Last week, we published an article about Covestor, a trading site that has become a sort of Facebook for investors. It is trying to tap into the idea of social networks as a means to make profits and encourage communities.
After we published the piece, Doug Estadt, one of the company’s “model managers” not mentioned in the piece, e-mailed with his own experiences.
I traded stocks for years with mixed results.
Last winter a friend, knowing my passion for trading stocks and online technology, brought Howard Lindzon to my office. Howard told me about a new community he’d built on Twitter called StockTwits that he was very enthusiastic about and of which I was thrilled to learn. I signed on during the dark, chaotic period the markets were suffering this year and found an incredible fount of knowledge, a wonderful community willing to share ideas and their actionable trades in real time.
The combination of camaraderie and smart people sharing what they were doing in real time via Twitter on StockTwits was nirvana for me. One of the many great people who took the time to teach and share with me was Todd Sullivan of ValuePlays.net and he shared what he was doing and why and explained all the risks to me and my trading results went straight up as evidenced by the results you can see here on Covestor (it posts results directly from my brokerage account) and which are as of closing yesterday a gain of 292% year to date and which I attribute to all I’ve learned and done as part of the fabulous community Howard built (StockTwits.com).
Later this Spring the people at Covestor launched their Covestor Investment Management that allows people to place money into a model managed by individuals and have those model portfolios autotrade their accounts to reflect what the manager does in his/her own account. Since inception April 10th of this year my model has returned 111% which you can see here.
Whenever I see articles about whether there is any true value in social media, I just smile and think of the friends I’ve made and the profits they’ve made me and which I am now hoping to pass on to others as well.
Thank you very much,
Doug Estadt
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