VentureBeat

Updated with confirmation

We’re hearing that SocialPicks, a fantasy stock website, has been acquired by financial data and business news company FinancialContent. There’s been no official word from either company, but if you visit the SocialPicks site, at the very top of the page it says that SocialPicks is part of the FinancialContent network. And at the bottom, visitors are told that the site is “© 2009 FinancialContent Services, Inc.”

Mountain View, Calif.-based SocialPicks was part of what seemed like a glut of social investing sites; we profiled 11 of them about a year ago. Unlike sites such as Cake Financial, SocialPicks doesn’t pull in any information about users’ real investments. Instead, it’s like a fantasy sports league, with users selecting the companies they believe will do best, then receiving a score based on how well their stocks perform. It’s also a site where investors can exchange news and advice.

SocialPicks raised $500,000 from Bay Partners and others at the end of 2007. The site seems like a good fit for FinancialContent, which is best-known for the financial data widgets it provides to sites like SFGate, but which also runs sites like StreetIQ.com. On the other hand, SocialPick’s traffic has been falling over the last few months (according to Compete) — it’s hard to imagine that fantasy investing is much fun when the market is tanking. So you could also see the move as part of the inevitable consolidation among these social investing startups.

I’ve emailed SocialPicks for comment, but haven’t heard back yet.

Update: FinancialContent’s Chief Operating Officer Mark Dierolf just confirmed the acquisition via email. He writes:

We acquired SocialPicks approximately two weeks ago, and have been transitioning the destination site into our network.

Their are a number of reasons we acquired this business:

• It is a quicker way to add community features to our platform.
• It is part of a roll-up strategy to acquire destination sites.
• We are uniquely positioned to easily add users to the site due to the breadth of our network.
  

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Tags: co:FinancialContent, co:socialpicks, inv:Bay-Partners