Social Investing Site Covestor Now Collectively “Manages” $100 Million

No comparison whatsoever between the sites. Covestor is the sole one of the financial socialnetworking sites to use real money and real trades. Sorry, but the others are poor imitations using play money. World of difference folks. Have you ever played poker for a penny a hand versus if you played with your retirement fund? Covestor is for those who think they’re suitable to run with the big dogs, the rest are also rans. Eg, winning at Monopoly doesn’t make you a real estate titan.

Covestor always had, and has, a certain panache and origianlity. Not surprised to see the success in facilitating the investment process. Good job so far. Y

Seems like a great idea. When I was starting my hedge fund (13 short yrs ago) I encountered the problem every guy who wants to go on his own has: no one will give you money without a track record, and you can’t get a track record w/o money. Catch-22. These guys seem to tackle this issue exactly - you can run your own money and generate an independently verified track record. Then you can take it to money people and say “Here’s what I can do. Give me your money.” Wish they had this thing back in the day…

At TWST we do lots of intervew with professional money managers and its always occurred to us that their should be a way to measure private investors who like to pontificate on their holding and investment ideas. What I like about Covestor is that people can describe their investment strategies as well their holdings - and that is what we are always trying to get out of our Money Manager interviews. I hope it succeeds.

I’ve been using Covestor for exactly the purpose of building a track record, with the hopes of starting my own fund at some point in the next couple years. It’s amazing how poor (and expensive!) other performance tracking tools are compared to Covestor. This feature alone makes it a must have, and I can’t wait until they add some more community elements.

Covestor is a great concept. I will join.

I’m guessing that like pretty much every other cool investing site out there that this won’t work well for Canadian investors. Can somebody confirm?

I tried Covestor, and liked what I saw. I’d also check out SteamStreet (www.steamstreet.com) another up and comer that has some similar features. The goal is a little different… instead of trying to build up a reputation and sell advice, it’s more focused on individuals working with people they know to improve their portfolios. It felt a little less intimidating, since not all of us are looking to become investment stars.

Hey Garth. I am one of the founders of Covestor. We do support Canadian investors, or those trading in any of 34 international markets - not yet with the automated data import but using the manual trade entry process (which we verify by periodicially checking against your statements). Hope this helps

back-to-back, year after year…that monkey throwing darts on the list of stocks beats out the professionals - so it’ll be interesting to see which no-name individuals will come out of the heard in this ‘contest’ site

I would like to respond directly to Garth who said pessimistically that he’s guessing this will not work well for Canadian investors. In fact, Canadian Business did a story about Covestor just last month and a number of Covestor members are Canadian. A link to the Canadian Business story as well as some other news coverage is available on the Covestor site as well as directly from the publication.

One of the most compelling part for me is comparing the return of my passive indexing strategy to other Covestor members, indexes and the mutual funds that are tracked as part of the service. It makes me want to delve deeper into other strategies and see what they are doing that I’m not (when they are beating me). My goal is that by perfecting my passive investment strategy will generate a following for me that I can monetize into an income stream. Wish me luck! (and I agree with the sentiments of lawrence — active management with its associated fees can make it almost impossible to meet or beat appropriate benchmarks).

Hmmm $100m, where have I heard that number before…

I’d rather see brokers offering these features to clients than some third party social whatever website that might be here today, dead pool tomorrow and god knows what is being done with your broker user/pass logins (yeah, I saw the demo where they say they have no access to your info and it’s not stored anywhere, it’s simply passed along in an encrypted connection to their partners).

Pass.

100 million, where’s the rest?

I have been using Covestor since it launched and have been very impressed with the idea and the promise of what this could represent for the “democratization” of investing. The website is very well constructed, with solid functionality and some really cool features. I think these guys are on to a really powerful concept: think of it like “American Idol” meets “Facebook” meets “TheStreet.com”!

I just signed up for the service and am, in short, stunned. It blows away all the competitors in this space by guaranteeing trust (all the trades you see are real) and reducing friction (you don’t have to re-enter any of your trades, ever).

This is the first investment-related site that will actually gain my attention on a regular basis.

Erick

it doesn’t take guts to post your performance when you are a self described “horrible public market investor”

and i do like covestor. i think they are on to something

Fred

good job so far…they always had originality unlike google

Nice product.. but I don’t know if their business model will work.

Perry: I too am Canadian and interested in Covestor, however, looking at your site I can’t make it give me a quote for stocks on the TSX Ventures Exchange. Are you only supporting the main TSX board right now?

I don’t understand. If i am making so much profit investing, why would I spend the time to look for some “rewards”.

can they offset my loss?

why would I share with others to make a few bucks?

Marc T

That was my biggest concern and I finally invested anyways. If you are a financial blogger, thousands of them, its that urge to compete and this software and tool makes it so easy.

It wont be about the ‘money ‘ rewards necessarily for me, it’s about putting yourself out there and it not being so freaking hard that its not worth it.

For me the most interesting development to watch with these sites will be when one or more of them claims to have real market insight based on consumer sentiment… a few of them, (e.g. The Motley Fool) have been around long enough and have enough usage/data that they should know by now if that Holy Grail exists I would be willing to bet that there are some well paid mathematicians and statisticians working hard on multi-variant regression analysis as we speak.

Whether it’s true or not, I expect one or more of these sites to start selling investment advice based on socially generated sentiment data as a premium product offering within the next 12 months… could open up a very profitable revenue stream for someone.

Ultimately market mechanics will defeat the value of such information, but in the short term, I expect a beady-eyed mathematician to show up with some very compelling evidence that he can predict the market, and offer to sell you access to his crystal ball. Will be interesting to watch.

It’s interesting that they get people to put their real brokerage accounts on the line–really hard to get anyone to log on to any new website nowadays and this is a standalone website–shows that the features are unique. this one will get snatched up by dow jones in no time once rupert closes that deal. how do i invest in this company?