Joshua Brown, a money manager and blogger, has offered five suggestions for us here at CNBC.com.
It's hard not to get a little defensive when someone tells you what you should be doing. On the other hand, if you don't listen to folks outside of your own little shell, you risk missing out on some great new ideas. So let's address his suggestions:
1. Track the stock pickers. We love this idea and actually have been working on it for a while. The problem is consistency, uniformity and fairness. The circumstances and time frames surrounding various guest recommendations can vary and sometimes a live interview doesn't allow for all those variables to be aired. If we start putting up track records, people will start comparing track records, so we want it to be a fair comparison.
We do, however, put links to previous appearances by stock pickers in the write-ups of their on-air interviews. And we try to include links to differing views as well.
2. Give Dennis Kneale a blog. Did Dennis pay you to write that? Joke. Joke. We've talked about this. Dennis writes quite a bit for us. Owing to his busy TV schedule, though, it's not always on a regular basis — which can be a problem for a regular blog. But this suggestion is a good one.
3. Add Stocktwits to our quote pages. Aw c'mon. As you yourself point out, Joshua, that's a home-team suggestion. And there are A LOT of other similar outfits that would get jealous. Pretty soon our quote pages would get so cluttered it'd be hard to find the price.
4. Boost small- and mid-cap coverage. We'd love to — and we do. Check out this week's piece about small caps ready to rally in the face of global volatility. Now, could we do more? Sure. But we can't do that to the detriment of widely held stocks either. Prioritization ... it's a pain.
5. Diversification of opinion. We try to do this as much as we can. But we want to do more. Hence, our hiring of John Carney, an enterprising business journalist who often takes the contrarian stance.
So hey, we're trying.
