So Daniel of Equities.com was kind enough to interview me – I am not sure I sounded good but Dan did try his best to help. Thought readers might be interested so below is a small excerpt.
Jacob Wolinsky (Value Walk) by Daniel Banas, Equities.com
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EQ: What inspired you to start Value Walk?
Jacob Wolinsky: I actually started it as a hobby. I never expected to be doing it full time. I never expected it to be this big. I was just writing on the side, working for small firms. I was writing and then one night, Alice Schroeder, another blogger who has written for Seeking Alpha and Bloomberg, sent me an email, saying she enjoyed my work. I said “Hey, this is cool. I’m going to continue writing. I did Value Walk besides writing for some of the bigger guys like Seeking Alpha just to get my name out there. Then, around late-2011 I decided that I was already making money and I wasn’t so happy with what I was doing at the time. I was kind of tired of being an analyst.
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EQ: It has grown quite a bit since then. What differentiates your blog from other financial blogs out there?
Jacob Wolinsky: There are a lot more people now and many of them are great. In terms of our core avenues, I never planned it this way. It just developed. People trust me, and I made a lot of contacts in the hedge fund world. I have a lot of interesting hedge fund stories. A lot of times I’ll just tell a story for Bloomberg that they couldn’t even get.
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EQ: Do you have any specific long term goal for Value Walk? Do you have a specific goal in mind for the site, or a philosophy behind it?
Jacob Wolinsky: No one knows what the future will bring. I try to do a little bit of long term planning, but there are some things that I would like to do more of. This is my biggest handicap, just trying to find good tech help. I’ve gotten through a lot of candidates, and if you know anyone, feel free to recommend, but I want to build some more data on those types of things.
Hopefully we’re partnering up with some people who already have that, which will help someone in that regard, but this model does work. As you know, there’s a lot more competition in our audience. Not to sound elitist, but our advertising partners and audience are a pretty high demographic. Things are going well. We try to keep up a little if we can, but no earth shattering plans.
EQ: You guys have definitely been successful among many financial blogs out there. Was there any specific point where you saw a real big uptick, and finally felt comfortable that the blog would be sustainable?
Jacob Wolinsky: We’ve been very conservative in our approach. The end of 2014 was especially spectacular, and 2015 is already even better. It’s been really good as late, and we’re cash flow positive. So, even though there’s so much more competition, and there’s a lot of trends in the space that are difficult to deal with, 2014 was much better than 2013.
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See the full interview Equities.com
