SocialPicks.com - Keeping the Selections Honest

When I see other financial bloggers on sites like SeekingAlpha and StraightStocks I sometimes wonder who is tracking their picks and who is keeping them honest. Their picks don’t have a very good chance of paying off anytime in the next 6 months. And most investors will be selling an investment that has only lost them money over the last six months.

Being Tracked
    Well after installing Google Analytics on FastSwings.com and studying where the incoming visitors were being referred from, I found a site called SocialPicks.com. At first I was slightly offended that the site was scrapping my RSS feed and redisplaying my content on their site. But the traffic generated was pretty good so it didn’t bother me too much. Plus the site was tracking my picks and grading me against other investors. Now that was something that I at first thought wasn’t a good thing.

Better Picks
    I ignored the SocialPicks.com rating for about two weeks after noticing that they were rating me. But then the competitive side of me kicked in and the desire to provide good trades to my readers led me to watch my rating on a regular basis and do my best to keep it high. This mindset allowed me to focus in on the best picks every week and every day and ignore the picks that are more speculative and not going to pay off in a timely manner.

Not Perfect
    I have praised the site so far but with everything there are still some negatives. The site seems to have editors that skim your articles and try to determine if you are long or short and which stocks you are recommending in a particular article. Then they enter this information into your profile to begin being tracked the following day. The problems occur as the editor don’t always see all the picks, sometimes are late tracking certain picks, and aren’t able to take into account variables.
    The variables are conditions that I recommend before a trade begins or for a trade to end. Say I write that you should wait until the stock pulls back a certain percentage before buying. SocialPicks.com is not setup to handle any of these kinds of conditions. They simply mark such a mention as a long trade and begin tracking the next day. And since my account with them is not able to link to the account they setup for me when they started scrapping my RSS feed, I have no control over their entries.

The Trade
    I like the way a tracking site keeps bloggers honest about their trades and somewhat accountable and I feel that all bloggers should track their trades with some kind of system. This would hopefully avoid a writer recommending a stock while it drops two weeks in a row and their readers are left wishing they hadn’t read the author’s article in the first place.