Over the past few weeks there has been a significant increase in subscribers to Over My Shoulder. I want to welcome all of you and give you a little personal insight into how I go about selecting the articles that appear in your inbox as Over My Shoulder.

First, this is not a daily service. I’m not going to send you links to 10 odds and ends of data or news, nor do I feel the need to drive traffic to my website. What I am trying to do is to send you (maybe) 5 to 10 articles, essays, or reports a week that I think have truly unique information.

Your subscription gives you two things. First, it gives you access to a great deal of information and useful resources that are unlikely to otherwise find your inbox. I just have an amazing amount of material coming across my desk, and I will confess that I am an insatiable reader and obsessively read all the time. I will also admit that probably the bulk of it is not all that useful to me when I think about it a week later. So the second thing you get is me hand-picking articles that I think offer really good insights into economics and finance. Think of me as your research assistant, bringing to your attention the things you should be reading – at least from my point of view.

I should point out that you’re rarely going to get an article from the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times or the usual US financial media. I am kind of assuming that you’re already subscribing to those. On occasion I will include something from the Journal or Financial Times that I think is really a must-read piece, but those probably amount to just one or two per quarter.

I should note that I may go a whole week without posting a note, and then you may get a bunch of postings in just a few days. That doesn’t mean that I took the prior week off but that I just didn’t find anything worth sending to you. August this year was particularly dry. I don’t feel an obligation to try and find something every day. It either shows up and is useful (in my opinion) or I don’t send it. I will typically write a short paragraph as a way to introduce the posting.

A word on my sources: some of them are quite frankly either private or very expensive subscription services. I get permission to use the ones that aren’t public. There will be occasions when I ask you not to forward a posting to anyone outside your normal “inside” group. There are some people who simply don’t want to see their expensive work on Zero Hedge or Business Insider. In the three years I have been doing Over My Shoulder, that has not become a problem; and I don’t think it will be, but I am trying to give you a heads-up.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to send them to me. I consider you part of my “insider family” and want to be responsive. Thanks for your support.

Your forever browsing for business and pleasure analyst,

John Mauldin

PS. No PDF attached.