Instavest – Collaborative Investing

[MachineGhost]

People want to learn how to invest from the world’s best investors and Instavest helps investors share their how they do it. It does this by letting anyone follow a trade and share purchases in the stock market. It launched two weeks ago with 175 investors with $1.2 million under management with the aim to be the discount brokerage “killer.”? The growth strategy includes attracting active investors on sites like SeekingAlpha. Every investor brings in another 3 investors, according to the company.

https://goinstavest.com/

P.S.  It's wait list only, so I don't suggest signing up and providing your intimate details just yet.

[Saleem]

Hi Machine Ghost! Thanks for your note on Instavest.

We've removed the waitlist and everyone can now sign up.

You sign up here: https://goinstavest.com/legal/register/

Can't wait to see your trades!

[sophie]

At risk of offending Saleem, who appears to work for Instavest...

I don't understand why this is so interesting.  You could do the same thing for free and without having to sign up for yet another account by picking an investment guru of your choice, e.g. Jim Cramer, and making the trades he/she suggests.

When I tracked Mad Money's recommendations for a bit, I found that indeed, the stocks reacted to the recommendations on the show, the way Desert mentioned.  Thus, if you were tracking his stock performance using the day of the show as the measure, you would overestimate performance.

It seems the point of this is to make it easy to buy individual stocks.  Presumably, the website will be careful not to make it easy for the user to add up the trading fees.  Have any of you noticed that the big brokerages don't do this either?  Fidelity gives you a number on the year-end summary, but it's carefully buried.

[dualstow]

Presumably, the website will be careful not to make it easy for the user to add up the trading fees.  ...
Fidelity gives you a number on the year-end summary, but it's carefully buried.

I see it on page 1, line 3 of my Fidelity statement. Maybe it used to be less visible in the past, though.

[MachineGhost]

I don't understand why this is so interesting.  You could do the same thing for free and without having to sign up for yet another account by picking an investment guru of your choice, e.g. Jim Cramer, and making the trades he/she suggests.

I guess the point is it is a meritocracy, where the best of the best will rise to the top, as opposed to an edu-tainer like Cramer who is no better than random.

There was a previous startup attempt at social investing and it failed because not enough investors would publicaly disclose their brokerage statements.  I think it was called Circle Capital or something like that.  Its since converted into a roboadvisor.