Financial news site MarketWatch added a number of new features to their site recently, including a single search box (you no longer need to look up stock symbols separately) and a new user-generated stock price predictor called MarketPerception.
The predictor is a small widget included on every stock listing page (example). Users are asked whether the stock will move up or down on the next trading day from its current price. Once a selection is made, the overall user votes are shown.
Users can also see which stocks are getting a large number of user votes on any particular day.
Last year a number of other sites began experiments in gathering user opinions on stocks to create additional content and potential revenue streams. See our articles on SocialPicks, Motley Fool CAPS and The Street’s Stockpickr for examples.
MarketPerception is a very simple tool at this point, but the company says they’ll be expanding functionality later this year. The long term goal is to develop more community features on top of the market perception rating. The finished product will most likely resemble other social stock market sites out there, with a rating system based on the accuracy of your predictions and performance of your stock portfolio.
MarketWatch’s two largest investors were Viacom and Pearson Plc, until Dow Jones bought the entire operation for $500 million in January 2005. In February, MarketWatch had 6.6 million unique visitors and 172 million page views.
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I still think Marketocracy is the powerhouse social stock picking site. It is definitely worth a look. Tons of valuable info if you love stocks. I think the site needs a redesign, but the content is top notch!
I am slightly impressed with the success of this site.
I don’t think the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ is just a voting technique, and I don’t see these yielding great results.
What makes the difference, is when it’s a group of individuals making decisions they actually have a stake in. Just voting or giving an impression means almost nothing. If you’d actually put money on the stock, that’s quite a bit better. And a crowd of people with money at stake is generally pretty good, like Tradsports for example.
I can see this being scammed by pump and dumpers
the details of the story are inaccurate…..marketwatch was a partnership between viacom and data broadcastiing corp, not bewteen viacom and dow jones. dow jones bought the whole thing a few years back, and ever since the site has gone downhill….less content, and slower. it used to be my homepage.
dow jones bought marketwatch as a free “gateway” into its paid subscription products…wsj.com, barrons.com, etc.
many of the key players that made marketwatch so great left soon after the dow jones acquisition.
I am looking forward to the other community features that they are promising to launch later on. This MarketPerception tool may be good for fun and making predictions but I wouldn’t take its results seriously.
I like MarketWatch, but even though I may be the worst investor in history, I will find it irresistible to chime in and vote for up or down on comapnies. I can’t see this helping the accuracy.
Who need a stock predictor when you have the actual stock price as a way of knowing if it is going up or down.
Sorry I couldn’t help it.
ertetgtg
OPEN ID?
Why in the world would anyone bother to enter a guess without voting in the way they _want_ the stock to go?
I suppose if there’s a lot of voting and activity, it could be a sign that someone’s trying to manipulate a stock in the same way they do with spamed predictions. But that never means anything to the stock price either, so it’s hard to see any value at all in this.
Hi,
Does anyone know if the predictions shown for the top / worst 10 are from yesterday? None of them seem to be accurate when I click on them. How long does it take for them to update?
if they make the widget contest oriented with longer timeframes you have a winner if you know of one - pls contact us at wallstrip.com
Another experimental site trying to create a prediction market is http://fin.uti.ae. I wonder if any of these prediction markets have built a large enough and liquid enough information market to truly capture the market’s knowledge. And what happens with the few insiders who have a tremendous amount of valuable information on a company or stock but won’t or can’t share it with the community of the prediction market? Will the aggregated knowledge of the rest of the “lay” investors be enough to predict accurately?
I have heard the complaints about prediction markets like these being unnecessary because of the stocks price already public and should encompass any and all important information, but this feature allows users who don’t want to actually sign up on a an e*trade account, but may have some info that is predictive to participate in the market. In other words, I do have an opinion about certain stocks (especially retail), but do not want to actually commit $$.
As an Economist, I am attempting to do the same thing at http://www.finanicalnext.com for economic inidcators, if anyone wants to check it out.
I agree - without considerdable investment;
- no one will care too much about how well - their pick is ..
- If they held contest; for free amount of $$ worth of investment on their site… or something ..
- that people could win -
-RB
This piece of crap feature addition is worthy of a whole post? Wow.