Ten for Tadas

The most important blogger on the financial web, and my friend, Tadas Viskanta is celebrating 10 (10!) years of his site Abnormal Returns this week.

I’ve waxed poetic before about how important Abnormal Returns is for the investor / trader blogosphere. Here’s how I described it in July 2010:

The two biggest-selling new hip hop artists of the last decade, 50 Cent and Lil Wayne, both came to international platinum status via being discovered on underground mixtapes.  In many ways, Tadas Viskanta of Abnormal Returns is like the DJ Clue of Wall Street blogging.  Just like an unknown rapper can find himself on a Clue mixtape sandwiched between tracks by Jay-Z and Eminem, so too can a fresh new finance blogger see his work in the spotlight on AR, mentioned amongst the insights coming from the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.  If you’re blogging the market and you want to know if you’ve written something worthwhile that day, you get your answer around lunchtime when the AR linkfest hits the web.  Only the best posts and articles appear each day, carefully curated, along with some original writing that never fails to illuminate.  The new real-time linking that Tadas does makes the site even more essential – it’s my browser’s start page.

And I wasn’t the only financial writer who felt that way. A year later, when Tadas celebrated his sixth blogiversary (an unthinkable tenure at the time), we threw him a surprise party. All of the top bloggers wanted the chance to thank him for his tireless, seven-days-a-week curation. You can read the remarks from Phil Pearlman, Carl Richards, Meb Faber, Eddy Elfenbein and others here.

My friendship with Tadas began in 2009 when he was one of the first people to link to my stuff, which was pretty scary back then. TRB was mainly me lashing out at the financial world and venting on the industry, but the encouragement and recognition from Abnormal Returns and its readers made me keep going. It changed my life. When he ditched the anonymous blogger schtick and came out as himself, we began to talk.

Since then, we’ve appeared at dozens of panels and events together, have compared notes on the challenges of blogging and book-writing, and have been almost completely simpatico on every major industry issue that’s arisen. We even like the same indie rock bands, I found out, when I started getting his year-in-review mixtapes each December.

I wouldn’t be where I am today without Abnormal Returns and I certainly wouldn’t be anywhere near as knowledgeable without the reliable curation work that Tadas does. It’s an honor and a privilege to be his colleague and his pal.

Happy ten year blogiversary, my man. Here’s to ten more.