Honest and serious question - what's the purpose of this service? Do you think an investor will get higher returns if he knows what his friends are buying? What experts are buying? It seems to me that no serious investor would ever need this type of a service. I understand it's cool to make everything social, but I can get absolutely no useful information from this aspect.
The reporting side can definitely be very cool though, and it could provide serious benefits if done right.
There's ongoing debate as to whether a highly successful investor will surface and be able to beat the market (i.e. the next warren buffett). We don't take a position for or against that. To those that are up for the challenge, great, but we don't at all count on it. In fact, we debate it internally, but it's not as important bc our purpose right now is to provide this platform.
We believe there is value in the transparency of the platform to foster better discussions. Most people make decisions alone. And current platforms like Stocktwits are interesting for sentiment but are filled with banter and are unreliable for real discussions.
In terms of reporting / tools, we're focused on investor self-awareness. Most people have more than 1 account and have a hard time even finding out the annual return on their portfolio. We'd like to start alerting people of things like strategy drift, as well.
Slightly more advanced topic: There's also something to be said of the data itself once people start sharing. The idea is that if you can get a cross-section of sentiment / social data backed by real portfolio data, it adds an element that wasn't previously available and should technically result in a more efficient market, resulting in an opportunity for new value creation. Brainstorming with few Anderson / GSB / Cornell finance professors on this.
Maybe I didn't phrase my question right. What I want to know is, as an investor, why should I use your service? Personally, I don't see much value in knowing what my friends are investing in. There are 10,000 stocks, I cannot follow them all anyway. As an investor, the only thing that I am interested in is increasing my returns. Everything else is secondary. So my question is not whether markets are efficient (we'll leave that to the academics) but whether you believe your service, in some way, would help investors improve their returns. If the answer is no, the product, from the very start, will be very limited in scope (e.g. only the investing newbies and other such small segments would get a benefit).
Reporting-wise, I am with you. I think the current models are antiquated, and most of the solutions I see are outright wrong (Hint: If you're looking only at stock prices for returns, you're doing it wrong too).
Hey tinkerrr, I believe the value to someone like you is in connecting with others on the same boat to be better informed. I'm with you in the sense that I don't always care what my friends are holding... unless my friends are really smart.
For example, I see LVS dropping and am considering starting a position. I ping the people who hold LVS right now (nvestly.com/ticker/lvs) and ask them what they think and if they know what's driving the selloff. Reality is that people on Nvestly are generally well-informed about what they hold, so new information surfaces and the entire group benefits. The fact that people's identities are tied to real portfolios tends to generate higher quality discussions vs. a Stocktwits, Yahoo! group or even SeekingAlpha comments.
If you don't ever trade and don't have to discuss anything, it's most helpful just to track your portfolios in one place without multiple logins and to see your returns. The annualized return (IRR) figure for example is something you can't generally get without paying an analyst (or investing hours into a spreadsheet). The IRR is important because it's an annual return that all funds in the world look at (like angels looking at traction).
Newbies do like to follow 'top investors'. I actually didn't think this would be super relevant but people loved it so we made it the homepage upon login and are adding a few things to protect people against blindly following.
Experienced investors have been using Nvestly as an investment resume of sorts. The system pulls up to 10 years of historical track record info and this is unprecedented afaik.
So these are 3 use cases. Let me know if it doesn't answer your question.
> the system pulls up to 10 years of historical track record
Do you mean for experienced investors or for regular users?
If it's the latter, I'm curious as to how - by parsing PDFs from the supported brokers? It would be in fact pretty cool since places like personal capital only do 90 days max when a new account is imported.
I can actually see an advantage to knowing what my friends (or top profiles) are investing in. There are certainly no guarantees with it, but if you were invested in one fund, and maybe 10 of your friends were, and then suddenly 5 of them dropped off... you might have a look as to why half of your friends were moving away from that fund, what had they read or heard that you hadn't.
i suppose if your friends were trading everyday, the value in that would be tiny, but for longer term investments, seeing the herd mentallity might make it easier for people.
If long-term investors are basing investment decisions on what their friends are investing in, they need to rethink their entire investing philosophy and strategy. Heck, Buffet's trades are public - if you had to choose between the two, would you rather mimic Buffet's trades or would you rather mimic your friends? Or 5 of your favorite investors instead of 5 of your friends?
