PersonalRIA is a service that helps you monitor your portfolio and connect you with reliable investment advisors who can better manage your investments.
The startup presented today during the Finance and Statistics session of TechCrunch50. You can watch the video of its presentation here.
After signing up for PersonalRIA, users can start looking for investment advisors. The site gives the users information about why they buy or sold each stock, full disclosure about the advisor, and specific information about their trading moves.
Once the user finds an investment advisor worth working with, they can add the advisor that best matches their strategy. The advisor is added to the portfolio page where you can see what the advisor is doing.
PersonalRIA really shines when it allows you to add your own brokerage account to the service and let it become monitored by the advisor you choose. Once complete, it will scale your portfolio to the advisor’s portfolio regardless of the funds in your account and manage your account based onthe advisor’s suggestions.
In order ot make money, PersonalRIA collects 0.5% for managing services and trading costs.
Expert Panelists
Mark Cuban:
I hate the idea but it still can work. I only hate the idea because I have no confidence or trust in investment managers. But how will you protect against fraud and see an investment advisor run up a stock and game the system?
Answer: What we do is we have a threshold and the advisors must be managed with SEC and do a due diligence process with all of them. Automated and non-automated processes will be present.
Roelof:
Very interesting idea and I think it’s good for one reason: it’s always good to take advantage of man’s sins and not their virtues. My primary question is how to get cost-effective customer acquisition.
Answer: Customer acquisition at the beginning will cost and we’ll need to spend money to get customers. But brokerage firms will want to add us to their platforms as well because we can increase trading. We’re already talking with one of them.
Kevin Rose:
“How do you tailor this to an investor based on their ages? Am I basically buying into this one advisor or can I have a custom-based system?”
Answer: You can have personalized advice and from that point onwards, you can search for advisors that hve the same asset allocation you want. You can have it managed for you based on that.
Don Dodge:
“This is a very competitive space and more mutual funds that publicly traded stocks. The competition is enormous and customer acquisition is going to be very difficult. A 0.5 percent fee is small and you’ll have enormous marketing costs. Easily understandable, but difficult to implement.”