[tinkerrr]

Honest and serious question - what's the purpose of this service? Do you think an investor will get higher returns if he knows what his friends are buying? What experts are buying? It seems to me that no serious investor would ever need this type of a service. I understand it's cool to make everything social, but I can get absolutely no useful information from this aspect.

The reporting side can definitely be very cool though, and it could provide serious benefits if done right.

[kyu]

Thanks so much for this question!

There's ongoing debate as to whether a highly successful investor will surface and be able to beat the market (i.e. the next warren buffett). We don't take a position for or against that. To those that are up for the challenge, great, but we don't at all count on it. In fact, we debate it internally, but it's not as important bc our purpose right now is to provide this platform.

We believe there is value in the transparency of the platform to foster better discussions. Most people make decisions alone. And current platforms like Stocktwits are interesting for sentiment but are filled with banter and are unreliable for real discussions.

In terms of reporting / tools, we're focused on investor self-awareness. Most people have more than 1 account and have a hard time even finding out the annual return on their portfolio. We'd like to start alerting people of things like strategy drift, as well.

Slightly more advanced topic: There's also something to be said of the data itself once people start sharing. The idea is that if you can get a cross-section of sentiment / social data backed by real portfolio data, it adds an element that wasn't previously available and should technically result in a more efficient market, resulting in an opportunity for new value creation. Brainstorming with few Anderson / GSB / Cornell finance professors on this.

[tinkerrr]

Maybe I didn't phrase my question right. What I want to know is, as an investor, why should I use your service? Personally, I don't see much value in knowing what my friends are investing in. There are 10,000 stocks, I cannot follow them all anyway. As an investor, the only thing that I am interested in is increasing my returns. Everything else is secondary. So my question is not whether markets are efficient (we'll leave that to the academics) but whether you believe your service, in some way, would help investors improve their returns. If the answer is no, the product, from the very start, will be very limited in scope (e.g. only the investing newbies and other such small segments would get a benefit).

Reporting-wise, I am with you. I think the current models are antiquated, and most of the solutions I see are outright wrong (Hint: If you're looking only at stock prices for returns, you're doing it wrong too).

[otavio]

Hey tinkerrr, I believe the value to someone like you is in connecting with others on the same boat to be better informed. I'm with you in the sense that I don't always care what my friends are holding... unless my friends are really smart.

For example, I see LVS dropping and am considering starting a position. I ping the people who hold LVS right now (nvestly.com/ticker/lvs) and ask them what they think and if they know what's driving the selloff. Reality is that people on Nvestly are generally well-informed about what they hold, so new information surfaces and the entire group benefits. The fact that people's identities are tied to real portfolios tends to generate higher quality discussions vs. a Stocktwits, Yahoo! group or even SeekingAlpha comments.

If you don't ever trade and don't have to discuss anything, it's most helpful just to track your portfolios in one place without multiple logins and to see your returns. The annualized return (IRR) figure for example is something you can't generally get without paying an analyst (or investing hours into a spreadsheet). The IRR is important because it's an annual return that all funds in the world look at (like angels looking at traction).

Newbies do like to follow 'top investors'. I actually didn't think this would be super relevant but people loved it so we made it the homepage upon login and are adding a few things to protect people against blindly following.

Experienced investors have been using Nvestly as an investment resume of sorts. The system pulls up to 10 years of historical track record info and this is unprecedented afaik.

So these are 3 use cases. Let me know if it doesn't answer your question.

[drglitch]

> the system pulls up to 10 years of historical track record

Do you mean for experienced investors or for regular users? If it's the latter, I'm curious as to how - by parsing PDFs from the supported brokers? It would be in fact pretty cool since places like personal capital only do 90 days max when a new account is imported.

[JazCE]

I can actually see an advantage to knowing what my friends (or top profiles) are investing in. There are certainly no guarantees with it, but if you were invested in one fund, and maybe 10 of your friends were, and then suddenly 5 of them dropped off... you might have a look as to why half of your friends were moving away from that fund, what had they read or heard that you hadn't.

i suppose if your friends were trading everyday, the value in that would be tiny, but for longer term investments, seeing the herd mentallity might make it easier for people.

[tinkerrr]

If long-term investors are basing investment decisions on what their friends are investing in, they need to rethink their entire investing philosophy and strategy. Heck, Buffet's trades are public - if you had to choose between the two, would you rather mimic Buffet's trades or would you rather mimic your friends? Or 5 of your favorite investors instead of 5 of your friends?