The problem with most portfolio trackers on financial sites like Yahoo Finance is that they are a pain to set up and an even bigger pain to maintain. Typically, you have to enter each stock position by hand, and every time you buy or sell a stock, you need to manually record the change. Wikinvest is introducing its own portfolio tracker today with an obvious improvement: it links directly to all of your brokerage, 401(k) and other stock accounts and tracks positions and changes automatically.
At launch, Wikinvest’s portfolio tracker hooks up to about 25 different brokerage accounts, including Schwab, ETrade, Fidelity, Ameritrade, Morgan Stanley, and Zecco. It lets you combine holdings from different accounts and track them as a single portfolio. You can compare the overall performance of your portfolio to the S&P 500 or Dow Jones, and see the average PE, ROA, ROE, and other ratios across your portfolio. Also, when you hover over a headline for a stock, you get a realtime newsfeed for that company.
Portfolio tracking is an addictive feature for finance site junkies. Parker Conrad, Wikinvest’s CEO, estimates that less than 3 percent of people who use finance portals actually add a portfolio, but those who do make up 30 percent of the pageviews. So if he can make it easier to set up and track portfolios on Wikinvest, it should help drive more growth. The site is still small, with about 1.2 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore, but it is currently going through a growth spurt which kicked off a year ago with a redesign.
About 60 percent of its traffic comes from search, with the rest coming either directly or through partnerships. Wikinvest powers the stock charts on Forbes, USA Today, and NPR.com. Wikinvest now needs to make more of those visitors stick around and come back on their own. Hence, the portfolio tracker.
Wikinvest is just as it sounds; a wiki for investing. The company seeks to take advantage of the large numbers of investors and investing savvy people who are looking to the web to get better trading tips. Like most wikis, Wikinvest will face a few problems including spammed/tampered entries, lack of incentive to create content and the dubious authority of users generating content. These problems exist for Wikipedia as well, yet Wikipedia continues to have as...
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