Covestor and CVIM Blog

Weekly Member Interview: Rashid Garuba

This week's Wall Street Transcript Interview is with Covestor member Rashid Garuba, aka retire48.  Rashid works as an architect in Georgia and invests as his primary hobby. You can read his daily market thoughts in his trading journal.

Rashid's trading style is about following economic and sectoral trends - and then focusing on what he is invested in. As a medium term technical trader he maintains a portfolio of up to about eight stocks at any given time.

In his interview Rashid discusses how important sector momentum is to his research. He outlines, as an example, the rise of commodities given the struggling US Dollar, stressing the importance of keeping an eye on both macro economic trends as well as the micro economic picture. 

Rashid tracks his portfolio on Covestor and is currently ranked sixth on the site by Annualized Sharpe Ratio.  You can find the interview - as always - on the top right hand side of his fact sheet.

Covestor Community Manager: Blain Reinkensmeyer

We are delighted to announce that Blain Reinkensmeyer, author of popular stock blog StockTradingToGo has joined Covestor as our Community Manager.  

Blain is uniquely experienced for the role. He has built up his own blog/forum to nearly 5,000 members worldwide, and formerly worked as a community moderator for both YoungEntrepreneur.com and for our friends at Investopedia.com. In his spare time he day trades actively on his own account, writes his blog, and somehow also finds time to teach hockey to local kids.

Blain is joining us to help to attract and build the reputations of the great self-directed investors on the site. He will be responsible for all community contact, and for increasing the value of the community to members. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to mail him directly. We are excited to have him on board.

Covestor Partners. TheStreet.com

Today we announced a content sharing partnership with leading financial media company TheStreet.com, which will be of great value to our community.

As part of the agreement, members will shortly be able to distribute their profiles and commentary relating to their actual stock trades in TheStreet.coms StreetPicks section. In other words when you write a post on your Covestor blog you will be able to choose whether you want this also to be featured on TheStreet.com website. This provides access to a wider audience for your analysis, and will help to build you credibility as an investor. So if you have ever wanted to sit alongside the best financial commentators out there, now is your opportunity...

You will also notice that we have started to display headlines from TheStreet.com on all of our stock pages on Covestor. View examples on popular stock pages like JPM, MSFT and AAPL.  You can follow through from the links to access the full stories on The Street - we hope you will also find this to be of benefit.

We will provide more details shortly, when the feed for your commentary back to The Street has been set up. TheStreet.com has established a reputation as the leading source of online investment content. We are proud to be working with them. It is testimony to the quality of our members that The Street has chosen to uniquely showcase Covestor portfolios. 

Weekly Member Interview: Michael Arold

This week's Wall Street Transcript Interview is with Covestor member Michael Arold, aka sunshine_micha.  Michael works in marketing for a software company and trades part time on the side. You can read his daily market thoughts on his blog, Sunshine Trader.

Michael is a short term swing trader, holding his positions on average between two and fifteen days. He focuses on technical analysis, to not only evaluate his positions on the fly but also the overall market.

In his interview Michael discusses how he considers a concentrated portfolio to be more effective with his trading style than a diverse one. With swing trading he tends to focus on what is in trend right now, rather than worrying about the overall market. "There is always a bull and a bear market somewhere and that's where I'm playing." Says Michael.

Michael tracks his portfolio on Covestor, and promotes disciplined investing as a key to success. You can find the interview - as always - on the top right hand side of his fact sheet.

Scheduled Site Maintenance

We will be performing scheduled maintenance tonight beginning at 03:01 AM EST / 00:01 AM PST.  The Covestor website will be unavailable for approximately 90 minutes during this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. Should you have any questions, please contact us.

TD Ameritrade Broker Link Update

As you may be aware if you use TD Ameritrade as your online broker, they have recently instituted some new security measures in the form of four additional questions that users have to select and provide answers for on TD Ameritrade's site. 

If you are setting up an account on Covestor, or have an existing account with Covestor using TD Ameritrade for automatic import, you will therefore also have to share your answers to these questions on registration (or enter them in the 'broker settings' in your account if already registered). Once entered your broker-link connection will be established/re-established shortly thereafter.

Apologies for the inconvenience. Please contact us if you have any questions about this change.

Covestor Raises Series A Funding

Today we announced the close of our Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures (USV) and Spark Capital. They are joined by one of Europe's leading technology investors, Amadeus Capital Partners. Between them these firms have over $2 billion under management.

This a great news for the team here and for all of our members. It will allow us to build out our asset management platform, enabling users to invest alongside the brilliant self-directed investors on the site, rather than in expensive managed funds.

We have already been hugely impressed by the individuals who have joined us. Todd Dagres of Spark, and Albert Wenger of USV have joined our board of directors, Anne Glover of Amadeus has joined as a board observer. We chose to work with them as they share the passion of the team here at Covestor. A big thanks to them, and to all of our friends on the site.

Weekly Member Interview: Fred Penney

Following on from great press coverage in his native Newfoundland, this weeks Wall Street Transcript Interview is with Covestor member Fred Penney.  Fred works as an engineer in the civil construction industry, and is also the author of stock blog Another Stock Blog.

Fred has been investing for around 20 years, and is a medium term investor. He focuses on small cap Canadian stocks, using filters to screen based on holding period.

In his interview Fred talks about the kind of stocks and ETFs he screens for, as well as sharing some of his criteria. He talks about the impact that the strong Canadian dollar is having on his investing - and highlights some of the books and people that have influenced his approach.

Fred tracks two different portfolios on Covestor, one of which has performed better than the other. He is a great contributor to Covestor and a disciplined investor. You can find the interview - as always - on the top right hand side of his fact sheet.