One of the great features beyond lots of amateur portfolios is that they construct portfolios for hundreds of wall street pros based on their picks.

One can see that the clowns on many pundit shows etc are pretty clueless. Or one can locate pundits that actually have some success

a) a better job on the investment funds side – different fund pool
b) a different type of compensation structure
c) a different reward system for the individual

SocialPicks, and the other sites like it, also exciting from the perspective of “an enhanced message board” for stock picks. But narrow innovation given an already saturated market for the field. This is an enhancement.

Marketocracy is a concept that has potential in a total new, revolutionary direction. Just short on execution at this point in time.

http://investor...h-meets-web-20/

I was invited to the early alpha phase… and made a review of it. Went back recently to try out things again. The interface is still a bit buggy and updates are not readily loaded up. But I’ll be watching this site’s development. At least they are willing to listen to bloggers!

Another way to monetize is to let the participants “monetize” their content…ie) charge for viewing their picks.

Field is extremely crowded at this time and I’m not sure individual stock picks makes a lot of sense for most investors.

Along the lines of “value added”, if you look at Marketocracy, they’ve done fine against the S&P 500, but if you look at their style over the past 5 years it’s more correlated to small/mid-caps. And against that benchmark the returns are just mediocre on a risk adjusted basis. That’s why Morningstar rates the fund as it does. Sure, better than the S&P 500 but my hunch is that there is always going to be a bias towards small/speculative fare amongst the participants, so when small/mid-caps go out of favor, the fund will likely show continued negative “alpha”.

We’re a traditional asset management shop, working on portfolio construction at the 401(k) level with a goal of out-performing various market-based benchmarks by 3-5% per year using funds within each individual plan. Not social networking per se, but real value to participants in the plans we cover – many of whom don’t have an interest in investments, or would like corroboration on their own ideas.

Crowded space and all have no chance based on the existing fetureset.

These are tech guys trying to crteate something for MBA types

The general theory is that there is no one investor or investing style that can be at the top of the market all of the time, but that there is some investor or investing style that is the best at any given time. So, we measure everyone’s performance in a very uniform way (by net asset value, just like all mutual funds). The system works to find skilled investors – many of the community are in the professional investing business, but it’s been fascinating to see them compete against ordinary joes when the ground rules are the same for everyone.

It’s a free way to find out if you’ve got the goods to invest – go to the site and sign up for a free account and you’ll create a virtual mutual fund to manage. All they ask is that you comply to standard mutual fund investing rules (for diversification, balance, etc) so that they can weed out the people who get lucky (like overweighting their portfolio with one stock that happens to go through the roof) and find those that can consistently beat the market in a diversified enough manner to lower the risk of their portfolio. Once you build a long enough track record, you’ll know how you stand against the others in the system, like ist.martin, up 500% since 2001: http://geobay.com/5136c7.

-Anand

http://www.soci...working-stocks/

Very quality site