One of the interesting things about writing on a Personal Finance site is that while you write for your readers and yourself, you are part of a broader community which informs your opinions and gives you reason to examine your own views on many topics. We at Don't Quit Your Day Job have now been around for (almost) three years, covered a large number of financial topics, introduced a number of personal financial strategies, and delved into too-great detail on subjects which had mildly interesting data.

We've got this running series on Don't Quit Your Day Job where we use the currently trading option prices (puts and calls) to divine where the market believes the S&P 500 is going over the next months. Normally, this is a problem we attack right after options expiration days (which happened to be on Friday), but as we had an issue with the script and prior commitments, you guys will have to accept our homework 2 days late.

Hello regular readers and folks new to the site, and welcome to the "I Read All The Submissions" edition of the TotallyMoney Carnival!

This is the first time I've ever hosted a blog carnival, pretty funny since we're going on 3 years now (just a few days time). I've gathered that it's proper to give yourself a brief shout-out, so if you like charts, graphs, numbers, and enlightened discussion? Subscribe to our RSS feed, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter. Enough of that pandering; we've got a carnival to host!

We had 96 submissions, but I trimmed it down to 72 remove obviously commercial posts and paid guest posts. Sorry folks, I make the rules here.

I went through all of the articles and gave a brief summary about each one. To all of our participants: thanks for submitting. To the rest of you? Enjoy the carnival!

Weekly link roundup and site status report!

We here at Don't Quit Your Day Job are a cynical crew. We have a keen sense of the absurd - and the stench of inappropriate numbers is very clear in this article. You see, there is a position on Wall Street called a Financial Analyst - and those Analysts are trusted to do a very fundamental job: break the investment prospects in various companies down into one of 5 categories. There are positive categories (like buy or overweight), neutral categories (like market perform, market weight or... neutral) and negative categories (like sell and underweight). Different firms have different ratings, but all ratings fall into one of those three bins.

Weekly links we liked!

Calculate the total return on the S&P 500 between two dates including reinvested dividends and inflation.

You recently completed a very verbose series here at DQYDJ on investor psychology, the failure of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and how to improve on buy and hold. If you survived all of that, you're probably wondering: "hey PK! You mentioned in the EMH article that you trade stocks on valuation. How do you know that you're doing the right thing?"

Good point dear reader, and to tell you the truth, until I ran the numbers this weekend I wasn't quite sure. However, lucky for you and my ego I have now run the numbers and am ready to share my investing history.

Hey! You reading!

Listen to us on our Podcast at The Free Financial Advisor.

Since you've now read my treatises on Investor Psychology and the Flaws of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, we're finally ready to discuss what we originally set out to discuss - how to improve on buy and hold investing, Rob Bennett's controversial ideas on "valuation informed indexing", the concept of the safe withdrawal rate, and the state of buy and hold investing.