At a time when the stock market is close to its all-time peak, a website set up by three Mumbai-born techies is trying to use social networking to lead what they call the “democratisation of stock pickin
 
India’s first online ‘social investing community’ is slowly emerging as a platform to connect investors, help them to share information about stocks, and get them to work together to make more informed investing decisions.
 
The brainchild of three Silicon Valley IT professionals, Stockezy was founded in August 2008, born largely out of their personal need to invest in the Indian stock market.
 
Tushar Makhija, Nikhil Badwe and Rushabh Doshi, all 29, were college buddies turned roommates working in San Francisco when they hit upon the idea and started work on it.
 
Explaining the rationale for Stockezy, Makhija, CEO and business head, said, “Stockezy takes the social bandwagon ahead by trusting community intelligence over individual opinion (herd mentality is always closer to reality). At Stockezy, investors can rate stocks, research stocks, and work together to identify the best stocks and best investors. Stockezy tracks the performance of each of the recommendations and provides a performance rating to all stock pickers sharing recommendations on the site.”
 
In the words of Doshi, the chief technology officer, “Professionals use Stockezy to showcase their investment talent and earn a reputation, while novice investors use the features to learn more about investing, and mainly about which stocks to invest in and which stocks to avoid.”
 
One of the key features of the website is the premium advice paid subscription service, a fully automated system which allows members to subscribe to stock recommendations of the top-performing stock pickers via email or SMS.
 
In tandem with the latest technologies and features of social-networking communities, Stockezy boasts of features like the blogging tool, where users can create their own content and share links, and the Twitter clone for users to communicate in real time during market hours.
 
Over the past two years, Stockezy has been growing steadily in popularity. Badwe, the technical architect, said, “According to the latest statistics, we have 18,000 registered users and aim to reach 1,00,000 in the next six months. On average, a user spends nine minutes on the site, during which time she visits about 20 pages. Every month the site gets around 500K page views.”
 
In terms of investment, the founders say they have put just $25,000 into the development and maintenance of the website in the past two years, because they did not need to go out for technical expertise and technology.
 
Using Facebook and Twitter for promotions, they are now mulling over expansion plans. Makhija said, “We are in talks with Kotak Securities to allow automatic trading of stocks from Stockezy using Kotak's trading terminals.
 
“We are also working on collaborating with Dorsey Wright Associates, a US-based firm, to build research and market learning products for the Indian stock market. Besides, we are planning to go global within the next three months by tying up with a Wall Street investment advisory firm.”