Former Hedge Fund Manager creates financial Cartoon Website

“Imagine Jon Stewart, Bill Maher and Shrek, rolled into a cohesive and scalable platform, providing valuable market insight with snarky humour and cunning wit.” This is how Todd Harrison, former president of Cramer Berkowitz, a $400 million hedge fund, describes his new creation.

The web site was started in 2002 as Harrison’s blog, he used personifications of the traditional Wall Street bull and bear characters to represent his current trading stance, and other characters such as “Snapper” the turtle (who represents a “snap back” in the market). His blog used these characters’ conversations, with him and with each other, to illustrate the multiple competing viewpoints of stock market dynamics. Collectively, he called these creations “critters” or “minyans”.

At minyanville.com, Hoofy, Boo and the other minyans have been given form as cartoon characters. New content appears on the site every day that the American stock markets are open. “News & Views” consists of about ten articles per day of a page or more in length, usually including at least two by Todd Harrison and two by Minyanville Staff. Other regular writers include John Succo, Kevin A. Tuttle and Laurie McGuirk.

“Buzz & Banter” provides up to forty short submissions per day from a wider set of contributors. Buzz & Banter allows dialogue among contributors, minute-by-minute market commentary, opinions and business news throughout the trading day from market pros.

Harrison gave up a 15 year career in fast paced and physically draining world of hedge funds and Wall Street trading houses to found Minyanville, the ambition being to do for finance what Sesame Street did for education, what MTV did for music and what ESPN did for sports.

“The vision of the company is to create a fiscal fitness franchise, or Walt Disney meets Wall Street,” said Harrison, a resident of New York City.

Minyanville now has eight employees and 33 contract writers who contribute content to the site. The site is generating 1.6 million to 2 million page views monthly from more than 100 countries, with the traffic doubling since January, according to Wassong. Much of the site is free and is advertising-supported.