i went through the 'fintech' startups that showed up for the benzinga fintech conference. the ideas can be rougly categorized as 1- better charting - charting but with more gizmos - pineapple pizza. 2 - social stock tips/tip ranking/crowdsourced rankings/estimates - stock tips but social. 3 - financial planning online/aggregation/roboadvisor - this has been around for 15 years - yahoo had something like this in the nineties - but now it's called roboadvisor. same data aggregation stuff but now with recommendations 4 - 13fs and hedge fund replication - this was big a few years ago. 5 - special sauce stock tips - when will stock tips die 6 - stock trading but with mini portfolios - doesn't solve the right problem. if you are no good at trading then miniportfolios won't help i think most of these overestimate the number of people who want stock tips/charts/etc but these tools don't really serve active traders because the number of active traders is so small. so you get stuff that nobody is going to use eg social stock tips.
I ran through them myself a couple months ago and came to a similar conclusion as you. Not particularly impressed with the offerings at all mainly because so many of them are just rehashes of old ideas.
spiking.com looks kind of interesting. it's not live so hard to say. btw the awards are at benzingafintechawards.com lots of big names there - relatively speaking - but i don't think the award candidates themselves were creme of the crop - top companies are probably well funded already and don't need an award
Yeah, that brings up another point I ran across when evaluating them: some aren't even live. It's hard to believe benzinga would even include vaporware services like that in the line up.
Trading view has charting locked up. Social/crowd sources is probably the most fertile ground. People get addicted to this stuff. It's part of herd development in any bull market. Baron, have you ever charted no. of forum posts or no of new accounts vs the Sp500 performance through several market cycles?
do you use trading view? looks like stockcharts.com dominates tradingview.com https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=tradingview.com, stockcharts.com&cmpt=q&tz=
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/08/why-has-social-failed-in-fintech/#.kmaxz5 somebody else is negative on "sofi" I don't mind following a few people on twitter but mostly not interested in stock tips. Even CNBC seems to have fewer fund managers on to give stock tips. interested in why Baron thinks 'sofi' has failed
from the article linked above: There is a dominant social network for investing, but it’s just for the professionals. The joke in finance is that the Bloomberg terminal is the most expensive social network in the world at $2,500 a month. There’s truth to the joke. It’s been a winner-takes-all market. Reuters failed in the last decade to build an alternative network. And more recently in 2013, Markit partnered with every leading investment bank and competitor of Bloomberg and tried again. But it failed in less than a year. So what is Bloomberg’s secret? Bloomberg never led with its messaging platform. The data and analysis was key to its early success. Sharing that data and analysis is the core use of its messaging service. The service is private and secure, and who you interact with is of your own making. What you interact about is driven by data and analytics from one of the most credible companies in the world. Bloomberg’s data is integral to its messaging platform. For social to find a place in finance, it needs to learn from Bloomberg. People don’t need a new way to communicate with each other or share investment ideas. They need a way to come up with new ideas and validate them with the people they trust. Anything else is likely to join the rather large graveyard.
Actually, I use stockcharts mostly. Even the CEO of my platform developer uses it. Didn't want to seem fuddy duddy. Nonetheless, TV has a lot of flexibility for web developers. You can even build a trading front end.