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This month for ‘Meet the Players’ I interviewed Clem Chambers, Co-founder and Managing Director of ADVFN.  Clem provided some very interesting responses (black) to my questions (maroon).

Can you give some background about how the ADVFN website was set up initially?

Online PLC started ADVFN as one of its incubator projects. We decided that a listed website about stocks would be attractive to the very people that used the site to buy the stock; a kind of virtuous circle. It was a typical dotcom idea.  We floated it pretty early and we went from 10p at 8am on day 1 to 66p at 8:01 on day one.

When was this?

Back in 1999

Can you tell me about the early challenges?

Starting businesses is just a series of inventions. You take all the good ideas you can find, add your own and then try to do them fast, well and cheaper.  It’s an alchemical process that needs a lot of finesse. We seemed to have done it well as most other companies who tried to do dotcoms are long gone and or blew up almost immediately.

People often think that internet sites grow exponentially if they are a hit. This is not often true. It’s a slow growth process like most businesses and overnight success can take years.

...and  have there been any major recent improvements to the site?

We are always improving the site. It’s a constant process. Often it’s just a thousand small things. Or a reengineering that scales the site by 300-1000% that no one sees.

Are there any major future changes planned?

The moment you stop changing and building you start dying.  It’s a 3 to 5 year death on the internet if you stop. So yes there are plenty of changes planned and they will come as fast as we can build them. But that’s how it always is.

I have seen your name crop up as a company director, an author, a journalist, a speaker and a broadcaster. Can you say a little about each of these activities and how you find time for them?

You can always find time. If you are prepared to get up at 4.30 to do a broadcast like I do often, you will always be in demand.  Want to spend a few hours of your weekend writing a newspaper column?  No problems.  After years of writing and broadcasting it gets easier and easier too. If you don’t have a TV in the house you will find plenty of time for all sorts of activities.  I must have written a thousand articles in the last 5 or so years.  Everyone’s a free promo for ADVFN.

Clem Chambers: Managing Director of ADVFN 

the moment you stop changing....you start dying

....and your books?

My first novel, 'The Armageddon Trade', had a pretty rapturous reception from the critics, much to my amazement.  It was meant to be a little bit of fun but it was been quite seriously considered.  I suppose it is based in the very real world of trading – it’s quite gripping. It also seems to upset quite a few on the left wing.  Some seem to think that traders are more dangerous than terrorists;  seeing how they think bankers lured them into maxing out their credit cards. I’ve literally had people suggesting the credit crunch was worse than 9/11: ergo bankers are more evil than Al Qaeda.

The next one, The Twain Maxim, is out at Easter. It’s about a corrupt mining endeavour in Congo. It is very much set in fact. I think it will also be taken more seriously than I’d like it to be, as it is quite a dramatic story and it explains a lot of what goes on in the dodgy mining arena.  It’s also set in the appealing set up of east Congo.  I suppose I’m trying to make a good yarn but in fact the material is pretty dark, or rather there is a contingent that seems to think so. (To purchase either of Clem’s books from Amazon please click on The Armageddon Trade or The Twain Maxim)

I cannot believe that you have much spare time, but are you involved in any sports?

I play cricket. It’s a lot more fun to practice batting or bowling at Lord’s than to go down to a gym and do crunches. There is nothing finer than hitting cricket balls.

Can you say a little about ADVFN the AIM-listed company?

ADVFN is one of the very few internet companies listed in London. We are still doing what we set out to do in 2000 and have grown every year since then. We are now starting to get the kind of scale that sees us in the top echelons of global internet financial portals. We plan to keep doing what we’ve been doing until we are number one.   That might take another 10 years but we are already on the edge of surpassing The Fool in the US and Jim Cramer’s The Street and we’ve been No1 in the UK for a few years now.  The US is really starting to grow for us.

raptuous reception from the critics

Are you an active Private Investor and do you invest in AIM companies, other than ADVFN?

I’m a very active investor. When I founded ADVFN I put much of my liquidity into the market so that it would force me to build ADVFN so that it drove my investing and vice versa. It’s called putting your money where your mouth is. I buy Aim companies but the market makers’ stupid spreads offend me. However I have a 3 year horizon and I push hard for improvement through my broker, so that obviates the spread on AIM stocks.

Do you have particular views about the future for the world economy and markets?

There are no economics only demographics. In the UK we are half way through a governmental cycle, where government bloats until the lights start going out as they did in the 70s. Hopefully in a few years there will be a rationalisation which will bring back growth to the real economy here. However ADVFN is increasingly becoming independent of the UK market and local difficulties will become increasingly secondary.

I recall reading that you are a contrarian investor. Can you say a little about this?  

The market pays you to invest. As such if you invest in unfashionable things or unpopular stocks, it will pay you more. It’s that simple. I’m not a fan of narrative when it comes to investing. If someone is singing the praises of a stock, they have already bought or worse, want to sell. Sociability is not a skill when it comes to investing.  Herds become beefburgers, so don’t be in the herd. Contrarian logic is basically sound when it comes to pricing... everyone can’t be contrarian by definition. An investor should always ask, “why is the market paying me to hold this stock”. If you can’t answer the question, put it in a FTSE tracker.

I believe that ADVFN is the most popular UK investment website. How many subscribers/page hits do you have? ..and why do you think the site is so popular?

We’ve never really talked about subscriber numbers, mainly because even professional analysts don’t really understand how subscriptions work. Even the classic “churn” metric is such a wrong idea, that we prefer to just deal with the topline revenue numbers. Subs are roughly half of our income, the other half comes from advertising. It oscillates, some years it’s as much as 60/40, others it’s the reverse.

What about the Bulletin Boards. How do you control what gets posted on the boards?  To what extent would ADVFN be liable, if at all, for the content e.g. for Copyright infringements and libel?

We don’t control what’s posted. We only take down things we get relevant complaints about. The only relevance is that the complainer is connected directly to the content of the post. We don’t go looking for posts to delete, but we also take down obscenity, bad language etc that is reported to us. ADVFN is only liable for stuff it refuses to take down or writes itself. As we don’t do the latter or the former, it is not liable. However we are always getting threatened or sued and have been for 10 years, so it’s a budgeted part of our business. We’re just like any newspaper, one of our suppliers is a law firm, who always send us a Christmas card.

If you enjoyed reading this article look out for next month’s ‘Meet the Players’ which will feature a particularly important player in the AIM landscape.

the market makers' stupid spreads offend me

herds become beefburgers

we are always being threatened or sued

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Written by: Michael Crockett

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