MoneyVidya… wisdom of crowd approach to stock recommendations

MoneyVidya is a stock research site with a twist in the tale. Instead of financial experts making the stock recommendations, it employs a wisdom of crowd approach to financial advisory and stock tips. The company has developed a proprietary algorithm that benchmarks stock pickers against each other based on the actual performance of the stock picks made by them. Users who have the best record of profitable picks becomes a ‘5 star rated’ expert. Call it the community approach to stock recommendations, this method allows people who are actually good at providing investing advice to showcase themselves.

So how does this work? Once you create an account, you can make a pick by specifying the stock name, the buy or sell, the timeframe of the stock holding and some analysis backing your call. For power users, there are advanced options like a target price, a stop loss limit, a limit order etc. As soon as a stock pick is made, MoneyVidya.com starts tracking it. The site gives each member an unbiased rating based on average return on picks, number of profitable picks, riskiness of picks (volatility) and analysis quality (the only factor that is user driven). These ratings are summarized in a 5 star rating system.

Check out the list of their top stock pickers (screenshot below as well). You can see the individual rating, the average return he/she returns, the success probability etc. The website also hosts discussion forums, polls, research articles on stock related areas.

How do they plan to monetize this? Once they get a critical mass of high quality stock pickers, they want to create a stock trading platform where they will earn brokerage for stocks bought/sold.

MoneyVidya is promoted by a group of ex financial professionals who claim that their mission is to bring transparency to financial advice - starting with equity advice. I think there is probably more to their offering than just transparency. I think this concept has a gamelike dynamics at works and games based approaches sometimes break through the clutter. Games have an element of fun, mystique, competitiveness, voyeurism… a heady cocktail for some situations.