Accompanying the proliferation of the Internet has been the rise in the importance and impact of financial media. The seemingly archaic way of getting financial news through a newspaper every morning has become almost laughable given how globalized, fast-paced, and constant the markets have become. The Internet has tried to make everything easy. Now you can read all of Barron's, BusinessWeek, the WSJ, and IDD in 2 hours on a PC. However, the Internet has, to some extent, made the plethora of financial media excessive. How can investors, bankers, research analysts, traders, portfolio managers, CEOs, industry professionals, etc. find what the best commentary and insight without losing their mind in the search process? Sure you could sift through the NYTimes, WSJ, IDD, Financial Times, and IBD every morning looking for great financial news and perspectives, but you would 1) waste too much time and 2) miss out on the content in other highly relevant producers of quality financial media, such as the Washington Post, The Economist, Fortune, TheStreet.com, and Bloomberg.

So what to do? How can you be prepared when preparing is nearly impossible given the amount of information out there. Well, if you're in the securities industry, the best place to start is by signing up for Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook, which is published through the New York Times and is delivered to your mailbox every morning. The DealBook contains links to all the best M&A, investment banking, corporate finance, rumors, etc from a variety of different sources and is hands down the most comprehensive free set of links you're going to find. I use DealBook and I try to read it every morning. You can subscribe to the DealBook here: NYTimes Business. Scroll down to the right on that page and you'll see a section to sign-up for it

Your other option to find good financial commentary from a variety of sites is to check out this blog. I am going to try to post some of the things that not only I have found interesting, but also things that others in the marketplace are reading and buzzing about. A financial news junkie, I have been following the markets attentively for the past several years. During these past few years, I have realized that often the best articles lie in Internet obscurity and go unnoticed. So things that aren't covered by the NYTimes or WSJ or Barron's will make appear on this blog because they deserve the attention even if mainstream media overlooked them.

I will try to concentrate on corporate finance, investment banking, private equity, and M&A related news. However, this is not to say that I won't deliver commentary on the economy, investment ideas, international markets, etc.

Many of you will wonder where I find some of the links. I read a lot, for one, but I also get a lot of the news from my RSS reader. For the past year or so I have become addicted to RSS and RSS feeds. RSS stands for really simple syndication and basically allows you to see all the articles that appear on a certain site in one little reader. RSS is becoming very popular among web-users and is also getting looked at seriously by advertisers that are intrigued by the target audience it reaches. To read more about RSS go here. In order to get started on RSS, you'll need a reader. A reader I really like is JetBrains' Omea Reader. I could go on for hours on how this is the best RSS reader on the market, but instead I'll just say it is the fastest, easiest to use, and cleanest RSS program out there. Few people seem to know about it, or so it seems. I rarely hear it mentioned in the same breath as FeedDemon or NewsGator, but I don't know why. Check out Jetbrains' Omea Reader here.

That's it for the first post. This blog will, ideally, be updated 2 to 3 times a day with thoughts and ideas.