clouin.com - Latest Comments

Re: Mobile Retail – Coming to any Store near You

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:04:54 -0000

This is a terrific idea for brick-and-mortar retailers to at least capture some affiliate fees rather than nothing. It is an excellent case in point showing the potentially dramatic disruptions to retailers' traditional business model. I am not sure though that retailers would welcome becoming only a "showroom". In any case, that might be a way for Amazon to expand its associate program into brick-and-mortar retail.

Re: Mobile Retail – Coming to any Store near You

Guillaume Lebleu — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:49:12 -0000

Great post. I was wondering whether bookstores and other traditional retail shops should not embrace the Amazon App and actually provide it in their stores via a more convenient method of UPC barcode scanning "see how much you can get this item for at Amazon.com and when it will be at your doorstep". Users could then possibly print a receipt with a shopping cart session code that the user would enter back home at Amazon.com. This would be a great way for the real-life store to get a share of the revenue via the Amazon Associate program.

Re: Social Investing Crosses the Pond | clouin.com

Perry Blacher — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 21:45:16 -0000

Hi there. I am one of the founders of Covestor.

We are already very much open to members from France. We do not have a local language site yet, or support local brokers for automatic import of trades but anyone from France, or anyone globally trading French stocks, can join using the manual trade entry process and simply needs to upload a recent statement from their local broker to get going.

Anyone wants to drop me a mail I am happy to discuss (perry@covestor.com)

Re: Social Investing and Market Psychology | clouin.com

Steven A. Carpenter — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:45:51 -0000

Pierre-

Thanks for your interest in these new models of investing. I am the Founder and CEO of Cake and I wanted to respond to your good points.

I agree that the more transparency companies like ours can introduce the better the context is for individual investors to manage their portfolios. I also agree that the investment industry is entirely too performance focused, and more pointedly, too obsessed with short-term performance obsessed (i.e. daily and monthly swings).

That is why on Cake you can see upwards of 10 years of historical transactions and portfolio performance- across all of someone's accounts. Having a complete picture of your own and other investors' performance and risk metrics over time is a more accurate measure of how someone will do in down markets.

Also at Cake, by having the ability to look at aggregated data of investors over long periods of time, we avoid the potential of simply looking at the "hottest" investors and their trades and drawing erroneous conclusions by mistaking momentum for pure skill.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Re: Social Investing and Market Psychology | clouin.com

Rikki Tahta — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 05:45:53 -0000

Hi - this is Rikki Tahta the CEO of Covestor - that's a great point you make. Two quick points I'd add from my personal experience in the institutional investment world.

a) past performance is only one of the measures that the fund consultants (like Mercer) employ in measuring managers and matching them to institutional funds. A qualitative assessment of the manager is part of the profile, and here social networking has advantages alongside individual interviews.

b) risk measurement is more than just extrapolating from past performance. Following the collapse of Barings and problems at UBS, internal risk controls within banks has been an area of significant investment. However a financial institution can do it on their internal positions where they have 100% visibility of the holdings, it is not possible for you or I to do it as an external investor in Absolute Capital as we don't have visibility.

At Covestor by both requiring visibility and adding institutional grade risk measurement analytics - we are in a position to give an investor following one of our members a much more accurate measure of prospective risk than they would have if they were investing blindly in a fund.

Hope that helps put some context on the issue that we're addressing

cheers Rikki

Re: Social Investing Ain’t a Piece of Cake | clouin.com

Steven A. Carpenter — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:57:58 -0000

Hi. Thanks for posting about Cake. I'm Steve Carpenter, the Founder and CEO of Cake Financial.

I wanted to provide comment on two areas of concern for you about our service. The first is security and the protection of our users' personal and financial data, which we take extremely seriously. My team is made up of seasoned financial services engineers and security experts. Cake is built by the same people and employs the same practices that banks and brokerage firms use. The reason that startups can succeed here is that we don't have to protect antiquated legacy systems; we are using best practices from the ground up.

If, in the unlikely event of a breach that is the result of our negligence and causes a direct financial loss of one of our members' accounts, we will reimburse them for that loss.

Last, Cake is not simply about the wisdom of crowds. Cake is about providing transparency, allowing communication, and enabling collaboration around one of the most important areas of our adult lives: managing our money. We already know and trust people who invest their hard-earned money better than we do. Investing is already a proven social activity with the popularity of social clubs and the fact that we buy the same stocks as one another. And, there is evidence that shows that 10% of us consistently outperform markets. The collective wisdom of the few, I call it.

If you're interested, the is more here:

http://blog.cakefinancial.com/cake_financial/2007/09/the-power-of-th.html

Thanks for your thoughts.