have circled the Vanguard account, 22 people +1ed this post, three shared it and 13 commented. And, what other social network (i.e., somebody else’s platform) provides such open real estate (no ads) for your message and yours alone?

7. A Map Can Show You Where You Need To Go

Infographics were so 2010. Still, I couldn’t resist spending several minutes of my life with this Gartner Digital Marketing Transit Map released in June.

Gartner says, "Organizations should use the map to identify the connection among business functions, applications tracks and providers. Map elements can be used to find additional research or structure questions about strategy and best practices as well as providers, products and selection criteria. It is also a useful device for mediating discussions between marketing and IT."

Show this to the people in your life who think all digital marketers do is email and the Website.

8. Right Time, Right Place

Advertising a financial advisor-only conference call? On Twitter? By Royce Funds? Yes, yes and yes. In October, Royce Funds showed its leading edge lead-generation chops by employing a Twitter card to drive sign-ups.

9. Lovely To Learn From

Design is rarely front and center for digital marketers, and yet it's especially important at a time when so many clients and prospects access information via mobile devices. You’ll take a lot from this Prophets Agency presentation published last January—and follow the account to learn when the 2014 outlook is available.

Trends in interactive design 2013 from Prophets Agency

10. Where Do I Sign Up?

Few of us have high expectations when we go to a conference Website. Oh sure, the highest-profile events command the resources to deliver a functional, pleasant experience, but the majority of event sites lack luster.

That’s not the case with this vibrant LPL Connect 2013 site. I’d bookmarked it during the August event (which I attended by hashtag only) and hoped it would still be reachable when I returned to it for this list.

Outstanding—not only did it not go dark after the event, it’s been updated. Why would you go to a conference site afterward? Just one reason, probably. LPL lets the presentation archive dominate the home page, while most event sites require attendees to go looking. All that’s missing from my cursory review of the site is a Search capability. 

11. Sharing The Data

TD Ameritrade knew there was value in providing insights on what its investors were thinking. Previously, according to their Website, they'd satisfied media and others’ requests for information with opinion surveys.

That approach was upgraded considerably in January with the release of a quantitative, behavior-based index that reports on what retail investors are actually doing.

The Investor Movement Index, based on a sample of the firm’s 6 million accounts, is a tool that has ongoing marketing and communications utility. It raises the bar for other investment companies whose proprietary data contains insights when aggregated.

Wouldn’t it be cool (and ostensibly instructive) to someday get a full picture of what investors and 401(k) participants are doing, via a single site driven by the sampled and anonymized data from individual brokerage and investment firms?

12. Two Pictures = 1,000 Words

Nowadays, people are relying on mobile devices to share what they see around them and especially the news. We all need to plan accordingly.

Not that you needed the previous two sentences after looking at these photos comparing people anticipating a 2005 papal announcement in St. Peter's Square, Vatican City, and those in March 2013. 

If your client or boss isn't taking mobile strategy seriously, show them this picture of the Vatican crowd: pic.twitter.com/CPlrCbwrnp

— Fike (@MichaelFeldman) March 15, 2013

13. We Were Right There With You

From Google Earth to Reddit to Twitter, the Internet was focused on April’s Boston Marathon-related bombings.

From my perspective, this is the best content that came out of it. The rest of us were worried about Bostonians. In an inevitably schmaltzy way (is there any other when Neil Diamond is involved?), this video demonstrated their resilience. 

14. The Dope On SERPs

Google’s search engine results page (SERP) changed big-time in 2013. In October Moz provided a visual guide to all the variables that could possibly appear in (mostly organic) search results and why. Study the full guide (the screenshot below is just an excerpt) but don’t bother printing it—things may have changed since you started this post.  

15. Starting With Why

Water Investing, Calvert’s iPhone/iPad app launched in November, is different from other investment manager apps in at least four ways: 

• It’s about something—the world's water crisis—as opposed to being a container of investment commentary and investment product information. The embedded video is effective at using the medium to communicate more than just words and images could.
• Its Daily Drip is an aggregation of others’ (non-Calvert) views and updates.
• It offers the tweets of not just the firm but three analysts using a #CalvertH20 hashtag.
• It includes a "Play" feature that uses the device's camera to simulate a water effect. Kinda corny but something to build on.

