SocialPicks, a stock market community site, raises round

December 14, 2007 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

socialpickslogo1214.pngSocialPicks is one of many community sites for stock market investors. (Other such sites include Cake Financial, Wikinvest, Zecco, and StockPickr.) Like some of its rivals, SocialPicks has been persevering with its vision for years, but now its efforts are starting to pay off.

The company has just raised $500,000 from Bay Partners, according to a regulatory filing.

With SocialPicks, you select companies you think will perform well, then track your stocks’ performance against other SocialPicks users — like choosing a fantasy sports team. SocialPicks gives you a score based on the accuracy of your “picks” as well as your average return.

But it’s not all about entertainment. You can get investment ideas by watching which SocialPicks investors and companies are performing the best. SocialPicks also searches the web for opinions from top investors and analysts so you can use this information while picking stocks.

To be fair, these social investing sites do take somewhat distinct approaches to creating communities of investors, even if they’re all basically doing the same thing. Mountain View, Calif.-based SocialPicks focuses on ranking and comparing its users with each other, whereas competitors like Wikinvest (our coverage) focus on getting users to collaboratively pool information about companies.

One of the closer competitors to SocialPicks is Cake Financial (our coverage). That company also focuses on comparing individuals, but syncs with brokerages so you can automatically see how your past performance compares against other investors.

socialpicksscreenshot1214.png

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • There are quite a few of these types of social sites around now. I really don't see the benefit unless you are a lonely investor. Maybe people need friends to invest with.
  • These kind of sites are great. You can get some good tips if you hang around the forums and chat rooms if they have one. I have made some money.
  • Yeah I love those sites, if nothing else they get you thinking by reading about other people's positions and opinions.

    - Richard
    Hedge Fund Consulting Blog
    http://richard-wilson.blogspot.com
  • social picks is a good community to develop our stock marketing.These kind of sites will help us to improve our marketing in a very short period.
  • personally, i love social picks. its an amazing way to check the track record of others and thus get interesting new investment ideas.

    how many people really put their pick record out for the public? Shouldnt they all?