I'd like to wish all of my family, friends and colleagues a very happy holiday season and a prosperous 2016.

This holiday season has personally been a bittersweet one. Our youngest, who just turned one, is old enough to wonder at the holiday lights; but we mourn the recent unexpected passing of my mother.

Many of you were so supportive of my decision to give up a successful career at Seeking Alpha and move back to the US to be closer to my mother when she was diagnosed with cancer. Your kindness was not forgotten.

My mother was an incredible woman who, even when given a dire prognosis by her cancer doctors, refused to give in and fought the cancer into remissio, eventually becomin cancer free. Despite her seemingly excellent health post-cancer, she unexpectedly passed away shortly before Thanksgiving.

I am grateful for the extra time I had with my mother and that she lived to see the birth of my fourth child and the launch of my own startup, TalkMarkets, which I created along with other former executives from Seeking Alpha, Bloomberg, Reuters and Yahoo Finance. She took great pride in the company's success and was truly our biggest fan.

TalkMarkets now has hundreds of contributors, tens of thousands of registered users and millions of pageviews and just signed a major partnership deal with Reuters. And we accomplished all this by creating the first ever contributor-owned site, where our contributors are equity holders in the company and personally benefit from our success.

For all of you who became contributors and readers, I thank you for helping achieve this reality. For those of you who have yet to, I welcome you to do so.

I wish you all a joyous and safe holiday season, a happy new year and a reminder to cherish those dearest to you.

My warmest wishes,
Boaz

Boaz Berkowitz
Founder & CEO
TalkMarkets
877-667-9496 ext. 100
boazb [@]talkmarkets.com