I recently came across this article on “Seeking Alpha” about “Peer-to-Peer” investing (Covestor and VesTopia: Winners and Losers from Peer to Peer Investing - Seeking Alpha). I thought it sounded quite interesting and decided to have a go at signing up and I am now a “certified member” (I am soo important :-).

Covestor is “A real-trade sharing service for proven self-investors”. It is a bit like the portfolios you can create at finance.yahoo.com or finance.google.com, except, your portfolio is visible to other people surfing the internet. Other people won’t be able to see the exact size of your portfolio or exactly how many shares you have in a particular company (that is expressed as a percentage of your holdings). They don’t even necessarily know your name, you can use a pseudonym. But they can se how successful (or not) your portfolio is and they can decide to track it. If they track it, they can see whenever you make a trade. It is obvious what is in it for those following the portfolios of successful investors, but what’s in it for those baring their portfolios and trades? Well, other than the obvious 15-minutes of fame, there is the self-interest in being able to compare with others and the “I’ll show you my portfolio if you show me yours” and learning from what others have or are doing. Covestor say they will in the future allow successful self-investors to charge a fee to allow others to follow their portfolio allowing anybody to become the equivalent of a mutual funds administrator, only, without having to administrate the mutual funds. To keep the self-investors honest, you can either have Covestor pull the data about your trades directly from your online broker (if it is on the list of supported brokers), or if you enter your trades manually, you have to upload statements from your brokerage to Covestor. Personally, I opted for the latter, I use E*Trade in the US, and I have a digital security id device I have to use every time I login, so the automatic option isn’t available to me.I was a little bit sceptical in the beginning, I track my portfolios in Quicken, I don’t really want to keep the portfolio up-to-date other places as well, but even though I use the “manual” method at Covestor, whenever I submit a new monthly statement, shortly afterwards, the new data appears. Someone at Covestor is obviously looking at that statement and entering the data for me.
I have very recently started to add shares to watch-lists at Covestor; it allows me to instantly see other portfolios where a particular share is part of the holdings, and, if they’ve entered that information, the rationale behind them holding it.At the moment, my portfolio is in the black, so I am happy to share it on Covestor :-), we’ll se what I think about it if my prtfolio takes a beating.

I haven’t been registered at Covestor for very long, but this is a site I would recommend. I have so far only tried it with US stock holding, I suspect it would be less useful if your share holdings are all in non-US shares.

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