Covestor and CVIM Blog

Scheduled Site Maintenance

We will be performing scheduled maintenance tomorrow morning at EDT 3:00am / GMT 8.00am.

This maintenance should take 30-45 minutes. During the maintenance www.covestor.com will not be available.  We apologize for the inconvenience. Should you have any questions, please contact us.

Job Opportunity: Front End Web Developer, London

If you hate average websites, have a designer's taste and a developer's skills, enjoy taking a vague idea and seeing it realized as a working site, are passionate about improving the Covestor user experience, as well as smart, creative and energetic, then you will enjoy working at Covestor!

Role
Front end developer / designer at Covestor.com (Central London, UK).
A full time office based role to help Covestor deliver its software projects to a high quality level.
Design web sites, modify existing pages, develop prototypes and integrate with our back end systems.
Work closely with the existing engineers and project manager to ensure deadlines are met.
Partially own the front end code base and suggest ways to improve its structure and modularity.
Attend bug review meetings where necessary and take ownership of front end bugs.

Experience / Skills
•    2+ years of recent design and development experience in a web
•    environment - show us your sites.
•    W3C CSS, HTML/XHTML, Javascript, optionally and ideally also ColdFusion.
•    Familiarity with back end technologies such as SQL, so integrating web sites with them is smooth.
•    Familiarity with development methods and how they apply in a light-weight, rapid turnaround engineering environment.
•    Reasonable level of comfort with financial terms.
•    Experience in a quality focussed organization.

Personal Attributes
•    Design flair and excellent attention to detail.
•    Enjoys technology and keeps up to date with the latest innovations.
•    Good oral and written communication skills.
•    Able to prioritise and work within tight time scales to meet deadlines.
•    A self starter, able to make progress with minimal supervision.
•    Can accept and act upon constructive criticism.

Covestor are seeking only passionate, energetic and ambitious individuals with the relevant experience, eligible to work in the UK and able to attend interviews in London.

Please reference URLs to examples of sites you have personally built and send your CV to jobs0409 [at] covestor.com

Please do not apply if you are not eligible to work in the UK or unable to attend an interview in London.

No agencies.

Tough Times for Funds

Tough times for everyone but looks like it is beginning to get particularly challenging for those overcharging, under performing funds. It was always bound to come, but given the recession investors are talking with their feet and the incumbents are beginning to find life difficult.

Two recent stories only go to highlight the challenges faced by the industry. Bloomberg is reporting huge job losses in Hedge funds and that a staggering 70% lost money in 2008:

Hedge funds may cut 20,000 workers worldwide this year, a record 14 percent of the industry’s jobs, as investment losses and client withdrawals erode fees.

About 920 hedge funds, or 12 percent, closed last year, according to data compiled by Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. Of the 6,800 single-manager funds that remain, 70 percent lost money in 2008, meaning they can’t resume collecting performance fees until the losses are recouped. Those fees, generally 20 percent of investment profits, are the primary source of cash used to pay bonuses.

In even more telling news the Supreme court has agreed to hear a case that will determine whether investors can blame a fund's advisers for excessive charges:

At its heart, the case speaks to the way fees are set across the mutual fund industry, and, depending on the court’s decision, could radically change how much shareholders pay in the future. “Millions of people invest in mutual funds,” said William Birdthistle, a professor of securities law at Illinois Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent College of Law. “This touches everyone.”

Covestor was established to bring transparency to the fund management industry, to enable ordinary investors to challenge the incumbents. That is becoming more of a reality daily and it is great to have you on the journey.

Trading Financial Stocks

It continues to be a terrifying ride for anyone brave enough to be trading stocks in financials and yet the most bought and sold stocks on Covestor in the last month are still in financial services. Strong trading activity in Bank of America (BAC) and Citi (C) continues even with the growing risk of partial or complete nationalization.

There are some great posts on the site including:

• Zmoose12 on Fas vs Faz
• Graubart on the future of BAC
• mysmp on Goldman Sachs
• Ramtajogi's regular watches - including AIG

We have also noticed a huge number of visitors to the site searching for strong opinions on the topic. Share your own views on the site of where you think this will all end.