Covestor: roll-your-own fund management

Tracking the web for our customers we have noted a huge expansion in the last year in the area of online financial advice. One of the big searches to our website remains “eloan complaint” (as a consequence of an old blog post), but the sector has expanded from there to cover a far greater range of financial issues. The major UK growth has been in aggregators like Moneysupermarket and community sites like Moneysavingexpert, but there are some very interesting 2.0 ventures.

As the internet expands – and in my mind’s eye I think vaguely about a universe where huge new galaxies of are being created from month to month -

something like that – well, as the internet expands and more people do more online, it becomes more possible to share interesting information.

The internet start-up Covestor (full disclosure: I know the founder Rikki Tahta from Amazon days and have worked with him since) has an interesting model. It is that retail investors share the details of their transactions with one another in an online investors’ community. This way successful amateur investors can get a following, like a real world fund manager. It does for investing what Zopa does for credit – democratises it and cuts out the middle man. A very cool idea. …