It's not very often that CTCR gets reviewed. Usually, we are the ones doing the reviewing. CTCR exists to provide reviews of futures related products as well as provide the track records of key commodity advisory services and informational articles.

It was therefore very interesting to see the review of our website from Dow Jones. You can read it yourself at their website.

CTCR has been around for almost 14 years and has become a well respected part of the futures community. Our website has been around since the middle of 1996. We started with just a little information on the site and have been adding to it over the months. Dow Jones reviewed the site about a month ago.

On a scale of 10, they gave us an 8 for each of their four categories: Content, Speed, Navigation, and Design. Our favorite comments that they made were: "We like the sassy attitude of this site..." Another favorite: "This site isn't afraid of offending anyone."

The only real criticism was that we were "stingy" with the material on the site. They thought we could give away more material and still attract new subscribers to the magazine. We don't know if this is true. We debate it all the time. We don't sell ads in CTCR so our only revenue is the support we get from our members. Our mission is to provide the best information to the futures industry to both save and make money. We would therefore like to put more information out to the public. But we are obviously treading a fineline between our desire to give the most amount of information to the most number of people and the very real problem of supporting the expensive infrastructure to provide this unique service.

Our solution has been to provide a subset of the reviews and the track records and to not print any of the indepth interviews. On the other hand, we are really printing just about all of the educational articles on the web.

What do you think? Could we put more on the web and still attract members? Should we sell advertising on the web site? We have considered this but only if we sold it to people that we would never review, such as brokerage houses.

All-in-all, we were pleased with the review. It was interesting to see ourselves from the perspective of such a respected source as Dow Jones. We don't really disagree with the reviewer's comments.

---