Guest Author - Guido Deboeck

For over a year and a half I have posted short articles on this Investing site at BellaOnline. The feedback to my writings has been minimal, but that does not surprise me. While many think that men are often more eager to brag about their investment successes, are far more interested in arguing about where financial markets are going, and probably least interested in admitting losses or defeats, I have yet to find a lot of women who beat those tendencies.

Of course this was just the core reason to start this Investing site: to create greater awareness among women for what is happing in financial markets, create interest in investing, get women interested in beating the markets (if not the natural tendencies of men in this regard).

If I look back over the past year and a half, the effort that has been made has been rewarding. I know for a fact that more and more women are paying attention to this site, even though the forum discussions are not as active as many others. It is clear that this site (in this culture) can not compete with say sites on diet, hair do, fashion etc., although it must be pointed out that in some other cultures (e.g. Japanese) women take a great deal more interest in financial markets than do women in the U.S. May be over time American women will catch up with Japanese women and be as interested in financial markets as in their diet, their hair do, or the latest fashions.

To enhance the effort to get more women in this country involved with investing I have created Women Investing Weekly, a blog that grew out of more than a year and a half of contributions to the investing site of BellaOnLine.

This blog will post the same articles as those on BellaOnLine/Investing, at least originally but over time the presentations will be nicer. More graphs, tables and images will be added to enrich the articles posted on BellaOnline/Investing. There will be cross links posted on both sites, so that you can easily flip from the plain text to the enhanced copies. To facilitate your access to this Blog, you should start by bookmarking the following site:

http://www.flemishDNA.com/Investing/Blog/Blog.html

(Note this link is case sensitive: copy and paste into your browser and save as a bookmark.)

You can visit Women Investing Weekly already now, Some of the most read articles have been copied into this Blog, as well as the two most recent additions.

Why two versions of the same articles? Well, first they will be the same only in the initial period; quickly the BellaOnline articles will turn out to be the reduced versions (our goal there remains to stay within the 500-600 word per article limit) while the articles in my Blog will have more supportive material, graphs and images; they will be presented in a more attractive environment, with no distractions from commercials. This new site will also be easier to monitor meaning besides a simple count of visitors, the interest of the readers will be gauged from a wide variety of web statistics that have become common tools for webpage monitoring (something that until now was not possible at BellaOnline).

Over time material on Women Investing Weekly will be targeted directly to the interests of the readers and the customers. The simpler articles will always be on BellaOnline/Investing; the more in depth stuff will be in my Blog, Women Investing Weekly. Ideally the Blog will generate comments or contributions from the readers, so that through interaction also the readers get to post their ideas.