Archive for April, 2009

Moneyvidya is a stock picking system - you choose a stock, you put a buy or sell rating for it, and specify the time period - from Intraday to 2 years. You can also choose to say why, choose a target exit price, set up a limit (don't buy above "x") and set up a stop-loss point.

Picks are automatically closed by the system once they pass the duration specified or hit targets/stop losses. In this, they differ from Motley Fool's CAPS which asks you instead. (also, CAPS focusses on relative returns to S&P, and is US only)

People are rated by their pick performance, on a scale of 1-5 stars, and there's some more stats like average return, success rate etc. I like this idea - my strong belief is that the best stock pickers could come from anywhere, not just from the few desks of mutual funds or investment banks. To be able to track the very best, you need a third party rating system that is purely performance driven - to unearth the smart traders and to "unmask" any investment gurus who ask you to pay for their advice. (You should be able to say "Whats your ranking on [site]?") And of course, if you want to build a business that provides stock picking advice, it's good to build credibility on such sites.

About 2200 members seem to have registered, though not all may be active. Once this number grows and the site collects data, I'm sure there will be more analytics to compare users (intraday versus long term, return versus risk etc.).

The charting is limited to price/volume, with no indicators. There aren't any fundamentals shown, no P/E or EPS or profit figures. I couldn't get their Compare Stocks bit, or their watchlists to work at all. You can look at news and posts for any stock, aggregated from various sources.

The stock focusses on picks, not portfolios. So if you have a lakh to invest, you can't quite use the site to figure out how much to put in which stock; so you won't find the great portfolio managers here, only the best stock pickers. A reasonable part of trading and investing is money management and position sizing; some would say you could have a 50/50 win-loss ratio and still make great returns if you lose much lesser per losing pick than the amount you profit on a winning pick. Still, that might be in MoneyVidya's future plans, I won't write it off.

The site's early stage, so there's not much discussion on the mainstream stocks - most of it seems to be in the mid or small-caps. But there are reasonably active polls, news links and Q&A - interesting from the perspective of reading up views on a stock. Their blog is educative on both technicals and broad market terminologies; well worth the time reading, if you ask me.

A pain point: To look at members or stocks you need to log in. For one, this destroys a considerable amount of Google juice - behind a subscription wall, none of the stuff people have written, or your stock data, gets indexed. Plus, you shouldn't need to subscribe unless you want to participate. Another suggestion is to have a facebook plugin or such, that allows people to pick stocks in a different and more famous community platform. There are sites like this for the US market, not for India.

This review's already gotten longer than I thought it would, so let me stop here and wish the MoneyVidya team a ton of luck. And do let me know what you guys think.

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.