16. A Framework For Your Work

You could land on any blog post on Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor site and find Web analytics gold. But, make a special effort to read See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework. Your entire day every day can be filled in the pursuit of digital marketing tactics. This post is a nudge to be more strategic in how you think about your work and its effectiveness.

BREAKING: Sorry, I can’t let this post fly without also mentioning a December post in which Kaushik lays out a digital marketing “ladder of awesomeness.” Another must-read. You might just want to subscribe to this site.

17. Endorse Me As Father of The Bride

A chuckle is the last thing I expect when I log into LinkedIn but, no kidding, some of the photos being used for profiles are funny. This MarketingProfs 19 More Reasons Your LinkedIn Headshot May Be an Epic Fail presentation is not exaggerating. Too bad it doesn't touch on one of the types of photos I commonly see. Men in tuxedos, really?

19 Reasons Your LinkedIn Photo Is an Epic Fail from MarketingProfs

18. Looking Under The Hood

Last week was all about learning an hour of code. I’m guessing most of you sat that one out. But this week, how about learning to just read the source code on your Website?

If your work has anything to do with optimizing your site for search engines, this KISSmetrics post from August provides an excellent foundation for how to confirm what's happening on your site. Bonus: Check other sites' source code to learn what they're up to. This screenshot is just the first example the post provides.

19. Out Of The Ashes

First there was the dramatic reading by James Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell of Jenna’s Facebook for a Sprint commercial. I loved that. Moving onto the digital realm, on YouTube two actors re-enacted a YouTube comment war between two One Direction fans.

But the investment industry has nothing to do with most memes. We wouldn’t do the Blurred Lines knock-off videos, twerking is out of the question, and the President of the United States took part in a selfie before an asset manager CEO has. 

So, while I suffered along with other financial services marketers when the #AskJPM Twitterchat imploded, I have to say that a subsequent CNBC video published the next day thrilled me. Stacey Keach provides the dramatic reading. 

It didn’t go anywhere (just one tweet!) but let history show that this may have been the first stab at a meme. Thanks to my buddy Todd Donat for first sending me the link to this.

Too soon? I hope not.

20. In Another's Eyes

When one Website sneezes, do the other Websites catch a cold? Nah, the failings of healthcare.gov just inspired Slate in October to show how iconic sites Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon and Windows would have made the site over in their own image and likeness. Pretty genius. 

21. Borrowing From The Journalists

The introduction of data, including visualization, can add to the usefulness of content you’re creating.

But this is yet another competency that people in marketing positions today will have to learn on the job. Most likely, you will not be crunching the numbers, you’ll be managing the data-driven work. To be an effective partner and contributor you may have to dig in.

It was prepared for journalists and not marketers, but the Data Journalism handbook may be just the resource you need. The handbook, a version of which is also available in print, is a project of the European Journalism Centre’s Data Driven Journalism initiative.  

22. Tech To Watch Out For

The Marketing Arm’s Tom Edwards, the author of this contribution to iMedia Connection, sounds like he has one cool job as an evaluator of interactive/new media and emerging tech.

We’re the beneficiaries as he outlines—and provides plenty of examples of—six marketing technology trends. Included: collaborative commerce, curation, second screen and social TV, rich social media, crowdsourcing and social and CRM. The screenshot below shows the user interface of a social TV app.

This post will do it for me for 2013. Happy Holidays to all and see you back here in the first week of 2014! 

The Best Email, Websites, Social Media, Content, Presentations In 2013: Others’ Reviews

For those of us susceptible to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), year-end reviews are a tonic. They can catch us up, help us see an underlying order to what we’ve just lived through and provide some perspective on how to tackle the next year.

Rock The Boat Marketing is taking a two-post approach to putting a bow on 2013. On Monday, you’ll see RTB’s annual Content Highlights of the year. What follows is a compilation of what others have called out as noteworthy.

Email

Email is the mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketer’s workhorse—it’s what digital marketers do the most, email is interacted with the most and it produces the most results.

