Mr Michael Sha: We actually have more engineers in Singapore than in the US. |
While there is a lot of raw financial data freely available on the web, Wikinvest envisions itself playing a role in turning that into information that is useful and accessible to investors.
“During the early days of online trading, many new investing websites started popping up that made a lot of raw information that was available to personal investors,” said Mr Michael Sha, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Wikinvest. “While having access to live stock quotes and news was novel a decade ago, those sites have evolved little while the Internet has come a long way.”
Mr Sha saw this vacuum as an opportunity to innovate and create a site which is more than just a dump of raw numbers and data points. “We believe that investors need more - they want to understand what is relevant, what it means, and what they can ignore,” he said. “So we set out to create a site that combined a community with some interesting technologies to help people make sense of the markets.”
And community is key to the success of Wikinvest. Following in the footsteps of the well-known Wikipedia, Wikinvest plans to be the world’s largest investment research resource that is based on wiki - a place where people collaborate to write articles on a particular subject with links to other related articles.
“Since the beginning of investing, people have always wanted to interact with other investors to discuss their thoughts, analyses, and predictions for investments,” said Mr Sha. “The Internet and sites like Wikinvest take this to a new level by allowing people to interact virtually, sometimes with people they know, and often with people they don't know, but who share an interest in a topic.”
Wikinvest plans to be the world’s largest investment research resource that is based on wiki. |
This power of the web community as well as the ubiquity of the Internet allows Wikinvest to provide breadth in coverage, as well as depth. The website, which is free and open to all, currently has articles on over 10,000 investing topics as well as information and charts on thousands of companies, with the numbers growing every day.
“Our goal is to help people understand information,” said Mr Sha. “For example, when we present financial data, instead of just displaying a big wall of numbers like other sites, we help provide the context you need to understand what the data means.”
While Wikinvest’s main office is based in the United States (US), the company has invested in an offshore office in Singapore which does a lot of development work.
“We've had great luck attracting a team of some of the best engineers and that, combined with our partnership with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), is really what makes it work for us,” said Mr Sha. “We started the office about a year ago and they are a core part of our software development team. We actually have more engineers in Singapore than in the US.”
Development is critical to the success of Wikinvest, and Mr Sha notes that the company will always continue to innovate and create new parts to serve the community.
“One product that will be launching in early 2010 will be a revolutionary portfolio tracking tool that will help you easily keep track of your personal portfolio of investments,” he said.