Feeling nauseous this year from the financial markets? Have the symptoms persisted more than a week and more than just during business hours? Maybe its time to consider, taking your portfolio for a check up.
In the US, you have two standalone options for walk-in free check up, GuardVest and GradeMyAdvisor. You can also choose the Wealthfront stethoscope via its new portfolio review tool “Is your portfolio invested the right way for the long term?” (William Trout, at Celent tried it out already) or Sig Fig’s cardiogram via “Is your portfolio living up to its potential” (to name a few).
You can also, ignore your recent symptoms and stay put, and look towards the new world of actionable investment advice that Fintechs have generously opened up to retail investors. Most of these services have some freemuim basic service as bait to get you to open an account and thereafter, they propose a premium subscription to get access to additional information and insights, or more timely investment advice.
A wide range exists out there:
- Crowdsourced research and sentiment, like Stocktwits, Stockflare, and Investfeed (see, Keynes said to watch the “hoi polloi” on Twitter for stock sentiment);
- Purely quantitative and algorithmic, like Logical Invest, AdviseOnly, or OnFintur;
- Big data, machine learning sentiment analysis, like Sentifi or Natural language analysis, like Kensho or
- Data driven company analysis like ThinkNum or financial apps like Short Trends, that send short-selling alerts (found on Airex Market).
All of these services, can educate you, inform you, and help you form your own insights. Most of them have apps and are mostly geared to retail but some of these services can be accessed indirectly through their B2B parternships, like StatsBox of Kensho with CNBC.
Most of these Fintechs providing some kind of actionable advice, are subscription based. They are following the lead of Seeking Alpha that the crowd likes (see Why the Crowd Likes Seeking Alpha, but Wall Street not so much) and is willing to pay for a subscription. Seeking Alpha’s value proposition shouldn’t simplified into a subscription based business model for retail, because it has been experiencing high double digit growth also in the institutional “buy-side” space.
Bottom line is that we have been witnessing in the past few years, an explosion of actionable investment advice that can all be grouped under the umbrella of democratizing services otherwise available to only institutional investors and empowering DIY investors in very inexpensive ways. All these businesses are greatly improving the user experience and putting valuable tools on our smartphones.
For the end-user however, it is has been dazzling. Similar to entering into a candy store and being overwhelmed and confused as to which one to taste, try, and pick out. I’ve personally got half a dozen trial subscriptions (not counting the social trading ones, eToro, Darwinex etc) that are fading away from the front screen of my app.
All these financial apps and services need to do, to hook me up, is to
give me a BUY and SELL button
All they need to offer me, in addition to actionable advice, is the bridge to the ACTION itself. It took Stocktwits 7yrs to link with Robinhood!
Seeking Alpha, can bridge the gap between its actionable advice and execution. No drone technology needed to get this done. Others will follow.