Ralph F

Covestor and VesTopia: Winners and Losers from Peer to Peer Investing

Josh, you wrote: "Naturally, our financial arrangements with our Investment Directors is confidential. It does, however, reward performance in a major way." It's not "natural" at all not to publish what the fee arrangement is. You'll have to approach fund managers directly every time, pitch to them, and negotiate with them. Rikki's approach of providing transparency about fees and automating the sign up seems much more scalable.

Covestor and VesTopia: Winners and Losers from Peer to Peer Investing

Michiel, don't you think that because Covestor and VesTopia allow good stock pickers to make money, that all the best ones will migrate to them, and you'll be left with a community of poor performers sharing ideas with other poor performers for free?

Seems to me that the best thing about Covestor and VesTopia is that they allow people to make money from stock picking, and as Rikki says above -- there's real scale on the Internet, so that could produce large sums.

Covestor and VesTopia: Winners and Losers from Peer to Peer Investing

Michiel, do account holders get paid for effectively sharing their stock picks on Zecco? Or is this just a "you can see mine if I can see yours" arrangement?

Covestor and VesTopia: Winners and Losers from Peer to Peer Investing

Hi Rikki,

Great to have you on Seeking Alpha! What's your role in Covestor, and is there anything in the article that wasn't mentioned that's important for us to know?

What do you think are the greatest strengths of your product?

Ralph

Covestor and VesTopia: Winners and Losers from Peer to Peer Investing

Love the idea, but couldn't they have chosen a more Web-2.0-ish name? How about:

StockTradr
StockWinnr
StockManagr

:-)

Covestor and VesTopia: Winners and Losers from Peer to Peer Investing

I think you're right: the biggest hurdle will be to get people comfortable with the security aspect of giving access to your account to a startup. How are they handling that?