After writing about finance for Bloomberg and CNN for many years, Caleb Silver, now Investopedia’s Editor-in-Chief, shared his considerations concerning cryptocurrency regulation, analytical sources for investors, and Bitcoin prices in an interview with Bitnovosti. The interview was taken on MoneyConf in Dublin.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: Dear Caleb, your LinkedIn account indicates that you once worked for CNN. What made you quit this media channel?

Caleb Silver: I had 10 great years with CNN, but I always wanted to get more experience in the digital world. Media and news business is a very intense one, so I simply had enough of it.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: How did you come up with the idea of Frog Pond Productions? Why did you decide to start it?

Caleb Silver: When I graduated from college back in the 90s, I started a production company to do environmental educational documentaries. Then I entered graduate school and started working in media business; first for Bloomberg, then for CNN. When I left CNN, I wanted to start a digital production company in order to be more involved in production, consulting, and venture capital and private equity matters. I grew up near Frog Pond so it seemed to be a nice name for the company that really was about the media ecosystem and those looking to invest in media businesses.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: Now let’s switch to your current career. For me, for some years Investopedia was like Wikipedia for financial terms, and then to my great surprise, I discovered that it comprised of articles as well. How do you feel about Investopedia now? Is it a useful source of information or rather a mass media source?

Caleb Silver: This is a great question. First of all, Investopedia is already 19 years old. It is already an Internet dinosaur now. It has been around since 1999, but in the last four years we transformed our company, and our CEO, David Siegel, suggested embarking on a broader mission; to help investors and other people make smarter investment decisions. We want to be a solution provider in the spheres of finance, investments, and career management.

It all started out as a financial dictionary and as a place to do test preparation for CFA. But in the last three or 4 years we were involved in a bunch of different areas, a platform for financial advisors being one of them. We want to help financial advisors share their expertise and their advice with 30 million of our users. So we have created Advisor Insights, where users can address any questions to advisors who share their expertise and their practical experience.

We have also launched the Online Academy. People come to us from all over the world with questions like “how to start investing?”, “how to buy options?”, “how to trade?”, “how to calculate some rates in Excel?”, etc. You won’t ask such questions unless you are willing to do something, to take action. It is like you are not going to the hospital unless you are looking for symptoms or trying to do some research. The same is true for finance and investing. People approached us with very high expectations, so aside from writing articles we had to answer their questions, thus we created the Online Learning Academy, where we have over 30 courses on investing, trading, financial modeling, and career skills. So if they want to get a job or get a promotion, they have the opportunity to learn more about the industry and the relevant requirements. That’s a new feature of ours.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: Is the Online Learning Academy open to anyone who is willing to study in it, or are there some entrance exams?

Caleb Silver: There are no entrance exams. The only thing is that we actually charge fees for studying in it. The Academy is an e-commerce product which is gradually shifting towards a subscription service where you can buy courses a la carte, one at a time or in sets. In the next few months we will launch our subscription service. Users are free to take any courses they wish. And we are delighted that people are ready to pay us for that. But I think it’s because they trust us, and the content is really good. People really want to study and are willing to pay so long as you keep it affordable and available to them.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: How much does it cost and are there any star teachers?

Caleb Silver: The most expensive course costs $399, and the cheapest one, I believe, is about $20. You can bundle courses to get price discounts and we offer special prices. And all the instructors are experts in their fields, whether in investing or technical analysis. We have J.C. Parets, who is very well known in technical analysis community. We have people who are well known, who have followers, who have been teaching people special skills, and we are proud to work with them.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: If you compare working for CNN to working for Frog Pond Productions and Investopedia, what have been the advantages and disadvantages?

Caleb Silver: I like to think of it this way: when you are in the news business, it is all about “pushing” content to users; “read my article,” “watch my video,” etc. In Investopedia, so much of our traffic comes from search requests. We do news as well, but we do them as a gateway to drive people’s attention to educational content. So we are not a news organization per se, but news is an important component of what we do because we like to think of it as educational news. We are trying to enfold a story in a broader context to make our readers more knowledgeable.

