We had a rough week on the financial report. We reported third quarter earnings and our friends on Wall Street did not like the results.

Seeing your stock price get walloped is not fun when you are CEO and also the largest stockholder. Even worse are the numerous phone calls and emails directed my way to further explain the results.

Many Funds gave up on us last week. I am sure they will be sorry about this decision in coming months. But that is the nature of the game when you run a public company. Funds demand quarterly results in line with guidance.

My only guide in running our company is longterm success. And I am confident that we are building a company that is and will be a good longterm investment. Unfortunately we are trapped by the "Guidance" game.

I have mentioned in previous posts that I am tempted to do away with guidance. We probably will not do this, but when you have a company in transition as we do, guidance can sometimes be difficult to predict. I think all of Wall Street would be better off with no guidance from any company. Companies could still do quarterly conference calls and then analysts could make their respective predictions about the coming quarters and years. Alas no change is likely to take place. And I must admit that some of the calls mentioned above are quite interesting. Unfortunately most are not.

Turning to other matters. I was interested to see that the head of SEC, Christopher Cox commented that perhaps blogs could be acceptable to the SEC in terms of public companies using them as outlets to disseminate so-called "Regulation FD" financial information.

I have found this blog to be quite useful for both financial and public relations purposes. We used to use a PR agency. But my blog gets more exposure than any three PR agencies combined could possibly get us. I would not swear off ever using a PR agency again, but for the time being, blogs are the way to go for public relations.

I have a few more posts planned for this coming week about our new trade show strategy. I am excited about getting back to the trade show arena.

I am also excited about closing our announced deal to obtain a 90 percent interest in the micropayment site - stockxpert.com and its companion community site stock.xchng with its almost 1 million members. We have some exciting plans for these two properties and cannot wait to get started with the rapid growth process.