Stockpickr, an investing site founded by two New York City hedge fund managers, is giving a boost to all companies in the “investing 2.0” sector today with their announcement of a partnership with a leader from the first generation of the web investment sector, TheStreet.com.
Stockpickr took an equity investment from TheStreet pursuant to the deal, although the size of the investment is not being disclosed. The deal also includes extensive advertising on the stockpickr site and featuring of the stockpickr service on the Street.com web properties. This partnership with TheStreet, one of the first web companies to essentially monetize blogging, is quite obviously a big deal for stockpickr. Anyone in this space who can somehow tie itself to the ubiquitous Jim Cramer (The Street’s largest stockholder) is bound to benefit.
The site bills itself as “the stock idea network” and the tag line is accurate. It does idea generation very well by offering the community portfolios from publicly available investing information of experts like Warren Buffett, George Soros and Mark Cuban, among others. Since there is enough data to suggest most of us can’t pick stocks, a one stop shop for tracking guys who can beat the market is pretty cool.
There are also a number of portfolios from the community and all the usual current community features are available to users. You can rate portfolios, be directed to similar portfolios and get recommendations of stocks within similar portfolios to help you assemble your own. There’s a cool voyeuristic element to the site, so it doesn’t take long to get lost on it and before long you’ve got a watch list of stocks. While you can’t trade or manage a real portfolio here, it does what it claims to do very well, and the service would fit well as another research tool on any brokerage site.
What makes the deal really interesting is there just hasn’t been much to write about in the financial services community with respect to web 2.0. Perhaps the crater was too deep, the wounds too great from the drop in the NASDAQ, but there’s been almost no noise out of this sector. Now, in the last few months, we’re had news from SeekingAlpha, Zecco, Motley Fool and now Stockpickr. We’ve heard rumblings about other startups and new products in the space as well. The big brokerages have far bigger war chests than does TheStreet. This space could get hot in a hurry.