This is the first entry of my new RECtv blog. Most people know me for writing on financial markets for Forbes, The Scotsman newspaper and, in the dotcom days, Wired. You may also have seen me pop up on CNBC, the BBC, BNN in Canada or even Phoenix TV in China. I run ADVFN, a huge, global stocks and shares website.
People like to use me for TV because I’m happy to make predictions and I don’t mince my words. Happily I’ve been spot on up to and through the credit crunch, so while I continue to make apparently “wag” predictions I don’t have to wear a dunce-cap yet.
However this is not why I’m blogging here. I’m also a thriller writer. Financial markets are loaded with criminals and crime. As such it is a mother lode of stories and plots. In a way even a bank robber is just a criminal trying to get some financial services action and time and again it is proved it’s not the robbers that go across the sidewalk that are the real danger to banks, but the robbers that are invited in or are already inside.
Of all the perfect crimes in the world most are executed on Wall Street.
My first book, The Armageddon Trade, came out in the middle of the credit crunch and accordingly did very well. The Twain Maxim, that just hit UK book stores last month, also seems to be doing well. What I’m going to be blogging about however is the process of writing and the trials and tribulations
of being an author.
Writing a book a year and running Europe and South America’s largest stocks and shares website at the same time, to many, seems insane so hopefully you’ll see it is possible to do both without getting a ghost writer in.
Right now I’m 70,000 words in on The Excalibur Trade, the third book of the series, which sees our heroes getting into hot water in Japan. The plan is to nail the first draft by the end of July. That’s 30,000 words in five weeks. I have to fly to
Australia, New York and play three cricket matches. Sounds like a tall order.
Clem Chambers is CEO of stocks and investment website ADVFN (www.advfn.com). He wrote a stock column for WIRED, is a Forbes columnist and has written for Working Money, Active Trader, SFO and Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities and national newspapers The Business, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Express and The Scotsman in the UK.
