Emerginvest wants to be the “Yahoo finance for the rest of the world.” In order to do that, it’s trying to give investors more information about emerging markets and let Yahoo and Google focus their time in the United States.
The startup presented today during the Collaboration session of TechCrunch50. You can watch the video of its presentation here.
Once you sign up with Emerginvest, it will show you a heat map to show you how well markets are performing around the world. Well-performing markets are displayed in green, while poorly-performing companies are displayed in red.
At its heart, Emerginvest will will guide you through the process of investing in overseas markets and can find give you an overview of market indexes and provide you with macro analysis, news, overview of markets, and data on what sectors are performing well.
Once you collect all that data and find the companies in Brazil, China, or more than 120 other countries, you want to invest in, the service will tell you which brokerage firms will let you buy the company or fund.
Finally, Emerginvest lets you input your own portfolio and modify it as you buy and sell more stocks. Once that’s uploaded, the company’s “Hitlist” will track stocks, performance, and diversification.
The service, which is launching now, has tools that will let users embed data into blogs, which it believes will increase its user-base.
Expert Panelists
Roelof Botha:
“I’ve faced this problem and it’s frustrating to find information. We need to look at the rest of the world and the business models elsewhere and I think it’s a great idea. A very interesting idea.”
Mark Cuban:
“Do you have any exclusive information at all?”
Answer: “No, but what we do is exclusive and we can give you overseas content.”
Mark Cuban:
“If you’re getting ready to spend money on stocks, you’re going to look for best sources of information and people you buy stocks through is where you’ll go. There’s nothing here that I can’t get on Reuters or Bloomberg. So why would I come to you unless I’m just window shopping?”
Answer: “Others lack the data coverage and have a handful and the websites don’t give you data coverage.”
Don Dodge:
“This is a huge huge market with billions of dollars, but it’s also the bad news. It’s very competitive and difficult to get traction. At least you’re focusing on emerging markets. The other good news is that a small percentage of the market is needed to make a lot of money.”
Kevin Rose:
“It scares me that you say you’re the Yahoo of emerging markets. What would stop Yahoo from doing this?”
Answer: “We’re solving a tough problem and we’re trying to present this information and Yahoo hasn’t done it yet even though they’ve had ten years to do it. It takes brains and not manpower.”
Don Dodge:
“Have you thought of providing this to Ameritrade, Yahoo and the others if they want this?”
A. “We have and we would like to that.”