Here’s an investing firm idea
Why not take the traditional online investing firm (such as eTrade or Scottrade) and combine it with user participation, a la Digg? It would certainly be useful to have a little comments thread associated with each stock. The investors could talk about stocks and use each other as a resource. It would certainly make the investing firm more attractive to investors, and at pretty minimal cost too, since all of the content would be user-generated.
I bring this up because one of my mutual funds took a dive today and I can’t for the life of me figure it out. It’d be neat to be able to ask a question right on the page that is giving me the quote, and see if some people who are more knowledgeable about it than I have anything to say.
So why hasn’t this been done? Maybe nobody’s just realized the potential of this yet. Big investing corporations aren’t exactly the type of organizations to be out on the cutting edge. And maybe there are some legal problems as well, but I’d think that a hefty disclaimer of “We are not providing stock advice” (but in legalese) in front of every comments section should take care of that.
Update on January 4: It turns out that Yahoo Finance has already implemented this idea. Here is the discussion forum for Microsoft, for instance. Unfortunately there are no comments yet for the mutual fund in question. I wish my own investing firm had this; hopefully they’ll add it soon.
