I’m out of town most of next week, and blogging will be on hold until Saturday, December 22nd.

If you haven’t already, check out Moneyoga.com. And watch out for a post on an investment strategy at the Moneyoga blog - we’ll talk about the best approach to trading stocks that have declared a bonus or a split.

OK, Galatime.com has officially arrived. It was on Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com:

Yes, I know what this reminds you of - that scene in Monster’s Inc where Mike Wazowski is excited to see himself on TV.

TV Ad: We’re M. I… Monsters, Incorporated. We scare because we care.

Mike: I can’t believe it.

Sully: Oh, Mike…

Mike: I was on TV! Did you see me? I’m a natural!

Apologies for the lack of posts - I was off on a sun ‘n sand vacation to Goa and didn’t get a chance to post before leaving. Looks like I missed quite an interesting week in the markets - a lot to catch up over the weekend!

Quick reminder - you can subscribe to GalaTime via email here:

You still need to visit the site for charts and such, but the daily posts will be delivered to your inbox once you subscribe!

Alternatively, you can add this RSS feed to your aggregator (Bloglines, Google Reader, etc).

Recently, I have also started posting intra-day comments to Twitter; you can follow those online (here) and/or subscribe to the Twitter RSS.

It’s been less than a week since I started using Twitter to post comments intraday, but I’m already looking to change things. The issue is the loading time for Twitter - given its popularity, there is significant delay before the comments show up on my blog. So here are some changes:

• Removed the Twitter widget from my blog, but instead there’s a link to the Twitter page
  • http://twitter.com/galatime
• Subscribe to Twitter comments via RSS - this is probably the most effective way to use Twitter
  • http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/60533.rss
• Start using the India room at Wall Streak (thanks, Ugly!)
  • http://wallstreak.com/posts/india
  • Note that everyone can post comments here - not just me!

In case you didn’t visit the site today, here’s all of today’s Twitter messages (latest one first). - you might find some of the links worth a read .

• Out of EDUCOMP @ 2668, Low volumes, Morning trend down
• Again playing with EDUCOMP intraday, in at 2662 @ 10.40am, morning range was 2640-2695
• Came across this while googling EDUCOMP: http://tinyurl.com/2zfxxj; From 120 to 2700; perhaps fundamental analysis is insufficient?
• Motilal Oswal IPO: August 20-23, Price range: Rs 725-825 per equity share.
• ET: Seven broking firms received ~$270 million in investments by private equity firms during the first six months of 2007.
• Subprime Trouble @ Barclays: http://tinyurl.com/2t8pmx (Jeff Mathews), http://tinyurl.com/2wj6fc (Economic Times)
• More Saut: unusual occurrence of 3 90% downside-days where points lost, and A/D ratio, showed over 90% negative daily readings since July 19
• Latest from jSaut: Despite investors’ panic, these selling-stampedes run 17 – 25 sessions before exhausting themselves on the downside.
• Via mCovel: David Faber reporting today that GS and all “other” top hedge funds are 75%-100% done delevering their stat arb funds.
• Sarcasm from pKedrosky: GS’s GEO quant long-short fund losing 30% last week;tough to do in a market neutral fund, so kudos to ‘em.

I got an account at Twitter, and have put in a widget in my blog’s sidebar. Twitter allows me to post short messages via Web/IM that then show up on the blog. Before you think that this is just ‘time-pass’, check out how effectively Brett Steenbarger uses Twitter to track the US stock markets intra-day.

What would be much more fun is if readers could post messages as well. The Uglychart team has developed Wallstreak to do exactly that. We need something similar for Indian markets!

A Chitika “Blog Dollars” Study says 500 Million

. . . we have estimated that $500 million has been generated within the top 50k blogs in 2006.

$500M! To put that in context, the entire Indian online advertising spend for 2006-2007 was estimated at ~300 crores ($75M).

Blogging will be light over the next few days - not that it’s been too heavy of late - I’ll be off to Chennai to attend Proto.in this weekend. Should be fun - there are 23 startups presenting their ideas / prototypes, and a whole bunch of investors (both VCs and angels) wanting to invest in the best!

Check out the agenda and coverage in Mint:

. . . the basic criterion is that start-ups should have a product that they can demonstrate. The selection is made on the basis of the strength of the product as well as the maturity of the team, and whether they can differentiate themselves in the market.

. . . a number of companies in areas related to online transactions, VLSI (hardware design) and some in the enterprise solutions space. The number of companies in the mobile space has reduced.

The venue is IIT-M; never been there, but heard it’s quite nice. Only thing that scares me is July weather in Chennai!

• Marc Andreessen: Eleven lessons learned about blogging, so far

. . . writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits. I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly).

• Kudzu: Blogging - The Addiction Rehab Can’t Touch

• ProBlogger: How to Make Money Blogging - What We Wish We Knew

bloggers wishing that they’d started experimenting with ads and affiliate programs earlier to others wishing that they’d never started monetizing blogs at all because it was a distraction from what they actually liked doing . . .

. . . traffic from social bookmarking sites like Digg is generally much harder to monetize with contextual ads like AdSense than traffic coming from a search engine.