Best 25 Financial Blogs

Over the last month 24/7 Wall St. has looked at more than 100 financial blog websites. The list came from those blogs mentioned at major media sites and the largest aggregators of financial blogs, SeekingAlpha and BloggingStocks. We also reviewed the lists of "blogrolls" —favorite blog lists—at long-established financial blogs like The Kirk Report and financial commentary sites like Minyanville.

After we narrowed the number of financial blogs down to about 50, we tracked posts for several weeks before picking the final twenty-five.

Original content was our most important measurement: specifically, content that was well-written, well-researched and crisp. Blogs that were mostly aggregations of content from mainstream media did not make the cut. This meant that the majority of the copy had to be directly written by the blog's author(s).

Blogs that used profanity were also excluded from the list. It is well recognized that traders are a notoriously bawdy bunch. And, unfortunately, a number of these blogs are incredibly insightful. However, our aim was to create a list that avoided offending any of our reader's delicate sensibilities.

Anonymous blogs also did not make the cut. It is too difficult to understand the agenda of a blog where readers cannot figure out the writer's identity and potential motivations.

The final major metric was frequency of posting. If a blog had very good content, but the author only posts once or twice a month, it becomes too hard to follow without referring back to the same story and waiting for weeks for it to change.

24/7 Wall St. also looked at how well read the blogs were based on the number of other blogs that linked to each websites on our list. These figures were provided by Technorati, the internet's leading blog search engine. (Because Technorati indexes more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time, these numbers are subject to change.) This is the one audience or traffic metric that is universally available for all the websites on the list.

See the best business deals of 2008.

For constant business updates, go to 247wallst.com.