New Investimonials Website Taps the Wisdom of the Crowd
by Efin Advisor | January 12, 2010
Can the new age of social media and “crowdsourcing” ensure better investment advice? A Website that works more like Digg or StumbleUpon than MarketWatch lets the voice of the people be heard loud and clear.
At Efinancial, we know that getting only one point of view or learning about just one product or company is as limiting as “tunnel vision.” After all, you can’t choose the right financial value if you don’t have a choice. The same idea goes for Investimonials. The goal of the social site is to help users cut through the “spammy” or ” scammy” financial sites that litter the web, by offering a comprehensive hub of user reviews for each product.
Investimonials is launching with eight categories, including the top rated Brokers, Newsletters, DVDs, Books, and websites, but plans to have “dozens” over the next few years. The site already has 3,000 products ready to review, though the vast majority of them are waiting for reviewers just like you to comment to them.
Users who complete a review on the site, will be rewarded with ‘iv bucks’, which can be traded in for prizes.
EliteTrader, an age-old competitor has been around for a decade and possesses more than one thousand total reviews. Investimonials has a fres h new outlook. Like any social media site, it will be the people who write and read the site who decide its success.
Great site, and great coverage, Efinancial! I’d like to think that the “wisdom of the crowd” is the smartest when it comes to investments. On the other hand, if that was the case, why isn’t more of the crowd rich? Is the “wisdom of the crowd” the “greatest common factor” or the “lowest common denominator”? Ive often wondered!
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You can’t fool all the people all the time. I’m all for letting the public critique which investments rate the most attention and which are useless. The power of the Internet at work!
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Investimonials is like Google Customer Reviews. Why take their word for it? Asking for references is good for my money!
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If I found an investment fund that was going south I’d want to tell as many people about it as I could. Imagine if Investimonials had been around during the Madoff days. Would anyone have come forward? In that case, the investors were as quiet as they were stupid.
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