Back in March 2000, just as the dotcom bubble began to deflate, an article that should perhaps have been seen as yet another sell signal appeared on Salon.com. It was a bit too soon for the author to realise the fall had started. Written by Katharine Mieskowski and headlined ‘My dotcom business mags have fallen on me and I can’t get up’, it catalogued the rise and rise of the many over-excitable publications making a (very good) living from the bubble: Red Herring, Business 2.0, Upside, The Industry Standard, Wired and Fast Company.
All these magazines had two things in common. First they sold glamour as much as information: the teenage CEOs that filled their pages were treated like superstars and the titles used the kind of thick, shiny paper usually favoured by Vanity Fair and Vogue, rather than that used by the likes of BusinessWeek (and us). And second they were very, very long. As Mieskowski pointed out, the March 2000 issue of Red Herring had 440 pages and weighed in at 1 pound, 12.5 ounces (the average MoneyWeek has 44 pages). That of Business 2.0 weighed 2 pounds, 5.3 ounces.
The crash bought an end to all this as ad revenues collapsed. At its peak Red Herring was selling more than $87m worth of ads a year and had 350 staff. In its last year it sold $15m worth and had only 31 staff left to make redundant. It was a similar story with The Industry Standard. In 2000 it generated $140m worth of revenues. By the middle of 2001 it was out of business.
I’m thinking about all this now simply because history is repeating itself. Last year saw the launch of US-based magazine Trader Monthly in the UK. This hugely glossy and excitable publication leads with stories such as The 100 Highest Earning Traders In The World and is packed with news on not just investment opportunities and deals but supercars, premium vodkas, and of course the favourite status symbol of those who work in finance: luxury watches (or timepieces as they are now called). Then earlier this year came Monocle from ex-Wallpaper editor Tyler Brule (which is a bit more varied in its writing but substantially more boring), and finally last month, from Conde Naste, we got Portfolio, which promises to offer readers ‘business intelligence’ and is described by The Observer as the ‘Vanity Fair of Wall Street’.
The content of all these magazines is different from those of the late 1990s (the hype is now all about private equity and hedge funds), but in most other respects they are much the same, particularly in that they, too, inappropriately glamourise finance: it makes sense that moneymaking should come with humour and with intelligence, but when money mags start jostling for space on the newsstands with Harpers Bazaar and GQ it suggests that there is a hint of market mania in the air. In our markets page, we look at why that mania might not end this year. But in our cover story we look at something you might want to buy to give a defensive edge to your portfolio just in case it does – soft commodities, which we think are still only at the beginning of a long-term upswing.