SteamStreet Investment Community
Posted by Blain Reinkensmeyer
June 15, 2007 at 7:43 pm
A new investment community site still in Beta, SteamStreet, ordered a reviewme of their site, and from testing out their platform this week, I’m pretty impressed.
Site Overview
SteamStreet offers a place to track your portfolio performance as you buy and sell investments, share portfolios, write notes for each investment, and really just track the market. As I said above the site is still in Beta testing, but I found new problems in the coding already setup.
The concept of the site is to setup your own portfolio/s, covering everything from the risk tolerance to the purchase price of the stocks and recent portfolio performance. You can then share your portfolio with friends and see all their core information including picks, thoughts, etc.
Promoting Education Over Competition
A major aspect of the site that I noticed right away was that it is not setup to be some competitive, “look what I’ve done” show-boat kind of community. The concept I felt from the SteamStreet team was one of community education and self indulgence.
You don’t buy stocks like you do in a traditional stock simulator. With SteamStreet you simply input the shares, ticker, and price of when you bought, alongside any notes with the purchase, and the stock is tracked for you. Really it is like a trade journal online, which is perfect for people who simply want to learn as they go, or perfect a specific strategy.
The Community
You aren’t ranked against the rest of the site based on performance. Instead you “add friends” which allows you to view their picks, results, and the most valuable information from an educational standpoint, their notes. This makes SteamStreet relative for any experience level trader.
But, I found the process off adding friends to be difficult and tedious. There is no way for me to simply browse the community and add friends with a simple click of the button. I think this is something that needs to be developed extensively if Steam Street wants to really be a competitive investment community.
For example, take a look a the screenshot to the left of someones community profile with portfolio overview (click to view, click again to zoom).
I like the cleanliness, portfolio overview, you can see at the very bottom a portion of the notes, and then you have a market summary on the right and the investor profile at the top right. But what about adding this guy as a friend? What’s his name anyway? What about sending him a private message or leaving a note? Perhaps I am just way to used to facebook, but heck, it’d help a lot.
Closing Notes
I think SteamStreet has a lot of potential. The base look and feel of the site are grade A, and I really can see the site being used for working on developing different strategies, or just starting off as a stock trader.
What I think SteamStreet needs to develop though is the communtiy aspect of the site. Everything from adding friends to viewing profiles could more web 2.0 based. One big way to kick off a community like SteamStreet is through a forum. Pick up a copy of Vbulletin, modify the default color scheme, and in less than few hours and under $100 you have a place for members to meet one another and talk stocks.
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Great review! Congrats on attracting new clients!
FT
Thanks so much for the review! We’ve definitely heard some of these comments before and we’re actively working to address them prior to our public launch.
We do in fact have forums (http://community.steamstreet.com), but the link is buried at the bottom of the page, so I can see how you may have missed it. We’re going to be pushing a new version early next week that makes this more obvious, and it has some nice improvements, including more community features (like the ability to make comments on others’ portfolios).
Some of the broader community features are still in development, as the first goal was more of a person-to-person sharing system, where privacy is tightly controlled. As a result, you have fine-grained control over what data is shared with each of your friends, as well as the public. That said, expect to see better tools soon to help find investors and portfolios that are shared publicly.
We’re getting close to launching the public beta, but we still want to hear from investors so we can make the best site possible. Please go to the site and sign up to get access to the private beta.
Thanks!
Well if its free im joining, and if aint, ill wait till i have a portfolio till i join.
:)
Free to join, just register and youll get your access to test the Beta
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