Wikinvest’s realtime portfolio tracker makes tracking a number of brokerage accounts and your investment portfolio easy. The Wikinvest portfolio tracker lets anyone link up their real brokerage accounts to so they can keep tabs on their actual holdings, which are updated automatically every time you make a trade. Today, the startup is launching its free investment portfolio tracking iPad app, Wikinvest Portfolio HD, to enable users to track, analyze and manage all their investments in one place.
The app has been built from the ground up for iPad to give investors a high-level view of their investments. Through Wikinvest’s proprietary brokerage import technology, users can import their account information from over 60 of the largest brokerage firms in the U.S. → Read More
Charles Schwab doesn’t have an Android app, a Blackberry app, or even an iPhone app. Many brokerages are in the same boat, or if they do have a mobile app it is only on the iPhone. Starting later today, brokerage customers of Schwab, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and more than 60 other brokerages will be able to track their portfolios on new mobile Android and Blackberry apps from Wikinvest. Directions for downloading the mobile apps can be found here.
While about half of the brokerages Wikinvest suports have iPhone apps, only about 20 percent have Android or Blackberry apps. There are so many mobile app platforms that it is difficult for the brokerages to support them all. Wikinvest hopes to fill that gap with these apps. → Read More
Wikinvest today launches its mobile initiative with its iPhone app, now live in the Apple store. As brokerages and the finance industry in general are usually late to the mobile and Internet game, the Wikinvest app is one of the first that allows iPhone users mobile access to their personal portfolios as well as the latest investment news.
From Wikinvest CEO Michael Sha:
“We’ve amassed an incredibly rich set of portfolio data that, when complemented with our unique user generated content, will provide a much better way to manage your investments than what’s found today on traditional finance portals like Yahoo Finance.”
Wikinvest pulls in user-generated stock info as well as aggregate information from a user’s brokerage and investment accounts. Aside from portfolio specific content, the app will provide market data, quotes, charts, news, and currency info, including that of international exchanges and over 60 brokerages. → Read More
Sometimes a startup rolls out a new feature, and it just hits the sweet spot of what consumers are craving. It looks like Wikinvest has a hit on its hands with its new realtime portfolio tracker. Less than three weeks after its launch, Wikinvest is tracking $1 billion worth of real investments tied to the real brokerage accounts of about 10,000 members.
The Wikinvest portfolio tracker lets anyone link up their real brokerage accounts to Wikinvest so they can keep tabs on their actual holdings, which are updated automatically every time you make a trade. That way you don’t have to manually update your portfolio (which is what most finance sites make you do). Getting to $1 billion worth of tracked assets in such a short time suggests there is a real need for such a service. → Read More
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. → Read More
Finance sites like Yahoo Finance and Google Finance haven’t changed much in the past ten years. The fonts are different. Maybe there’s some more real-time quotes and fancier, interactive charts. But at their core they all follow pretty much the same formula: dump as much data on the individual investor as they can and let them figure it out. Wikinvest, which started out as a crowd-sourced investing site, is trying to change all of that with a complete redesign that is being turned on tonight for members who log in.
Over the past two years, Wikinvest has become a great resource for researching stocks but some of its most interesting data was hidden away. It is not a daily habit like other finance sites, attracting only about 500,000 unique visitors a month. The redesign aims to change that by putting all of Wikinvest’s industry- and company-specific data front and center. Each stock page has a chart, key metrics, a news feed, wiki analysis, and opinions from bulls and bears. → Read More
Stock charts and data are the lifeblood of all investing sites, even in these slumping times. Most major media sites have investing sections powered by stock data that they license for a pretty penny. San Francisco startup Wikinvest is making inroads as a stock data provider for media Websites. Its embeddable, annotatable charts now grace the stock pages of USAToday. Beginning next week, they will also power the stock charts on Forbes.com, replacing its current stock data provider, INVESTools. (On USAToday, the Wikinvest charts are supplementing the main charts).
Each stock page on USAToday also includes community analysis and links to related concepts from Wikinvest as well. Wikinvest charts can be annotated with news stories and embedded elsewhere. For instance here is a chart from USAToday’s Google stock page: → Read More
Financial bloggers are going to like this one. Wikinvest is getting ready to release a Livequotes plugin that automatically adds a stock quote every time a publicly traded company is mentioned in a post. It auto-detects company names and adds the ticker symbol, price, and the percent change in parentheses after the name, with links to the Wikinvest page for that stock. It also can add links for financial terms and definitions such as “PEG ratio” or “price to book.”
The plugin works on Wordpress and Blogger right now, and will launch officially in a couple weeks. But Wikinvest will give 10 TechCrunch readers early access. State in comments why your site or blog is deserving and how your would use the plugin, or email Wikinvest founder Parker Conrad (parker [at] wikinvest). → Read More
The current market gyrations have investors running everywhere seeking advice. What better time to launch a newswire culled from the latest posts of financial bloggers? That’s the idea behind Wikinvest Wire, which has just been launched by the user-edited investment site Wikinvest. Except that it is not really a newswire in the traditional sense. It is more like a contextual recommendation system for the blogs invited to participate.
