Covestor and CVIM Blog

Feature Updates: Misc

A few updates to existing functionality have gone live today that you will notice across the site. A couple of the key ones to highlight for you:

Member Search

 You can now search for members by user name as well as by browsing or using the keyword search. Select the type of search you want to perform using the drop down on the top navigation from each page

Updated Terms and Conditions

We have updated the terms and conditions on the site both to tighten up some of the language and to take into account the investment management services we will be launching .Some key areas include:

• Dates to make it easy for you to recognize when updated again
• A minimum age of 18 for usage of the site
• More comprehensive conduct guidelines for posting and commenting on the site including specific language about forgery, impersonation and insider information.
• Instructions on how to notify us in the event that you believe there has been misconduct
• Broadening to browsers as well as registered users
• Your responsibilities for keeping your registration information secure and giving us and maintaining a verified email address for notices

Completing your Fact Sheet Profile

Completing your Fact Sheet Profile provides you with a verified track record of your investment activity, helps others find you and enables you to compare other members' investment styles to your own.  Covestor now provides the ability to quickly view the status of your Fact Sheet Profile - by adding all the data requested in your Fact Sheet Editor you will successfully establish a 100% complete Profile.

Access your Fact Sheet Editor by selecting Fact Sheet Editor under the Home menu, or by clicking one of the Edit links located on your Fact Sheet.  Here are some tips to help you establish a full Profile:

1. Did you fill out all the Personal Profile information in About You and upload a Head Shot?
2. Did you complete your Investment Profile and Investor Type within Find Others?
3. Did you setup "Auto Trade Import" connecting your account to your broker?
   

Once your Profile is 100% complete, your status bar will look like this:

Covestor Comes Out Of Beta!

Today you will notice some significant changes to the website as Covestor comes out of beta and opens up to anyone to join. You should find this improves your experience on the website and significantly expands the community for you to help/learn from.

Investors of any level or experience can now register to track the live trades of the self directed investors on the site (i.e. you no longer need a membership code/invitation or to share a portfolio to participate). To create an account, simply choose a username and password. Once signed in you can track the real trades of tens of thousands of brilliant investors for free, and/or add your portfolio at any time to better track your own investments. Invite your friends as we are now open to the world!

Other new features include:

• Enhanced Personal Profiles: More detailed Profiles of the members and the ability to see how they match your investment goals.
• Simplified Navigation: Including the ability to access a list of recently viewed members (per the Amazon recently viewed items feature).
• Updated design: New style and colors to make the Fact Sheets and the Editor easier to use.
• Extended Invitations: Full address book upload and management functionality. Tell your friends about other members on the site and they will tell their friends about you.
• Follower Fact Sheets: If choosing just to follow others, you are still given a Blog and Watchlist (i.e. everything other than Trades and Holdings, per members sharing portfolios).

If you are an existing member all of your account information will be on new site. Let us know if there is anything that you think hasn’t been correctly updated. Send us your feedback on the upgrade and as always any further suggestions for improvement. Great work Covestor team...

New Feature: Stock Blog

We have overhauled the commentary on Covestor, to allow you to keep track better of all of your investment decisions in a single blog.

You no longer need to go into each holding, watchlist item or your market report to share your rationales. Instead posts can be drafted and attached directly to your positions from a single compose page. This new feature will make it easier for you to maintain a historic record of your thinking, and for others to follow and respond to your analysis.
   
Key Features of the new blog:

• Full functionality of a regular blog: Full ability to draft, edit, attach (e.g. photo's, charts) and comment per other blogging software.
• Posts can be attached to positions: Capability to attach posts to individual holdings, or as watchlist ideas, to allow people to see what you are saying alongside what you are actually doing.
• Stock tagging: Select the stock symbols which the post relates to, to help others to find all commentary relating to the stocks they are interested in.
• Previous posts imported: You will see all of your previous commentary on Covestor has been automatically imported and categorized on your Covestor blog.
• Ability to import your external blog/Export your Covestor blog: If you already have a blog you can set it up to import automatically to Covestor, to save you replicating posts on multiple websites.

Each stock page will now also feature the latest commentary from members relating to the stock. Please leave others comments on, and rate, their posts to help the community find the best analysis.

We would also encourage you to share your Covestor blog publicly. To do this change your privacy setting to public. As well as giving access to your blog to non members, it will allow Google to crawl and index your posts.

Two New Auto Brokers Enabled (With Disclaimers)

Two new broker agents are now available for automatic import to Covestor- thinkorswim and E*Trade Canada. Both of these imports come with minor disclaimers when importing directly to Covestor.

thinkorswim is a  subsidiary of Investools Inc. and a fantastic broker, that provides services targeted at self-directed options traders and active traders.

