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.

Wikinvest Portfolio HD also features visual analytics to give users insight into metrics including estimated portfolio risk, true asset allocation, geographic allocation distribution, and more. Users can also access a overview dashboard gives investors a bird’s eye view of their portfolio, easy-to-read news feeds, analytics on metrics such as asset allocation, geographic asset distribution, and a “Movers and Losers” section so investors can instantly see what is and isn’t moving in the market

Wikinvest, which currently tracks over tracks more than thirty billion dollars in real assets for its users, expects that the iPad app will be popular among users. In fact, the startup says that 75 percent of the 60 largest brokerage firms lack a portfolio app for the iPad. And 82 percent of Wikinvest’s active users use mobile, plus the startup’s mobile users are averaging 5.5 sessions per week.

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.

One limitation of the apps is that they are view-only apps. You can track your portfolios across multiple brokerage accounts, but can’t trade from the app. Still, for most people, they just want that little ego boost (or crush, depending on teh direction of the market) every day. Wikinvest’s iPhone app, which launched in August, is currently one of the top 10 finance apps in the App Store, and accounts for a whopping two thirds of Wikinvest’s sign-ups.

Wikinvest is currently tracking $16 billion in assets, up from $1 billion five months ago. Those assets are spread across 62,000 Wikinvest members who track their portfolios, with half on the iPhone. Of those users, 65 percent are active at least once a month. They average 167 pageviews and log about 15 hours a month. People have always been addicted to checking their stocks, and now Wikinvest is riding that wave with its mobile apps.

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.

Wikinvest has done well in its web incarnation, tracking over $3 billion dollars in assets. And the launch of an iPhone app is the next step in the company’s growth, which is moving away from the user-generated wiki aspect.

According to Sha, “Our portfolio tracker has been so incredibly successful that much of our product roadmap is focused on building technology to help people track their portfolios and make better investment decisions.”

You can download the app here.

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. Social investing sites like Covestor and KaChing also let you track your real brokerage accounts, and even invest alongside other users—Covestor recently passed $100 million in tracked trades managed through its service.

The difference is that Wikinvest’s portfolio tracker is purely an information product. Wikinvest doesn’t hold or direct any of these assets. They are all in Etrade, Schwab, Ameritrade, Fidleity, and other brokers. But Wikinvest ingests the data and gives people one place to research and track all of their investments. Co-founder Mike Sha says the “vast vast majority of the adoption was from new users.”

One of the biggest requests for the product has been to add brokers who manage 401(k)s. Sha describes the pain financial consumers are feeling: “A lot of these financial institutions are really old school, whose wealth management products were centered around communicating with clients via phone calls and monthly/quarterly reports by mail. Times have changed and they’ve fallen way behind on their web-based self-service tools.”

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.

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.

But there is a new data central tab which presents financial data in new ways. For each metric, whether it is revenues, operating margins, or debt-to-equity ratios, Wikinvest tells you whether the number you are looking at is high, low, or average compared to the industry. It also computes trends for you such as revenue growth and net income growth. Hovering over an one of these numbers produces a mini chart graphing the trend over time.

Beyond that, though, Wikinvest shows industry metrics which can give investors insights into the health of the company. For instance, the industry metrics it shows for Google include ad revenue growth, paid clicks increase, and market share of searches. All of these also have their own little charts, each of which are embeddable. Here are the charts for ad revenue growth and licensing growth:

http://charts.wikinvest.com/data/Illusion.swf

http://charts.wikinvest.com/data/Illusion.swf

You can also create charts which compare Google to Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay across a variety of metric. Here is one comparing advertising revenues:

http://charts.wikinvest.com/data/Illusion.swf

The whole point is to make the data intelligible. If you don’t know what the Price to Sales ratio means, you can click on it and get a definition

In addition to making all the data come more alive, Wikinvest also now has a news feed for each stock. But instead of showing articles tagged with the ticker symbol, which is now overused by every finance news site from Forbes.com to the Motley Fool, it matches words in articles to its own database of 100,000 keywords associated with different companies. Its news feed shows headlines and snippets of text from 200 trusted sources, ranging from Bloomberg and the New York Times to wonkish finance and economic blogs. This casts a wider net and brings back different types of headlines than you might find on Yahoo Finance, although it may be too wide a net. I am not sure why a Forbes story about the hospital where Steve Jobs got his liver transplant comes up on the Yahoo stock page.

