At the end of March, the editors of Seeking Alpha asked whether they could reprint my content on their site. They told me that it would increase the exposure to my writing via their syndicated deals with Yahoo Finance, Reuters, etc. Whatever! Note that they asked me….I did not ask them.

I don’t seek publicity for the blog and never intended to be known for writing on HEDGEfolios. I know this is different from many bloggers who crave attention for their work and may hope for a career in real journalism or get a mention on other blogs or media websites or magazines/newspapers or the apparent holy grail … a television appearance. All of that has happened for me and I never asked for any of it and I have turned down most of the requests from media or others who apparently like my work. Why? I don’t care about it and I don’t benefit from it. I guess if I wanted to make some beer and pizza money off Google ads, increasing website traffic would have been a huge priority. As it was, I wrote the blog to discuss topics I found interesting and to provide insight into how I think….about finance theory, markets, portfolio management and anything else that someone who might want to invest with me might use to evaluate their decisions. I didn’t write a word to increase website traffic. Maybe I should have. I’ve enjoyed writing without worrying about getting paid to do it. Mostly.

Have I enjoyed other websites taking my content without permission and doing whatever they want with it? Nope. I actually care about intellectual property and its importance to the foundations of capitalism. Do I like that other people might be making beer and pizza money by using my content? Nope. Especially considering that I have never charged for it, you might expect that I don’t appreciate other people with apparently no intellect making more off my stuff than I have by just cutting and pasting something in seconds that might have taken me hours to research and write.

So when Seeking Alpha actually asked my permission I appreciated that. Considering I believe Seeking Alpha provides a beneficial service for investors by aggregating and filtering content, I agreed with a few easy conditions - don’t edit my work to the point where my original words are not representative of my thoughts and I can opt out whenever I want. By the way, I also told them they may not want to waste their time with me since I intend to stop blogging within the next few months. They chose to move forward anyway.

For any of you that use Seeking Alpha, please know that they do not pay me for my content. My sole compensation is the increased traffic they can bring to HEDGEfolios. No offense to Seeking Alpha or its readers, but as I said before, I don’t care how much traffic they bring to my site. It does nothing for me. I don’t charge for subscriptions. I don’t sell ads. I don’t get a warm fuzzy feeling from having a few thousand extra readers. Nothing. I sought nothing from them so when I tell you I get nothing I care about, don’t think I am bitching. It is neutral. I know Barry and some other bloggers have their issues with compensation and aggregators like Seeking Alpha. That is their right and I respect whatever they want to do. It is just is not my concern so I gave my permission to Seeking Alpha because I thought it would not require extra work from me and on the off chance that someone might benefit from my thoughts.

Seeking Alpha decides which of my posts are worthy of appearing on their site and when they appear. Additionally, they edit my work and to the extent that they follow my simple rule of not bastardizing my words, I am comfortable with this process. I’ve had an issue once so far when they accidentally repeated the Too Small To NOT Fail post and it was resolved promptly and professionally. I appreciate that.

Unfortunately, the affiliation has required some extra efforts from me despite my naive expectations. If it gets worse, I will end it. Until then, HEDGEfolios content will appear on Seeking Alpha if they choose to put it there.