Social Networking Equals Investing Community

Today I wrote briefly about the need for a web site that would be truly useful and productive. Immediately following that article about Facebook I was contacted and informed about a new site that might fit my need for a useful and potentially profitable social site. Some would call it a social investing site.

There are plenty of web logs such as Future1investor but these blogs are not meant as community type sites. There isn't anything that brings people together to chat about, share, and help with a common interest. This is where Covestor comes in. Covestor is the Facebook of investing but instead of a general meaningless place to waste your time, it encourages the members to help each other by sharing their investing decisions.

There are two types of Covestor members:

1. Fund Managers
2. Investors

Fund Managers link their online portfolio into the site via any of 18 available brokerage services. Each portfolio is analyzed so that people can follow either individual stocks or fund manager moves. Users can also see how risky certain investments can be.

Investors are able to track and compare their own portfolio to fund managers as well as to other users. The system will email them when fund managers that they are following have a change in the fund manager's portfolio.

The Chief Operating Officer at Covestor previously ran the portfolio analysis systems at Goldman Sachs. So in this way you can see that this is not just another site designed on whim and idea. Covestor has partnered with research providers and also plans to monetize the site. Fund managers will be able to charge a small fee for allowing investors to follow them. Covestor will retain a portion of that fee. In this way, users are encouraged to allow their portfolio to be posted in a way that helps others learn from their successes and failures.

The main lure of being a Covestor are these three things:

• To prove your investing skills
• Track other members real trades
• Profit from sharing your decisions
  

I'd suggest changing the top bullet point 'To prove/improve your investing skills'.
In this way it shows the value of learning from others which is the point of social investing.

Social Networking For Dollars

Do you do face time with Facebook?

The stolen source code and idea may be nearing an IPO. Reportedly the company is nearing a settlement with the actual originators (brains behind the what is now Facebook). Law suits generally get settled prior to an IPO or other major event as not to depress the value of the new security.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a colleague, Divya Narendra accuse Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the source code, design, and business plan for Facebook in 2003. Meanwhile in October of 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook. The company is valued at $15 billion, making supposed thief Mark Zuckerberg the youngest billionaire in the United States if not the world.

I think that these social networking web sites have a long way to go before they can be something which can be useful and not just time wasting. Perhaps I don't have the same enthusiasm for Facebook as my former colleagues who waste time each week on the site which could be much more productive if it had a way of linking applications which complemented their work in some meaningful way.

People constantly have the excuse of not having enough time to do this or that. Sometimes I view that as a cop-out but in many cases it is actually valid. So if we are to use the web in our daily lives, then at least lets not waste our time needlessly on sites such as Facebook. Google lost out to Microsoft some say, but I think that Google could easily wipe it's nose with the Facebook site and premiere something truly useful. Something that would be social but provide truly useful and productive web apps at the same time.

I added these vids on 4-17-08 because of their relevance to this article.