Today's post is No. 156, which makes it the 3rd birthday for this weekly blog. Usually, the post at this time of the year is on reflection and also some shameless self-promotion. Regular readers can skip this post without missing much. The topic for this year's post is the value of (The) Boring Investor blog.

The most direct measure of the value of this blog is the amount of advertising revenue received. For 3 years of efforts, the grand total of advertising revenue is... $78.20! This works out to be $26 per year or $0.50 per post! Applying a Price/ Earnings multiple of 12 times, the value of this blog works out to be $312!

There is another way to measure the value of this blog, which is the value that it brings to readers. Besides writing it, I also refer to my own blog from time to time, to remind myself of the actions that I have to take or the rationale for taking certain actions. Generally, the driving force behind this blog is about applicability. It attempts to answer, for example, whether a particular investment is a good one for investors. To this end, this blog has several themes running through it.

Research-based 

To determine whether an investment or a strategy is a good one, sometimes you need a lot of data and research to back it up. For example, do you wonder how the Dogs of Dow strategy would perform in Singapore's context? The answers to this and some other questions are addressed in posts such as the following:

There are a lot of finance books that talk about how to pick and trade stocks. However, they do not discuss what investment strategy should you choose, or what do you do when the stock market goes into a bear market, etc. This is another area where this blog attempts to fill some of the gaps with posts such as:

Blogs are always static information. Thus, we can only talk about things that apply in general which may not be applicable to every reader. For example, is the UOB One account or the OCBC360 account better? The answer depends on the individual readers' circumstances. One of the things that I found out through experimenting is that it is possible to incorporate Javascript in blogs! With this feature, it is possible to take in individual input and produce output that are personalised to individual readers' circumstances. So far, there are only 2 web calculators on this blog:

If you know of any ideas that can be solved using similar features, please feel free to leave a comment below.

The world and our own circumstances are constantly evolving and we sometimes enter into uncharted territories. There are no experience to call upon to navigate these unchartered terrorities. For example, we now have negative interest rates that we thought were impossible only a few years ago. In such cases, we can only rely on understanding the facts, analying the second- and third-order implications and come up with an appropriate answer or solution. Some of the posts that address these issues include:

• Retirement: Concluding Post on Early Retirement
• Tax Planning: SRS Exit Strategy
• Insurance: My Considerations on Eldershield
• Savings: Will Bank Deposits Pay Negative Interest Rates?
• Investment Planning: Getting Ready for US Interest Rate Rises

Conclusion

That's all for my once-a-year rumblings. I hope this blog has brought value to all readers. To those who read through this post even though you know that there is no new information, I thank you for being willing to read whatever I write. Thank you. 

See related blog posts:

• Where it all began: The Beginning of the End
• 1st blog birthday: A Year's Worth of Blog Posts
• 2nd blog birthday: About Blogging and Investing