Here’s a secret, Gordon Gekko keeps a blog. It’s known as the Prince of Wall Street - Updated daily covering finance news, finance gossip, economic commentary and the madness of wall street.” POWS is authored anonymously by an Ivy League college senior on the verge of an investment banking career intent on becoming the “King of Wall Street.” If the complexity of his posts are any indication, that goal is certainly achievable.

Theme

There are basically three camps within the larger genre of business blogs on the web: The abundantly smiley’d Get-Rich-Quick camp, and the exuberant Motley-Fool-inspired “Anyone can get rich, even you!” camp. But off to the side, barricaded by a dense forest of weighty vernacular sits the Insiders camp. Prince fits squarely in that third camp, and seems directed almost exclusively to similarly-minded Wall Street denizens. If you don’t have at least a basic understanding of words and phrases like “writedown,” “twice the inverse exposure,” and the puzzling “P/EBITDA and P/E basis,” it’ll be a challenge to follow some of The Prince’s posts.

Highlights

However, there are a few articles more accessible to us mere mortals. Like these, for example:

Gifts for the Guy Banker You Love - A pricey wish list sure to please any Wall Street worker. While it isn’t exactly something that would do well on Digg or Reddit as link-bait, I could easily see an article like this printed in Forbes magazine.

King of the Week - Peter Thiel - An engaging expose on the PayPal co-founder. This is undoubtedly my favorite piece on POWS because I enjoy reading about successful people and what they did to get to the top. The recurring “King of the Week” should definitely be something to look forward to in the future on this blog. Actually, it would be interesting to see a whole blog devoted to a feature like this. I wonder if anyone is already doing one.

Trading Tour: UBS Trading Floor in Stamford is Gigantic - I love this quote: “That is a lot of testosterone in one room, then again, it is a big room.”

Design

POWS employs a simple design hosted off WordPress using the appropriate “The Masterplan” theme. You may notice that this theme is somewhat similar to the newly blog-ramped Skelliewag. As is the case with WordPress themes, many of them look so closely related that sometimes you’ll be surfing and confuse one blog with another merely because they look almost alike. Prince does add his own flavor to the theme, albeit in a generic sense. There’s a close-up shot of a trading board in black and white, the obvious Wall Street road sign, as well as a trading room, all in headline banners pictorial. Pretty bland, yes, but then considering POWS is “value-based,” a modus operandi I embrace around here, it’s clearly not meant to dazzle the eye.

Debatable Points

• Overall this is a clean-looking blog, but I did notice some weird scripting on the very bottom of the homepage that seems to be for an ad of some kind: ” var dc_UnitID = 14; var dc_PublisherID = 27232; var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘black’; var dc_isBoldActive= ‘no’; var dc_adprod=’ADL‘;”
• Also, the “Home, About,” and “Archives” links do not always load correctly on the front page. This may have something to do with the theme code.
• The ads slow down the loading time noticeably. There are four ad zones on the homepage and two in an article page. That’s not many, but if there’s one thing I believe it’s that you really shouldn’t have any ads until your site is pulling in substantial traffic. As much as I would like to host Max-Bro off WordPress and put up ads in the hope of making extra cash, right now is not the time. I say build your blog slowly and take things one step at a time. Even a few hundred visitors a day aren’t going to add much in your Google Adsense earnings, so why diminish your blog’s brand with unnecessary ads right from the get-go?
• Thumbs up on the crown logo.
• Big thumbs up on the well-written ‘About’ section.

Conclusion

This is a great blog if you’re a Wall Street type. If not, you’re more than likely going to feel excluded. There were many articles where I wished The Prince would slow down and explain something in layman’s terms so I could better understand what he was talking about. It’s understandable why he doesn’t “dumb it down,” to use a crude phrase, given the target audience, but still it’d be nice. Perhaps this can be solved with the help of a knowledgeable guest blogger who can make difficult financial concerns simple for the masses.

Aside from the high academic tone of the blog, I can see POWS becoming a very successful blog in the future given that it updates daily and deals with in-depth current events. Whether it will attain the title of “trusted” source (i.e., something a Forbes-reader would add to his list of reputable resources) is something POWS subscribers will ultimately decide in the future.

Above all, this blog needs more personality. Prince, tell us about yourself and what made you choose investment banking. Tell us about your experiences in college. Don’t just give us facts and figures, give us the inside scoop on what it’s like dealing with millions of dollars per microsecond. Is it like the world of Gordon Gekko? Is it like how Tom Wolfe described it in The Bonfire of the Vanities? Give your readers the human side and they’ll love you for it.

-mb