Frog Pond Productions was organized to choose the story to tell, I had never had this opportunity before I started working for a big news corporation.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: Back to Investopedia, in your Twitter you wrote, “One of the best parts of my job as editor @Investopedia is working with so many smart and talented #advisors. Today we announced our list of the 100 Most Influential. Congrats to all! #INV100.” How do you choose them? Is it possible to apply to be included in the list?

Caleb Silver: Anybody who is a registered financial advisor can apply. It is open to everybody. We created Investopedia 100 to celebrate financial education through financial advisors. We firmly believe that anyone who is investing should have an advisor. The advisor’s job is to make people make smart, holistic decisions. Our list is made up of champion financial advisors. We didn’t measure how much money is under their management or who they are they working for, we were judging on how they share information. So we measured the number of their followers on LinkedIn and Twitter. But it wasn’t just size, it was the type of content, and the message they bring to people. And then among the candidates, who is following whom. So people that had the most connections from other advisors saw their score increased. The measure of influence is the measure of how big your audience is, what you share, and many other people in the industry are actually listening to you

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: There are many blockchain startups attending MoneyConf, so let’s talk about cryptocurrencies. Recently, there was a CNBC news title: “$1.1 billion in cryptocurrency has been stolen this year, and it was apparently easy to do.” What do you think about it?

Caleb Silver: There are bad actors in any industry; there are bank thefts, thefts of gold, jewelry, personal information, and so on. So, the blockchain is going to have it all too. It is not 100% safe. It is in an early stage of the development of this technology and hopefully it will become safer, because this technology is quite a promising one.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: What do you think about bringing the blockchain to everyday life? Tokenizing real assets? Real estate, yachts, art pieces? Is it useful?

Caleb Silver: I think there are some industries where it is a very good idea. Supply chain management and shipping seems like a natural place for the blockchain or distributed ledgers, so that everyone could see where the goods are, where they are moving to, and from which port.

It seems to me that the banking industry may also benefit from blockchain technology. But there, however, are certain gaps which may be exploited by criminals. Until those things are set up, I think we will not see wide adoption yet. I was listening to the Square CFO before, and they are now offering transactions in Bitcoin. Goldman Sachs is talking about the blockchain and the potential of cryptocurrency as well.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: If most crypto companies will be regulated, will it have a positive impact on Bitcoin’s price? Will there be less people interested in buying crypto?

Caleb Silver: I actually think that it will get more people interested in it. Right now, it’s the Wild West, and the general public is afraid. Six month ago, when Bitcoin and other altcoins were at their high, everybody was talking about it. And that is the great indicator that it came too far, too fast. I think more regulation is probably a good thing, as it will allow cryptocurrency to enter more markets. Will the price double or triple? I don’t know, but I think more regulatory control will actually be good for stabilizing cryptocurrencies.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: What are your favorite financial analytical sources?

Caleb Silver: I love the publicly available data that you can get from the Federal Reserve, for instance. In Investopedia, we have a lot of data as well. We are going through tons of pages from Google analytics to discover what people are looking for. We have an index in Investopedia called “The Inside index,” which measures search volumes across the fear-related terms. So when people are looking up bankruptcy or default, the search volume across these terms spikes, which tells you that people are very concerned. So our index reacts before many market predictors could do so. I love products like that. They allow you to feel the pulse of what investors and consumers are feeling.

Maria Lobanova, Bitnovosti: What was the most visionary investment of the 21st century, so far in your opinion (besides Bitcoin)?

Caleb Silver: First of all, I am not so sure we can call Bitcoin an asset. Sure, if you bought Bitcoins for 2 dollars and then sell it for 20,000, you’ve made a smart investment. The answer to your question is that Apple stocks performed great in the past 10 years, and I think that when the first iPhone was out, none of us could tell how it all would turn out to be. Take companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft – nobody could tell that they would be where they are today. They have made a trillion dollar evaluation, so if you are invested in them or in ETFs, you have done well. The thing is that we do not like to make stock predictions in Investopedia. But many people who refrained from investing have missed the greatest run of all times. We want to teach people how to invest because everybody should be an investor.
https://en.bitnovosti.com/2018/06/25/caleb-silver-investopedia-more-regulation-will-allow-cryptocurrency-to-enter-more-markets/