Stefan K.
Director at Edgehunt | kisss at edgehunt dot com | LION 10k+ | All invitations welcomed
A free, easy to use "Craigslist style" website that is made up of investors from all over the world?
A friend of mine, had the idea of ..... "A free, easy to use "Craigslist style" website that is made up of investors from all over the world"
What do you think about it?
I think that's an excellent idea. My vision of that site - would be place where investors meet to discuss various investment opportunities as such as stock, bonds, real estate, venture capital... every possible category. Perhaps, we could somehow track performance of each segment/investment. Each advertiser (funds seeker) would provide an overview of profit/risk analysis of their proposal. On the investor's side, people would describe what they are looking for.
Is that what you have in mind too?
I would appreciate a place where I could find out which 'direct' saving account pays the highest interest, into which segments I could invest (that I'm not aware of) and etc.
Good Answers (1)
Very interesting topic with some very interesting answers. I'm actually in the midst of trying to get my arms around 2 niches that one of the answers touched upon - those with opportunities who are trying to raise relatively small amounts of money (say $100k-$2MM) and those who are looking to invest relatively small amount of money in interesting concepts (say $10-50k). These are both infamous niches that are reknown for being difficult to tap.
I have actually been considering starting a blog or community that is meant to bring these 2 groups together. In fact, my Company - Roll Investment Group - acts as a finder for this niche and has a distribution list of over 100 private investors who seek passive investments in real estate or businesses that are typically in the $10-25k+ minimum investment range. My investors typical comprise a small percentage of a larger equity pool in some very interesting deals that they wouldn't normally be able to access. These niches are extremely inefficient and are therefore disregarded by most. Online communities and/or tools might help to solve the inefficiency problem.
Feel free to send me an e-mail via LinkedIn if you would like to discuss in more detail, as this topic is of great interest to me.
Thanks and good luck,
Jeremy Roll
Roll Investment Group
More Answers (23)
At first blush, I would ask how would you make money to support the on-going admin work? Second, you could do this in a Yahoo group. Third, how would you keep momentum going to keep people engaged and coming back?
It is a good idea ... but has some administration and people issues to overcome.
Clarification added August 22, 2007:
One other point, you could create a risk of the impression of some insider trading.
Nathaniel "Ned" D.
Investment Associate at UBS Financial Services
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There are already services like this -- can't recall if Motley Fool offers it (I think they do), but there are others, although the names escape me. Anyway, you need to have some sort of rating system so people don't abuse the service with pump-and-dump schemes.
Mike R.
Relocation Auditor/consultant, making sure my clients pass their internal audits.
Ned is correct that Motley Fool (as well as yahoo & many others) have forums or discussion boards designed around this type of activity. Back in '98-'99, the "Fool" discussion boards and others (Raging Bull comes to mind) were notorious for pump & dump & pitching investments that were not viable. The difficulty is lack of opportunity for due diligence on the part of investors and no way to separate rumor from fact.
I have joined some Yahoo groups where I unsubscribed within a week because the only active participants on the boards were spammers.
I think a direction you might want to look at is a niche sector (VC deals too small for the typical PE firms, for example). Trying to build a useful tool to cover every possible investment category for investors all over the world seems impractical.
Mike S.
CEO and President at Axsh North America, Inc.
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Just read about this yesterday on Yahoo. Seems like there are already a few which are out there and quite active.
Haven't checked them myself.
Regards,
Mike
Links:
Clarification added August 22, 2007:
I actually did look at Yahoo Groups some years ago, but lost interest. Too low signal to noise ratio.
One other thing to keep in mind as well as the insider trading, and probably more important is to take "advice" you get from these resources with a grain of salt. Do your own homework.
Be alert to the potential of "pump-n-dump" schemes.
Amanda M.
Freelance SEO Provider offering guaranteed results
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As others have mentioned, there are already many such forums in existence, including the one on Craigslist itself though the CL MoFo does frown on asking for investors.
Harold A. suggests this expert on this topic:
Trevor would be able to give you some good ideas, sound advice.
Mark C.