Every year at about this time, I regret that I haven’t paid more blog attention to email. As a Chicago Cubs fan, I take comfort in knowing that there’s always next year to atone (and note that I’ve started by listing email first in this post).

In the meantime, please check out this iMedia Connection post highlighting the innovative approaches your peers in other industries took with email in 2013. This industry could use some of that.

Websites

Everybody has been at it so long that lists of "best" Websites tend to have little turnover year after year. If you’re looking for fresh inspiration, check out this DailyTekk list of “the 100 Best, Most Interesting Blogs And Websites Of 2014.” Best enjoyed after hours and on a tablet.

Social Media

Such a big topic it would have been easy to go off the tracks—or run longer than two minutes—but Socialbakers does neither in this succinct summary of social media networks in 2013. 

Content

Those of us marketing thought leadership pieces have been slogging at it for years, but content marketing took on a life of its own this year.

So, it’s no surprise that year-end content marketing reviews got pretty meta. Example: 18 of the Best Content Marketing Strategy Guides of 2013 by Tom Pick of Business 2 Community. These will tide you over until the Rock The Boat Marketing Content Highlights post next week. 

Presentations

With an August publication date, this HubSpot post doesn’t have a year-end hook. No matter, 20 Inspiring SlideShare Presentations Every Marketer Should See is a valuable curation.

It’s also a way for me to call your attention to the Upworthy approach—hmm, what could you achieve if your team was required to write/test 25 headlines for every piece of content? For more background than what the presentation provides, also see this PDF.

Upworthy: 10 Ways To Win The Internets from Upworthy

See you Monday!

Saving The Best For Last—3 Terrific Asset Manager Videos To Close Out The Year

With several years of talking head experience behind them, many mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms are getting the knack of using video to engage, educate and even inspire.

From my perspective, these three videos released in the last four weeks or so are among the best of the year.

Required Viewing

Can you think of any other investment firm that regularly cautions investors to stay away from its products?  

If you cannot tolerate substantial losses in short periods of time stay away from leverage! http://t.co/zlW3CehqWJ

— Direxion Alts (@DirexionAlts) December 3, 2013

Given its leveraged and inverse fund offerings, DirexionShares is practically obligated to provide product education. But they’ve really risen to the occasion with an ambitious set of animated videos that break down what would otherwise be dry issues to have to slog through in text. A transcript and glossary are made available as accompanying pieces.

Double-digit views for all but the first video must be a disappointment. More prominence for the series on the site, including the home page, would lift its visibility.

Go to the landing page and not the individual YouTube video page to see the full presentation.

"We Love Great People"

This new BlackRock video in support of the GLAAD Ally Network initiative employs a lot of familiar devices used in videos—fast pace, multiple smiling faces, people holding signs.

What makes it different is that some of the faces belong to named, senior people at BlackRock. Including the Global Head of iShares, the General Counsel and the deputy chief operating officer adds gravitas. At a time when other firms in other industries are embracing "diversity as a competitive advantage," the video is one way of asserting what appears to be authentic leadership in this space.

The YouTube description explains that BlackRock was recently recognized as a "Best Place to Work for LGBT Equality" by the Human Rights Campaign. Because this video is about something so different than most BlackRock videos, I think it could have been launched with more context—maybe a landing page or a press release. This is not a recruiting video per se, but I could see BlackRock extending its life by adding the video to the firm's LinkedIn Careers page. 

The Animated Case For Diversification

Back in the day, all asset management marketers had was an efficient frontier chart to convince investors that they may want to diversify their U.S. domestic portfolios.

Franklin Templeton raises the bar with this video on home country bias, released in late November. The animation is entertaining but the story had to come first, and it’s in the storytelling where I think this video excels. It's the third in an Investor Education series introduced in late 2012. 

The December 12 RegEd Webinar with Blane Warrene and Susan Weiner, which I mentioned when I published this post last week, has been postponed. Watch for an update from RegEd.

Keep an eye out for RTB's annual Content Highlights of the year, to be published on Monday, December 16. This is a random, thoroughly subjective list that has no articulated criteria. (For example, see last year's post.) That notwithstanding, if you have a nomination, please post here or email me no later than Wednesday, December 11.