Stockr Has Emerged To Make Trading More Informative And More Social

Most hardcore stock traders ravenously consume as much information as possible about the companies that they invest in. That means tracking charts and trends, but also aggressively scanning finance news sites and message boards for more data to trade on. The problem is, if you’ve ever gone to the likes of Yahoo Finance or Google Finance, you know that the message boards there aren’t exactly full of the most informative places to hang out. And they aren’t in any way social.

Stockr aims to provide an alternative, with a site for finance nerds who want to get relevant information about the stocks they trade, or are thinking about trading. The site mainly seeks to cut through the usual noise by requiring users to login with Facebook to set up watch lists and comment on stocks, press releases, and news items.

Stockr provides a lot of the same functionality you’ve come to expect from a stock site: It lets users create a watchlist of their favorite stocks, get feeds of news about the companies that they’re interested in, and follow the comments of users that the’ve chosen to follow. But the big differentiator is its use of social commenting, which ties their contributions to their identity.

By doing so, Stockr co-founder and CEO Vinny Jindal says that the platform will discourage the type of rampant spamming that happens on competing Internet message boards. It also let users find out more about the people who are making comments, follow them, and keep tabs on their opinions — if those opinions are worth following.

“Investing is a team sport,” Jindal told me, and he should know — prior to founding Stockr, he had worked in both buy-side and sell-side research. But previously there weren’t very many tools for keeping track of different users. And by letting users follow each other, Jindal said that traders might gain interest in stocks that they might not have previously considered.

The site is in private beta now, but is gradually opening up to new users as time goes on and it fixes bugs. Jindal expects to open to the general public in late July, but the first 500 TechCrunch readers can get access by clicking through and logging in with the “Connect with Facebook” button. Stockr has raised a friends and family seed round, and has eight employees currently. But now that the product is ready, Jindal says he’s looking to raise a Series A to continue development.