Can anyone here recommend a virtual stock market or paper portfolio website? I want to start building a track record as a buy-side analyst that’s external to the fund that I work for, so I was wondering if anyone here could make any recommendations. I want a site that’s easy to use and where the credibility of my recommendations won’t be subject to skepticism (i.e. there is a safeguard that will prevent me from going back to the start of 2012 and recommend all the stocks that went up 50%+ YTD retroactively, since I don’t want people to worry about the risk of people falsifying their returns). I figure it’s a good way to keep track of my recommendations and also another way to show my performance to potential buy-side employers in the future.
FYI I did a quick search for “virtual stock market” and the top-rated entries were MarketWatch, WeSeed, StockTrak and WallStreetSurvivor. If anyone has experience with any of these sites please let me know. Thanks.
Hey Numi, have you ever seen anyone actually present paper trading portfolio results in interviews? I’m not saying it’s a bad idea but how much credibility would there be in presenting a paper trading portfolio (i.e what would stop you from only showing your best result of the 100 portfolios you started and burying the other 99?).
That’s exactly the issue, cleverCFA. I am looking for something that’s basically fudgeproof and regarded as such. I’m sure your 99 out of 100 thing was mentioned for purposes of an example, but that would take an enormous amount of work just to fudge. I have enough confidence in my analytical and stock-picking skills that I’d be fine representing it as such, along with the rest of my resume and experience. What I *don’t* want is having someone question the credibility of my paper portfolio if I have to present it down the line, so I’m all OK with whatever the most bulletproof thing is…
chibwack thanks for the suggestion, I’ll take a look at investopedia. Anyone else have recommendations?
Have you considered just trading with your own money? I’m afraid that no virtual portfolio will stand up to scrutiny, for reasons mentioned above. In an interview situation, it will just come down to whether or not the guy trusts you as a person.
the 99 out of a 100 was an exageration, but even if it was 1 out of 2 (one long the market, one short), you could easily manage that and bury the one that didn’t work out.
Have you considered combining one of these tracking sites with a blog of some kind? I think this would give more credibility to your porfolio whilst at the same time allowing you to get your investment ideas and thinking across to anyone reading it. If you called the blog site something very attached to your name as well if would dismiss any ideas that you were showing your winning hand only (i.e. something like www.numiinvestingideas.com). On the blog site you could pin a link to the tracking site, so people could read about each investing decision you make and reference that against the tracking site.
In Michael Lewis’ Big Short, one of the characters mentioned in the book (the doctor with asburghers syndrome, sorry I’m sure I’ve mispelt that), keeps an online blog. He ended up noticing a lot of incoming traffic and it turned out a lot of it was coming from the large investment houses. That’s how he eventually got into managing a hedge fund.
You couldn’t really capture all the nuances of trading in scale with that though unless you’re just trading a simple stock only portfolio. Then again, maybe that’s just what Numi is looking for.
I just want something that tracks an equally weighted portfolio of my stock calls, or can somehow document that I recommended X stock on Y date.
I can’t trade the names in my personal portfolio because it’s just too onerous to do that for compliance reasons, given the potential risk of front-running or conflict-of-interest with the fund I work for.
I did start to post some of my recommendations on SumZero but I don’t want to give away all my ideas. I’d rather save those for specific discussions with potential employers, and have a paper portfolio to validate the timeliness of my recommendations.
It isn’t but for Sumzero you have to post your research report and I don’t want to give away all my analysis. Only want to disclose my positions since I like keeping the propriety of my research.
Just run a blog with your analysis and paper portfolio holdings. The blog form ensures that your presented portfolio is consistent with your analysis. MacroMan (the elder) did this for years.
You don’t have to post your full analysis if you don’t want to.
I appreciate the suggestion for a blog but really just want to have a mock portfolio site because blogs can be doctored as well.
Anyone else have suggestions for mock portfolio sites? I don’t wnat to post any analysis, recommendations, etc. Just a ticker, what date I bought it, what date I sold it, etc., and have everything timestamped so that there’s no monkeying around.
There’s no full answer. Eventually someone just has to trust you at some level. go ahead and do both. Blogs can be faked, but it’s an awful lot of work to do it. I would trust a trading diary more than just a printout of a paper portfolio, because the trading diary requires work to maintain over a long period of time, and even more work to fake.
Plus you can always change your reasons for why you chose the investments with hindsight knowledge. Seems like the easiest thing to fake of all. I have limited experience with this, but in my equity research interviews they were more interested in my previously authored research reports than my personal portfolio, although both were discussed.
OK, makes sense. I agree that during meetings with potential investors and fund managers, they really just want to figure out whether they can trust you. Sometimes their decision as to whether they can trust you can be based as much on intangible evidence as tangible evidence.
That said, I did find that Interactive Brokers (where I have an account) does offer a Paper Portfolio, which looks pretty awesome so far. It comes with access to the same types of information as a paid account, lets you do an audit trail, etc. Seems pretty foolproof and a good way to create a proxy portfolio of my stock calls. It starts you off with $1 million in “play money,” lets you run long and short, and charges you trade commissions – all of which are also based on play money. So far so good; I’d recommend it.
I also found an older thread on AnalystForum dealing with a similar topic, which others here may find helpful.
rawraw, I generally agree that process is more important than outcome from the standpoint of running a fund. However, when your LP’s want to know how their investments are doing, it’s hard to tell them that the outcomes don’t matter. I’m confident in my research product and just wanted to find ways to build a track record for myself that reflects the timing of my recommendations. I suppose there are various ways to do it at the fund internally, i.e. keeping track of e-mails and fund position statements, but I like to keep a separate portfolio of my own recommendations via my own means as well.
