A Tool to Boost Your Trading Results

People ask me how I have time to read the 200-plus blogs I keep track of each day in order to do my Blog Watch column. When I first started doing Blog Watch, it was impossible. I would bookmark each blog and then one by one click on each bookmark in order to read the blogs. Maybe I'd get through 10 and then give up.

What's made it easier?

RSS.

And now TheStreet.com has made it a lot easier to follow my favorite columnists and content features on these sites -- and it can help you too.

Recently, TheStreet.com unveiled the ability to stream specific content and columnists to your RSS reader home page. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS Reader is used to distribute your choice of RSS feeds.

Wait! I promise, it's not as complicated as it sounds, and once I walk you through it you'll see how your life will improve as you become a more informed consumer of news -- and hopefully a better trader and investor because of it.

Trust me. The most-popular RSS readers (which you probably use already) would be my.yahoo.com or your personalized Google homepage. For instance, I use my.yahoo.com as my home page and can read all my RSS feeds there.

Any Web site that has an RSS feed will have a little button like this:

Just click that image and you instantly will be "subscribed" to that site's content on your RSS reader (such as my.yahoo.com, or Google reader, or Bloglines.com, etc). A lot of the newer browsers also allow you to maintain RSS feeds right within the browser itself.

That's it. You can now keep track of hundreds of sites that way without ever leaving the comfort of your home page, just like I do.

So how did TheStreet.com specifically make our lives easier? It just added RSS feeds for almost everything on the site. First off, go to this page. Then pick the articles at TheStreet.com you like the best.

For instance, I highly recommend James Altucher's Blogwatch and James Altucher's Stockpickr. So click the "RSS" button next to each of those article titles on the main RSS page. If you are a my.yahoo.com user, click the my.yahoo.com button. Or if you are a bloglines user, click the bloglines button.

There! That's it. Now every time you go to my.yahoo.com you can see if there's a new edition of my Blog Watch column. You can click RSS on as many sections of TheStreet.com as you want.

Now I don't always have to click around to Jim Cramer's blog to see if he has a new blog post; every time he has a new blog post, I'll see it on my.yahoo.com, along with the newest posts from the Rev, the newest articles from "The Good Life," the newest scams being uncovered by TSC writer Melissa Davis, the newest Stockpickr columns and more.

And this is side by side with the updates I get on the other 200 blogs I follow. All without having to waste time clicking around to 200 different sites.

Maybe I have simple needs, but life just got a tiny bit better.