CEO Chat Junior Markets on Steroids, Try it

I, Peter Epstein, have no financial interest of any kind in CEO Chat.

Rarely do I write about an informative, helpful, free, easy to use investment focused application. Why? Because I’m usually disappointed with how important company developments, industry commentary and articles / interviews get disseminated. The time it takes me to stumble upon high quality content I seek is getting ever longer. Who still visits company message boards? Anyone? There was a short window where, for example, Stockhouse’s message boards were pretty good, but now they are almost unreadable. Arguments and rivalries develop and soon there’s name calling and so forth.

Other sincere users feel obligated to jump in and implore the bad actors to shut up and move along. Before long, the string of worthless messages means that one has to crawl through dozens to come across that one good one. Not only that, but each new post has to be loaded. God help those who’s computer is running a bit slowly. Everyone is branded a pumper or a short. It’s not just Stockhouse but a number of message boards like investorshub, hotcopper.au, (an Australian investment blog) and others.

What about Twitter as a medium to obtain quick, relevant, actionable information? Well, Twitter is certainly better than the message boards, but it too has its challenges. Promotional posts, SPAM-like tweets and too much information of marginal value comes through the pipe. Therefore, even a prolific Tweeter who sometimes has good content to share can rapidly dilute his/her Twitter feed by posting and re-posting and re-posting posts, only a few of which are worth reading. Don’t get me wrong, I use Twitter and think that it has a meaningful place to occupy online, but for pure investment discussions, it comes up short.

That’s why I want to point out Tommy Humphreys’ new investment focused offering called chat.ceo.ca. Readers may recognize Tommy’s name as the founder of CEO.CA, an investment blog that effectively screens out the noise and posts only a handful of articles per day. These articles are not puff pieces or merely summarized press releases– they are strong, actionable investment pieces.

Importantly, in speaking with Tommy, he reminded me that CEO Chat is in its early days, a “soft launch” as he calls it. He said that many enhancements are planned. I asked him for a description of CEO Chat….

“chat.ceo.ca was created to fill a void in connecting dedicated natural resources investors. I want to bring back the water cooler, so buzz can spread about new discoveries, and professionals, geologists, engineers and retail investors alike can discuss the news in real time. We have discussed every major junior mining story in CEO chat minutes if not hours ahead of everybody else since we soft launched the thing four weeks ago. We are adding stock charts, notifications and a mobile app in the next few weeks. Mobile user experience is the focus. Many newsletter writers and mining journalists are already using the service. Over 1,000 messages a day have been posted recently. The search function works great. To me it’s like a quality junior mining conference in your pocket.”

CEO Chat is like CEO.CA on steroids, it moves fast, but key to the action is that virtually all of the posts are on point, i.e. no spam, no fighting, no wasted space, no wasted time. The reason why Humphrey’s CEO Chat is able to bypass the faults of message boards and Twitter is that its users are largely investment professionals, focused on investment ideas and intelligent discussion. Links posted on CEO Chat are never spam, they direct users to valuable and timely content.

Perhaps best of all, I can browse several hours worth of posts in a few minutes. On Twitter, I browse for 10-15 minutes and I’ve only scanned the last 45 minutes worth of posts. Both Twitter and the message boards contain search engines. However, how does one search those vehicles for all the stocks one owns as well as the companies that one is keeping a close eye on? It’s impossible. chat.ceo.ca has an excellent search function, and since all of the content is investment-focused, the search results don’t come back with unrelated information.

I recommend that readers take CEO Chat for a test ride. It’s incredibly easy to sign on, and if you don’t like it, feel free to go back the message boards!

Also, for those investors attending PDAC in Toronto this year, CEO.ca, along with Eric Coffin of Hard Rock Advisory and Keith Schaefer of Oil and Gas Investments Bulletin are hosting a one day exclusive conference in Toronto on February 28th with 15 of their top CEOs. This will be a great event because of the quality of presenters. Seating is limited so if you’re in the area and a serious natural resources investor, you should register now (here’s the link).

@PeterEpstein2