The disclaimer is that we do not yet support options, futures or FOREX - only equities (long and short), mutual funds and ETFs. As such only your equity positions  will import automatically from thinkorswim at this point. We will be adding options shortly.

THe E*Trade Canada agent is now also on the live site for automatic import. We have had a great deal of demand from investors in Canada, and this is the first of the local brokers we are able to support directly.

The disclaimer is that the auto option is only recommended for users of E*Trade Canada who trade on a Canadian exchange. E*Trade Canada unfortunately does not distinguish between US and Canadian stock symbols, and so if a stock exists on both exchanges with the same symbol your performance/valuation will not be correctly calculated. As such please only use this if trading locally.

If you are an existing manual member using either of these brokers and wish to upgrade to automatic import let us know and we will enable this for you.

New Feature: Stock Watchlists

A number of you sent us feedback that you would value seeing what other members are watching and why, before the trades hit their account, so today we have added a stock watchlist for each member.  The watchlist lets you track the performance of stocks you are interested in and solicit feedback from the community on your ideas.

To add items to your watchlist, simply click on the link on your watchlist page or add the stock from any of the individual stock pages on the site. When you add a stock you will be asked to share a target buy or sell (if you have one) along with the thesis for why you are watching it. When you remove an item from your watchlist it will be added to prior watchlist items so that you can keep tracking its performance.

Watching stocks gives actionable information to both you and you followers. If the stock price falls below the target buy price, or above the target sell, it will be highlighted so that you can see that there is a recommended trade. Unlike any other watchlist on the web you can also see the five latest trades in each of the stocks you are watching, and roll over to see the performance of the members who have made these trades.

Your watchlist is shared with all members on the site who are able to rate your watchlist ideas. As well as giving you feedback this will help people to find you as we will highlight shortly the most recent and highest rated ideas on the site. We hope you will find this new feature of benefit, and as always keep the feedback coming.

MacOS X Widget for Live Feed

One of our developers has created a great MacOS X widget that you can use to keep an eye on your live feed, using the new Covestor data export API. Check it out on his blog - and download the widget directly from there. 

Let us know of other applications built to support the feeds. We would be happy to promote them here for others to use.

Rankings Go Live!

Today we activated the rankings tab to allow our members to benchmark their own performance, and to help users find other members that match their investment goals. We already have significantly more portfolio managers on Covestor than work for any professional firm, and so this feature will help you to find great performing individuals to track on the site.

There are over 150 different rankings tables to filter by preferred measure, portfolio characteristics (e.g. portfolio size or sector focus) and by time period. As well as in-depth rankings of portfolios we have added rankings of stocks, (most actively traded, most held, best performer by stock and so on) and a table for each member to cut their own track list based on performance by period. When logged in members looking at the rankings tables will see themselves highlighted if they have made it into one of the 'top 100' rankings.

Members will not appear in rankings during their first month on Covestor, and require a minimum of three months membership to appear on the tables cut by annualized return. 

We hope you find the rankings of value. We will continue to expand the list to include cuts by geography, strategy etc so if you have any suggestions for new tables to include please let us know.

New Feature: Data Export API

As you may have seen in your account already, or read online, we have added a great new feature to help members take greater control of their portfolio data. You can now export your performance, holding and trade data in RSS, XML and CSV formats. We know many of you like to use your own applications to analyse your investment decisions, so you can now export and mash up your verified broker data.

As well as your account data, you can also export your live feed; that is the view of activity of the other members you are tracking.

Per the help topic on the settings page, to use the feeds you first have to enable this feature. Click on the link to generate a URL for you to access live data in your own or third party applications. Although each URL is unique these are not password protected to avoiding you having to log in to Covestor each time you want the data to update, so if you wish to disable a particular application click reset URLs.

We hope that you find this of benefit. You can find the export feature on all of your account pages. If there is any further data you are interested in having access to let us know and we will keep developing these.

New Community Features

Following our recent launch of the Live Feed feature, we have this week introduced some additional community features.  As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions.

Request a Rationale - if you'd like to understand why someone has a position in a particular stock and they've not posted a rationale, or updated it for a while, you can now ask them to post one, directly from the stock holding page.

Ask Members Questions - following member feedback, we have introduced a feature on the Fact Sheet which allows members to communicate directly with other members to ask them questions about their portfolio or views on the market.

As per our Terms & Conditions, this feature should not be used for conducting unregulated investment activity.

Alerts - Alerts, which appears within My Account notifies members of any requests from other members.  Alert types currently include Rationale Requests and Questions.