SocialPicks, a social network around stocks, is officially out of private beta and has added features to make it one of the more compelling places for stock junkies to hang out. SocialPicks tracks imaginary portfolios as they shrink and grow, ranking users by paying close attention to how well their predictions pan out. The new release comes with a face lift, and a tweaked ranking calculation that takes into account the average return your picks, your accuracy in calling the direction a stock moves, and how highly the community rates your advice. SocialPicks tracks a series of “celebrity” stock pickers like Jim “BOOYAH” Crammer or Warren Buffet and the hope is that professionals will use the service too, in order to publicly assert their trading prowess. They also hope to generate revenue the stock picking data of top users, PicksPal style. The company has started with a contest for $1,000 to attract some top pickers. Their new Blog Tracker product is really interesting – submit your financial blog to SocialPicks. They’ll parse your RSS feed to try and determine when you are giving an opinion on the future performance of a stock (human verified). All of these blogs are then ranked by how well these predictions do over time. Currently Main Street Stocks is the top rated blog with a 66% accuracy rating. If you’re interested in SocialPicks, see our coverage of Motley Fool CAPS as well. CrunchBase Information SocialPicks Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

There’s no shortage of stock market oriented communities coming online, it’s almost hard to tell them apart, but today’s entrant is particularly interesting. SocialPicks is focused on reputation building and small group collaboration. They have just begun to offer limited beta accounts. Users enter their stock trading activities and thoughts then befriend and rate other users. Reputations are built according to a user’s percentage of winning picks, quality of insights as judged by the community and number of trades made. With commenting, feeds and a list of popular stocks that looks like a tag cloud (just charming really) this site has got most of the requisite features of a standard social network. SocialPicks believes that an emphasis on individual reputation instead of aggregate information will prevent much of the gaming that critics of social stock sites often critique. Cofounded by Weiting Liu, SocialPicks has been responded to with enthusiasm by alpha testers – but there are many competitors and many questions about this whole class of sites. I asked the company why successful traders would want to participate, instead of keeping their successful knowledge private. They told me that in addition to small group collaboration, SocialPicks will be a good place for would-be financial advisers to prove themselves in a public and transparent way. They told me that all too many market discussions go on in online forums, where there is no way to discern the veracity of advice. The company is also of the belief that many people want an easy way to share their knowledge with a small group of their friends in a structured way. They are aiming for a del.icio.us model more than a digg model, they say. That’s the main part of their approach that prevents pump and dump activity, they plan to institute activity monitoring that will notify users of suspicious behavior as well. See also Feeling Bullish (possibly the most similar to SocialPicks), Bullpoo, Gradr, Stocktickr and Digstock. Some one will come up with the winning formula in this space and SocialPicks does seem to have a well thought out strategy. → Read More