The internet has lowered the barrier to entry into many fields. Amateur writer/reporters can blog, amateur singers and movie makers can post to youtube, often achieving success inline with the “pro’s”. I for one see this as natural progress though much of the establishment media is often threatened, and denigrate online talent.
This movement of amateurs could be creeping into the investment world. SocialPicks has recently received a round of funding from Bay Partners. SocialPicks offers a forum for amateur investors to show off their analysis and investment skills.
As we are finding out more and more, experts most of the time, are not so expert (see Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb). And aggregated crowds are often smarter than individuals most of the time (Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki). This includes highly paid Wall Street analysts.
SocialPicks looks to let amateurs compare their performance against the Pro’s, often showing that such “gurus” as Jim Cramer are not the people you should be taking investment advice from. In addition SocialPicks aggregates the information about stocks giving an overview of how the crowd feels about a given investment.
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