Wikinvest Wire is starting off with 100 financial blogs, including Confused Capitalist, Money Morning, College Analysts, The Mess That Greenspan Made, Financial Armageddon, and Old School Value. All told the blogs attract about one million unique visitors a month. Wikinvest is also in the process of syndicating the Wikinvest Wire to mainstream media sites, where links will appear on their stock pages. Wikinvest Wire is invite-only, but interested bloggers can apply.
The Wire will exist primarily on the participating blogs themselves, on Wikinvest topic pages, and on the yet-to-be-named media sites. For each of the 100 financial blogs, at the end of each post three links will appear to posts from other blogs in the network discussing the same stock or financial topic (such as “Google (GOOG),” “bailout,” or “credit default swaps”). The contextual links will also appear on relevant pages on Wikinvest and other stock and financial sites. (See screenshot). In this sense, it is similar to contextual recommendation systems like Sphere, OutBrain, or BlogRovr, which all append recommended links at the end of blog posts or news articles using a variety of methods. → Read More
Embedable stock charts are nothing new, and neither are interactive charts that give you price information as you mouse over different dates. Both Yahoo Finance and Google Finance offer interactive charts on their respective sites, and Yahoo offers embeddable static charts. Neither one brings that interactivity to chart widgets that can be embedded on other sites. But starting today you can get interactive, embeddable WikiCharts like the one below from Wikinvest. Hold the mouse down over the chart and you can pan it from left to right. Hover over the line and you will get date, price, and volume, information. And it’s a wiki, so anyone can add an annotation. Do you think you know what’s been driving Yahoo’s stock price up and down lately? Stick in your best explanation before or during big price movements as an annotation. http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf/WikiChartMini.swf CrunchBase Information Wikinvest Information provided by CrunchBase . → Read More
Financial and stock research sites like Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Marketwatch, or CNNMoney have done a lot to democratize investment research by bringing reams of financial data for any publicly traded company to investors at the click of a button. But when it comes to financial metrics, much of the data they provide is the same for every company: revenues, earnings, PE ratios, market caps, assets, liabilities, analyst estimates, and so on. To really understand a company, this data is just a starting point. By the end of next week, Wikinvest is planning on introducing a new feature to help investors dig deeper. Says co-founder Michael Sha: People have a thirst for information and data, but the traditional data available does not make much logical sense. They don’t help you understand the nuances of companies and industries. Each industry has its own unique set of comparable metrics by which analysts and professional investors gauge the health and productivity of the companies in that industry. For airlines, it might be fuel costs, revenue per available seat-mile, cost per available seat-mile, and load factors (what percentage of seats are sold per flight). For home builders, the comps might be number of home closings, number of new contracts, and number of canceled contracts. For manufacturers, you might want to look at inventory turns. For banks, default rates and interest rate spreads. It is too much for any one individual investor to calculate and keep track of. But that is where Wikinvest comes in. As the name suggests, the site is like Wikipedia for stock research, and is part of a growing trend of investment sites that tap into the wisdom of the crowd for investment advice. (See also, Cake Financial, Covester, and Motley Fool CAPS). All it takes is for one member to add a useful piece of data for everyone else to benefit from it. The company will seed about a dozen industries with comp data, and then invite its members to fill out the rest. Each data point must be footnoted with a source. This is a really powerful example of what can happen when people collaborate around data. The comp numbers will appear on each industry page, relevant company pages, and a metrics page for each metric. They will also be embedded within articles about specific companies or industries. Explains Wikinvest’s other co-founder Parker Conrad: What we are building is → Read More
Wikinvest has closed a $2.5 million series A led by DCM and including angels. Wikinvest is just as the name suggests, a wiki for investors. Wikinvest is meant to be a research portal where anyone can contribute information on company profiles, investment concepts, or chart analysis. The site is a competitor with financial profiles and news listed on Yahoo and Google Finance, as well as Wikia’s investment portal and company profiles on the mother of all wikis, Wikipedia. Wikinvest does a good job of providing business focused company profiles, which include market information and product histories. Wikia doesn’t have company profiles and Wikipedia is focused on company history, not analyzing market data. They also have a very novel feature, wiki charts, which let users explain trends across real-time share price graphs through embedded comments (example). All this data is useless if it can be undermined by one malicious editor, so Wikinvest has a reputation system that tracks user trust. Trust is based around how often a user contributes and how much of that work is preserved. Users that contribute less and are infrequently over-written, are given the least scrutiny from administrators. The site also focuses on companies with at least $100 million in market capitalization. Wikinvest still faces the stiffest competition from the financial sites themselves, which offer real time news along with their professionally edited content. Wikinvest, however, has a wikis advantage of nimbleness, by quickly adjusting to new trends and interlinking across concepts. → Read More