Is that enough to make it the new Yahoo Finance? No, but at least it’s something different.

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:

http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf

Wikinvest gets only about 450,000 visitors a month worldwide (November, 2008 comScore numbers), but is growing rapidly. Distribution deals like these (and broader adoption of its Wikinvest Wire by financial blogs) could help Wikinvest grow beyond its current niche.

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).

The plugin works automatically, potentially cutting out a few steps for financial bloggers who often include links to stock quotes in their posts. For ambiguous company names, there’s a backup to the auto-detect feature: simply put the desired stock quote in double brackets like [[AAPL]]. It will look like this:

But instead of just spamming your blog with a bunch of links back to Wikinvest (because, let’s be honest here, that’s what this is really all about), it adds a box inside the editing pane of WordPress or Blogger that previews the links it will add. Any links a blogger doesn’t want can be unchecked before the post goes live.

Wikinvest will soon add support for other financial quotes beyond stocks, such as for currencies, commodities, and interest rates.

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.

Nevertheless, Wikinvest co-founder Parker Conrad positions Wikinvest Wire as really taking on SeekingAlpha, an investing news site that republishes posts from select blogs and media outlets (including TechCrunch). Conrad argues:

This launch puts us directly in competition with a larger site—SeekingAlpha.com—in that both SeekingAlpha and the Wire are syndication platforms for investing bloggers. However, there are some important distinctions:

SeekingAlpha requires a blogger to give up their content to SeekingAlpha. The bloggers’ articles are published on SeekingAlpha, and SeekingAlpha distributes links to content on their site to their partners, such as Yahoo Finance. Investing bloggers use SeekingAlpha, grudgingly, because it increases their traffic marginally. But they also hate SeekingAlpha—because 99% of the traffic to their posts actually goes to SeekingAlpha. Selling ads against the bloggers’ content is, after all, SeekingAlpha’s business model. But you can see why that might chafe . . .

Wikinvest, however, does not require bloggers to host their content on our site—and all links, from media partners, wikinvest.com, and other bloggers, go directly to the blogger’s own site. What we get out of it are links back to Wikinvest which are included in the Wire.

There’s also another big difference Conrad forgot to mention. SeekingAlpha is an actual site where readers can go and see all of the posts it hand-picks in one place. There is no one place you can go to see all the posts included in the Wikinvest Wire. The links are generated algorithmically and distributed piecemeal all over the Web. There is not even an RSS feed that pulls all the 100 financial blogs that make up the Wikinvest Wire together. (Although, you can get an RSS feed for any Wikinvest topic page, which will include Wikinvest Wire posts for that topic).

All of this is by design, as Conrad explains above, to generate more traffic for the participating blogs. But it’s not really a wire unless there is one place you can go to see all the posts popping up as they go live. So I’m not sure SeekingAlpha has too much to worry about.

Nevertheless, the addition of relevant financial blog posts to each page on Wikinvest should help to make it an even more useful site than it is today. If you are trying to figure out what to do with your stock portfolio, it is worth checking out for the comprehensiveness of the data and collection of arguments from both bulls and bears on each stock. They also have great charts that anyone can annotate (I’ve embedded one below).

http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf

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

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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 wiki for data. You might have data on our site that appears in multiple points on the site and that data point is updated everywhere it appears.

That’s great if the data is right. But there is one caveat: errors will also propagate more widely as a result. Wikis are eventually self-correcting by nature, but tell that to the investor who takes an erroneous piece of data on faith in the middle of an edit war and buys or sells a stock because of it.

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.