I'm with tinkerr: What is the value here? Openfolio.com is another player in this space, but I'm missing the value that this space has.
kyu: Can you speak to this? What is the ideal experience that you are hoping for people to get out of this which adds value to their stock market experience?
Hey tinkerr, I'm the CEO, thanks for the question.
The value in this space is in the shared data. It's analogous to Twitter -- the individual tweets might be useless, but the collective data is valuable. If you could see all the real portfolio data that people are sharing, it would be magnitudes more interesting than sentiment data from i.e. stocktwits because it represents real dollars (and in that sense we let people share trades to stocktwits, too). Actually, if someday people were to start publishing real dollar amounts you'd even see total aggregate volume. And if people were to add target holding period to their trades, you could see volume by expected holding period. There's definitely inherent value in that, but it's a very long-term play.
For now, the value is in better investment discussions. It's impossible to have one on i.e. stocktwits. The real portfolio info provides an environment for higher quality conversations. A few experiences people have expressed are valuable on Nvestly:
- Finding others who hold a stock they hold and discussing what to do next.
- Finding people who have traded a stock a lot and sharing research
- Having a little more fun by earnings investment merits (similar to badges) or getting feature as a top weekly investor
The 'business' way to describe the value to society is that the social element helps introduce the concept to the younger generation. >50% of millennials are saving for retirement but only 10% are investing even though the majority who save think of the stock market as a viable vehicle for retirement (had to memorize this for a pitch).
Thanks for spotting this ... no pun intended
Actually my fault for not creating accurate error messaging. It should say "No special symbols allowed." The code itself is fine. Love that you found this. We'll fix it on the next push. Ftr, these are some of the characters that are not allowed: <,>.?/:;"'{[}]|\`~
I made an account and checked it out, but I don't think I'm going to use it. I just don't get much out of it that I can see right now.
Something I immediately noticed: I'd like to have the ability to filter by diversified accounts. If I am looking at someone that gained 50% over the last year, and 91% of their holdings are 1 stock, I don't really gain anything. They bought shares in Tesla a couple of years ago. That's fine, but what do I get out of knowing that? Several members of your top group are like that.
When I open up 'professional investors' and go to an individual account, there isn't an easy way that I can see to go back to the overall view of professional investors, and going back sends me to the week's top performers window. I don't really want to go there at that point.
What might be useful for me too is a way to see what the professionals listed have invested in tracked over time, based on their past filings. It'd be interesting, anyway.
Hey I'm one of the co-founders. Thanks for checking it out and for the comments! Right now the site doesn't filter for concentrated portfolios and we'll certainly be adding that. This is our first version of the product. Glad you noticed that! You might find more value in finding people who hold something you hold or something you're considering investing in.
We just added the "professional investors" section today and will be sure to work on the UX. Agree with your points here. That feature would be awesome, we're adding it to the list.
Thanks for the feedback. We wanted to keep it simple for the general audience and we dig in just a little bit more in FAQ. We're in the process of creating a dedicated "security" page. As this is probably the smartest community we can find on the subject, would love any specific input on security.
TBH, we leveraged some of the same technology and thus wording that SigFig, Personal Capital, Mint and other pioneers in the space use.
I qute like this idea. I'm not sure how much I'd use it. Currently though this seems to be aimed at the US market. I'm a UK investor and you don't support my platform, that said I'm not sure my platform even has an API you could plug into. It'd be nice to look up my individual funds to list, so I can see my investments without needing to plugin to my platform.
It feels to me like all the online brokerages are stuck in the dark ages. I'd like to be able to trade on a nice modern site with good reporting tools. Maybe you guys could build that eventually. I'm sure in the meantime I will be interested in watching people who are doing really well -- that information is extremely interesting to me.
Yes we'd love to get there. Our CEO left the investment management industry precisely for that reason. Said his boss, who managed $6 billion, still typed with 2 fingers. No offense, but probably time to start embracing technology.
Thanks for the input! We're integrating more brokerages as we go. We've been swamped with requests, so any indications on your favorite brokerages would help us choose. Right now we've queued up Interactive Brokers, OptionsHouse, TradeKing and Wealthfront. Also have requests for Betterment, Loyal3 and Motif. If there are any more we should add to the list we'd love to hear it.
You need to define the value proposition a little better. Maybe you can find some great ways to integrate it with startup investments too, you should check out Angellist API.
The reporting side can definitely be very cool though, and it could provide serious benefits if done right.