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.
