MarketWatch
Stories from my career at MarketWatch and musings on the media business. I recall dinner with former colleagues, share anecdotes about forecasting and describe the “Two Second Test” for news websites.
- Take a large group of people, let’s say 10,000. Send half of them a message that Team A will win the game this weekend. Send the other have a message that Team B will win the game this weekend.
- Whichever team wins, send a message to that group that you were right. Send no further messages to the group you got wrong.
- Repeat.
Blog Categories via LLM
After using GPT-5 to create category introductions for my website I got to thinking about the categories themselves.
With over 9,800 blog posts spanning 20+ years it is daunting to figure out an approach to categories. It is especially daunting to approach them in a way that would make sense to a visitor to my website. As a test, I gave this challenge to GPT-5 using Agent mode. It took 31 minutes to do the research. I have no idea how many web pages it hit on my site (I wasn’t watching!). It gave me a whole report and the results seem really solid.
Each one of these is also provided a description and examples posts that would fit into it. This seems like a great place to use AI.
Going through my blog and assigning posts to these categories could be done with a script and some vibe coding. Perhaps this will be a winter project for me.
All of this has me thinking that it would be nice for micro.blog to do this for me. I wouldn’t mind having micro.blog use AI to recommend categories for me. But then separately, now that we have categories with introduction text take each of my blog posts and ask the LLM to categories it into the existing structure. All the data is there. 🤔
This chart of SPSC performance since IPO is amazing. Compared to the high growth tech giants — outperforms AMZN, MSFT, GOOG, AAPL. 🤩
Had a super evening with great MarketWatch friends. It has been decades since we worked together, but the stories are were as fresh as ever. Nick, Anna, Jim, Scott – you are all amazing! 🤩🥰
Random Forecasts
We all try to predict the future. Particularly in business, sports, finance, etc. I like to recall a story that Larry Kramer, CEO of MarketWatch, shared with me a long time ago.
Larry had spent a lot of time in finance, but before that had a deep background in sports. Sports betting is a huge industry and people try to prove that they have the edge in picking the winner of any game. So, anyone that can prove that they are a good picker will get attention, or be able to sell their upcoming predictions. Larry shared one of the strategies that he had seen many times.
At the end of three cycles you have 1,250 people that have seen you perfectly predict the last three games. You must be a genius! Will they pay you to get your prediction for the next game? You must have an edge.
So what is the lesson? When someone seems like a fantastic forecaster, make sure you aren’t just one of the people in that third set of people!
Two Second Test
I spent a lot of my career in media and publishing on the web. During that time one of the things that I came to appreciate more completely was the unique journalistic voice that news organizations have. Being responsible for the websites of a number of these sites, I felt it was absolutely critical that whatever Content Management Systems (CMS for those in the business) and other publishing systems we had must allow the journalists to express that unique voice to the reader, via the website. To this end I coined something that I called the Two Second Test.
The Two Second Test is simple. You should be able to show any person the front page of a news website for just two seconds and they should be able to have a feel for what is happening at that moment. Is there big news? Did something great just happen? Something bad? You should be able to intuit it from just those two seconds.
I was reminded of this concept recently when Larry Kramer shared How 9/11 looked on a newly created Internet on that day. His article includes pictures of two framed screen grabs of the MarketWatch page from that day.
I looked at those in Two Seconds you knew something big was happening.
This might seem easy, but the vast majority of news websites even today fail this test. Pick your favorite sites and go to them, look for two seconds, and see what you know. Ask yourself if you know anything? Mostly you don’t.
Most organizations fail this test because of the constraints of their content management system. In order to make their sites work, they have dozens of templates, and they flow articles and blurbs from their CMS into various templates. They change the template for what is going on in the world, but they are always working in a template.
In order to pass the Two Second Test you have to give your newsroom a canvas to work on, not a color-by-numbers template. Along with that power comes risk. The newsroom could put something on the site that has a technical flaw of some sort. Having a strong operational connection between the newsroom and the technology team limits that risk though.
Happy 23rd Birthday BigCharts!
On this day, 23 years ago, we launched BigCharts.com. The time before and after that was fun, stressful, and filled with unknowns. It was a great ride. One of the defining experiences of my life. I love that the site is still around, serving charts for all that want! I’m sure code I wrote is still running on it. 😬
I bet that it is one of the very few sites that can show a graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average back to 1970. I know because I was the one that backloaded that data into the database!
I love that the size of chart bigger than Large is still called Big! I remember the laughter when we came up with that obvious label.
It still is one of the few sites that will give you a historical quote, with the price info for a given day in the past, backing out splits.
I remember the up2.aspx page that we used for the load balancers to make sure servers were healthy.
Here is a team photo from June 9, 1999. It was a tech team dinner at Buca. What a great team!
I hope the site enjoys its 20s and is around for decades to come!
I also shared this on LinkedIn and hopefully we’ll get some old school BigCharts folks commenting.
Was great to catch up today with friends and MarketWatch colleagues Anna Klombies and Jim Bernard.
Playing The .com Edition of Monopoly, of course. 😜 Hilarious tiles. Game starts with $1.5 billion per player. 💸 CBS MarketWatch has a tile, right next to Sun Microsystems!
Google and Amazon are not on The .com Edition Monopoly board. 🤷♂️
I had to buy Sun Microsystems in .com Monopoly. 💙
56k modem for the win! .com Monopoly. 😊
Star Tribune in April 1999 on BigCharts Acquisition
I’ve been cleaning through old files and found the copy of the April 30, 1999 issue of the Star Tribune that I had saved with the article about BigCharts being acquired by CBS MarketWatch. I couldn’t just recycle this before running it through the scanner. Phil sure had some hair back then. 😀
Funny that Phil actually did relocate to San Francisco area, just about 10 years later than this article and had nothing to do with BigCharts or MarketWatch.
Traveling old school with CBS MarketWatch duffel this trip.
