Down 1% Already

I said I was going to join Covestor and build a public stock portfolio. I did that over the weekend. And I am down 1% already. Public market investing has never been my thing, but I am in this now and I’ll stay at it for a while.

I’ve added the Covestor widget to the right sidebar of this blog (appropriately right next to the Gaping Void cartoon of the day). So you’ll be able to see how I am doing every time you come visit this blog.

And you can follow me on Covestor and even track my trades if you want to get notified every time I trade. These are real trades. Covestor is linked to my E*Trade account. So this isn’t fantasy stock picking, it’s the real deal.

I got an email yesterday alerting me to the fact that my friend Mark sold Google. I don’t own Google so that didn’t impact me that much. But it’s interesting nonetheless.

If you like to buy and sell stocks and are interested in doing that in a social way, join Covestor and let me know your account and I’ll follow you.

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. dredding

    Down 1% relative to what? I’m sure many of us will be interested in how you do but you should consider picking a relevant index (S&P?) and track against that.

    1. fredwilson

      good point. the widget does show my performance against the S&P. since i started my portfolio, the S&P is down 0.5% and my portfolio is down 1.5%, so that’s why i am down 1%

  2. tim

    Fred,I agree that Covestor is an intriguing service, particularly due to the “wisdom of crowds” model it – and its peers like CAPS at fool.com – may engender. Don’t you worry, though, that the day-to-day score-keeping that’s part of its model contributes to the same speculative behaviors that got everyone in so much trouble in 2000? And 1989? And 1987? And… well, you get the point. Wouldn’t it provide greater value if it demonstrated the long-term performance of quality companies (i.e., the ones worth investing in), rather than the “quick hit” bumps of folks chasing hot stocks? Being “down 1% already,” after two whole days, strikes me as that same short-term mentality that caused all the troubles before. I’d like to see people’s trades and performance embargoed for a period (a quarter would be great, but even 21 days would be a start). Or am I living in fantasy land?

  3. vruz

    isn’t this daytrading, only social ?I know some daytrading guys who used to do this sort of day crowd-trading thing back in 1999, they used IRC and an application built atop it.There were rooms with coaches and people could self-assemble on the fly if they wanted.

  4. markslater

    Fred -Why are you in transocean and hercules offshore? any detailed analysis behind this? Reason i ask is that i sold one of their competitors last year.mark

    1. fredwilson

      i am following my friend mark pincus on those two tradesfred

  5. Don Park

    Well, if your portfolio performs consistently bad then it’s still good source of information for followers, no? ;-p

  6. Nick Davis

    Another good application of Covestor would be withing Financial Services compliance departments. Currently, mosted registered reps must provide statements to their compliance department to show that they aren’t doing anything illegal. Real-time trade info would be much more useful. For instance, say I’m a stockbroker and I get a call from a client to sell his 100,000 shares of some fairly illiquid stock. I could sell my shares in advance (or short the stock) because I know this large trade will drop the price.Having my personal trades in realtime makes this much easier to see than matching up a statement at the end of the month.

  7. jeremy

    i like gld and slw. actually own those.

  8. tmarman

    Fred, do you happen to have any registration codes for this service? I tried to use Cake Financial, but they don’t support my brokerage. Covestor appears to, but without a registration code you have to “qualify” to register.

    1. fredwilson

      timyou don’t need a registration code. you just need to fill out some data and they qualify youfred

  9. Dustin

    How come Wesabe doesn’t have this feature or link to it in some way? (Well I am assuming it doesn’t)

  10. howardlindzon

    congrats fred. I am signing up finally too. slw and gld are my picks by the way…full disclosure :)as to daytrading…please that is not true. This is a great tool for anti day traders, real money management. Fred is likely just posting in the spirit of blogging and disclosure.You can follow day traders, value people or long term trendx followers like me.disclosure – i am in investor

  11. Andy

    Hi Fred, I think we share a similar trade with HERO and a similar source in Mark Pincus. Lets see where it rolls. Follow me at: http://www.covestor.com/mbr

  12. Andy Swan

    Awesome. Covestor is doing an excellent job and TONS of new functionality coming. I don’t see “wisdom of the crowds” being valuable (or what Covestor is about)…..I see “wisdom of proven wise people” as a value proposition that’s never going away.

  13. Garth Walker

    Oh… this is cool. I wish I could use it as a currency trader.

  14. Antonio Leonforte

    Just created & confirmed an account in less than 3 hours. I just submitted PDF copies of the screen-shots I got from my Italian on-line broker (which was not listed) and they typed-in all my data for me (manually I guess). Impressive. And yes, I’m tracking you now (quite surprised not to find any high-tech or software company in your assets). My username is my surname, if you really want to track me down (a mad Italian driving his startup right into the downturn). All the best.

    1. JK

      wow. doesn’t that mean i can just make fake PDFs and they’ll just create my super portfolio?then what’s the point of believing that those performance figures on the site are real when you have loopholes like the manual entry.