Excellent idea! It wouldn't take many real traders posting to attract a paying clientele, just a few anchor members. Costs of running a forum are low, especially with the $50/month fee keeping the trolls out. A forum of this sort could be successful with fewer than 100 core members. Why not? You could steal the trade calls of top performing members and post them as your own in your journal here. It couldn't help but improve your track record.
There is something called collective2--- anyone could just take the calls there. This sounds like the same thing mixed with some social functions. It is a good idea on the surface, but I don't think it will hit critical mass to make it a worthwhile business, but I have been wrong before. My call is for < 20 paying members without big $ marketing----then the member churn of fast buck artists and hot hand chasers would make maintaining a consistent critical mass difficult. If he can get 100 plus steady members it may just work.... surf
I don't care about the scraps. It would be an attempt to keep the undesirables out. The self-promoters who can't and don't trade. The $50 is meaningless in funding the site, but meaningful in keeping out the trolls. A buddy of mine approached a self-promoter on this site with an offer to manage $50k of his money. The self-promoter went ballistic PMing my friend to accept the offer. Some baller, eh? I wouldn't be exposed to clowns like the self-promoter, as worst-case he's banned after he's paid some multiple of $50. The point is to attain a meaningful trading discourse absent the paper-trading nonsense so prevalent on your thread. The $50 is simply vetting the member so that he can't log in on Tor or a VPN. Troll attempts would be fruitless.
I wouldn't mind signing up to smth like that. But you'll need a critical mass of people, so that you cover a variety of assets. Like, in my case, I really don't care about all the potentially bright ideas arnd AAPL, say, as it's just not my cup of tea.
Instead of money how about a country club approach? Referrals only and voting by other members. Shared expenses if that's an issue. The population will be small but the discourse extremely high. Maybe even real life names and info.