If you’ve ever tried searching the web for financial advice, you probably know just how much junk there is out there. Sure, there may be a few diamonds in the rough, but oftentimes the best results go to the finance ‘experts’ who are good at SEO – not the ones who know what they’re talking about. Investimonials is a new site launching this week that’s looking to offer an unbiased view of the variety of financial brokers, services, videos, and books out there. And to do that, it’s turning to the site’s community to submit their own reviews (it’s essentially a TripAdvisor for financial goods).
The new site was founded by Timothy Sykes, a controversial financial expert who was named to Trader Monthly’s 2006 “Top 30 under 30″ and had a once-successful hedge fund that shut down in 2007 after taking heavy losses. Since then, though, he’s mounted a comeback and is now one of Covestor’s top ranked traders (though some people aren’t fans of his tactics).
Sykes says that his goal with Investimonials is to help users cut through the spammy and scammy financial sites that litter the web, by offering a comprehensive hub of user reviews for each product. Investimonials will be launching with eight categories, including the top rated Brokers, Newsletters, DVDs, Books, and websites, with plans to have “dozens” over the next few years. At launch the site has 3,000 products ready to review, though the vast majority of them haven’t been reviewed by anyone yet.
Sykes says the primary competitor in this area is EliteTrader, which has been around for a decade and has around one thousand total reviews (the site also looks pretty dated).
Investimonials incentivizes users to write reviews and share their personal contact information by offering ‘iv bucks’, which can be traded in for prizes. Many of these are Sykes’s own products, though there are a variety of prizes from others as well.
Investimonials seems like a good idea, though it’s going to have to be very transparent if it wants to avoid constant accusations of bias. And as with all review sites, it’s going to suffer from the chicken-and-the-egg problem – until it has a lot of reviews about products, few people will have a good reason to use it.
Thanks for the article, wait until you see the features we are working on…gonna make finance better whether the industry is ready for it or not!
Unfortunately, the only way finance will improve in the aggregate is with a more educated consumer.
The reality is, even if you spelled out to a T exactly what Joe consumer should do or whom he should trust etc, the information will fall on deaf ears.
Agreed David, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try…creating accountability for websites, newsletters, DVDs and brokers is the first step to forcing financial publishers to create better products…facing heat from thousands of brutally honest reviewers, scams will go the way of the dinosaurs.
In fact, there is already one publisher which does millions upon millions of sales each year that we have listed and we discovered they created a dozen fake aliases and posted 10 or so phony reviews today all from the same IP address…the idiots even used their company name as the ppassword for all their aliases…We will take pride in exposing them with a ridiculously detailed blog post next week!
I am so waiting for the next detailed blog post here. What you will revealed secret ?
Storing passwords as plaintext is poor security. Reasonable advice here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/270485/password-management-best-practices-soup-to-nuts-not-just-storage-or-generation
I absolutely agree with David. You can compile any list you want and it will be ignored. In order to be good at anything, it requires work and research. The average American is so friggin lazy that any effort to increase their knowledge to become better investors is considered prohibitive. People with a few dollars to invest in things like stocks want the picks handed to them on a silver platter. And, if the stock or other investment vehicle doesn’t work out perfectly, they will trash you and in some cases sue you…
This looks like a great idea. Can’t wait for it to gain traction. I keep seeing the same pitch of some guy in a suit who claims he can make triple digit gains with little risk.
I feel sorry for the people who fall for it. Having this will help.
http://www.traderbots.com
try out the new google search. its great.
http://www.zjtechlive.com/try-the-new-google-search/
Here is a little diamond in the rough:
http://invetrics.com
It has fee DJIA index timing signals for individual investors.
The site is VERY spammy, and just a referral service to promoters (brokers). Be careful!
Bobby you make me laugh, you MUST be a stock promoter, you have me on about a dozen Twitter lists and you go around badmouthing me…why are you afraid of a little transparency? Might you be one of the dinosaurs to which I refer? Man there is so much opportunity in being brutally honest, join the fight.
Tim – I promote stocks just like you. Except I don’t go around telling people I do not.
Come clean Tim
looks like a good idea to me…
Sarah
http://www.isopurewater.com/
Good heavens, what’s with all the spam comments today?
If they’ve cracked the issue of moderation v spam v biased recommendation, it’s got to be a useful resource.
With Investimonial now it would be easy enough to make easy financial investments
Because if we’ve learned anything in the past year, it’s that regular people really know the quality of the financial products they own…
Jon, they know which products educate them and make them money vs. those that don’t. Right now you have an entire industry full of random sales pages and no central ranking system.
Yeah, I am agree Timothy Sykes. Because the market of Stock is never enough for investor.
Looks like a very nice idea .I dont think there is another authority website in the finance sector.
Plenty of websites like elite trader.
The most comprehensive one in terms of products is:
http://www.forexprs.com
Yeah, You are right. But some of them include Forex, Stock, Gold trade, Option.
I think it is a good idea indeed to give more information, products, details of guide to a newbie investor. I love your site, I will add to my favourite with your site after that I will register a account. Another that, I believe you can overcome to compete other website.
Too much emotion is tied up in investing for this to actually work. Educate all you want but you’ll never overcome the psychology of investing from a web site.
I only have one investment advise:
http://www.iglue.com
I can see how Tim site will be useful just because as mentioned above there is so many BS in the trading world and commercial connections between promoters. Problem is some people who review the sites have some personal agendas at time. Overall many reviews can help making an educated decision like using amazon,or yahoo reviews. The more reviews the more objective obviously.
This site with have to filter out all of Tim Sykes other sites if it wants to get rid of scammy and spammy sites
No, my products represent all that is good, I am the #1 ranked trader out of 40,0000+ on Covestor…I am the ONLY newsletter provider/trading coach detailing all my trades and PROVING how my strategy is real and why I am teaching others (it is not very scalable).
People don’t like my attitude, but who cares. I can say whatever I want as long as I stick to my trading rules. That doesnt mean there aren’t more real useful people out there, Investimonials will help discover them!
Tim just FYI where is the transparency I have looked your site and it is very hard to add new sites for review seems you have established a group of sites that YOU know in your database.
Anyone should be able to poste a site for review if you want your site to be credible..it seems you have a submission process but not obvious at all
Investimonials.com I posted a review 2days ago showed up and then next day was gone.
Is this a joke a ripp off or blunt manipulation investimonials.com ? Did I miss something?
TechCrunch, wake up and do your homework. You guys are supposed to be about cutting edge information. Sykes is a classic pump and dump artist whose tactics have already been exposed. He’s a parasite who feeds off of credulous noobs. I have no problem with Sykes fleecing the serially uninformed sheep out there, but Techcrunch shouldn’t be representing this guy as anything other than what he is.
Try doing a Google search before you give guys like Sykes the airtime.