Head of Technology, Marketplaces at Fairfax Media
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Imagine a Craigslist style site where people each put in say $1000. The community then chooses an investment together, and does distributed risk VC..... there's an idea I like.
Stefan I like the idea!
Collaborative Investment over a Web 2.0 platform would need a very high transparency between Collaborative Investors. InnoCentive works around collaborative project on scientific research where Questions are pitched to over 70,000 retired scientists worldwide. Although that suffers in that the companies can hide their identity when requesting solutions. I believe the collaborative user base must divide the rewards with the right balance... I'm not sure what mechanism is used on InnoCentive...I'll look into it further. Linux collaborative projects work because It's not about money and the reward is social capital and perhaps a capital incentive from one's employer to contribute to the open-source community (IBM). The community would need a checks and balances to ensure Pump-And-Dump doesn't emerge. The Trust mechanism is the essential principle, I would be delighted to discuss it further, I know Chris Valle adopts a Trust Mechanism on a Web based system to manage business relationships and operating standards and has had marked success at Waitrose among others. He's very open to new ideas in this area.
Links:
Tony M. also suggests this expert on this topic:
I think I'd have to consider how many people would be open to shifty cyber scams these days. Anything that is free usually ends up begin a center for crime these days... just take a look at all of the myspace spin-offs.
!
I imagine it could work if people were open to discussing the things in an online environment. Perhaps it could be a starting point. A large degree of trust, credibility, and security would have to be established with the target audience for it to be successful.
Michael H.
SEO and Content Optimization Manager at Strayer University
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My first thought is that I think that you would need to proceed very carefully.
Investors exchanging advice and "discuss various investment opportunities as such as stock, bonds, real estate, venture capital... every possible category" could bring the Federal Government on top of you very quickly if it is not managed with extreme proficiency and security.
I would create a very detailed outline, followed by a business plan, and then hire a lawyer that specializes in the financial services industries, SEC, etc to review every aspect of what you want to do.
The concept sounds very cool. You might even consider utilizing the open source development code to create a social networking portal around this concept - similar to Facebook - and allow users to add modules, etc.
But take care and keep us all posted.
Guillaume G.
Chiffreur at Ministere des affaires étrangères - Ambassade de France
I think what you describe is somehow what wikinvest is doing :
http://www.wikinvest.com/
Links:
Mark B.
Founding Partner at ReviverSoft
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You could create your own investing social networking site using www.ning.com this is a great portal for creating your own social network on the cheap
Links:
Ed D.
Collaboration Strategist, Conmergence.com
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Vator + Prosper or Zopa
Links:
I like the idea, I was thinking of doing something on the same lines, not necessarily try to cover such a huge market or online but something physical. I think investors "invest" in people not in companies i.e. they need to know the team and understand their capabilities it in order to invest in them.
Sandeep Kumar S.
Senior Vice President - Hedge Fund Financing Risk / Market Risk at Citi
There is a website in USA which gives you the information about key bank rates etc, you could check www.bankrate.com
Sounds like a real useful site. I would like to be kept up to date as you proceed.
Dave Maples
You are joking aren't you? I would suggest you need to start by asking some real investors how they make decisions and what tools they use.
Tim
Mark A.
Securities Compliance and Litigation Attorney
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As Michael mentioned, you will need to watch the securities laws. While bringing a group of investors together would probably not be an issue, pooling the money might, and bringing investors together with issuers most certainly will.
The concepts are all quite interesting though.
Links:
Joseph W.
Quantitative Finance Research / Astrophysics
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The basic problem is that for a small investor, performance is irrelevant. What will eat up your money are transaction fees and taxes. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, mentioned in one book that he wanted to write a book on personal finance, but discovered that everything that he could say about personal finance could be written in one page.
What goes for "investing" in most places is "playing with money." Nothing wrong with that, but most people confuse the two. The problem with talking about stock picks, is that on the average, the only person likely to win is the broker. The big real investments that people need to make aren't in the stock market, but rather they are in the library.
There is a role for matchmaking between private equity providers and business owners. The trouble with this is that this requires face-to-face contact. Before someone either invests $100,000 in a new business, or accepts an investment of $100,000 you really need to stare the counter-party in the eyes.
