After the two initial posts by Deepak and a longish break on the blogging front, I figure it’s time for me (Kaushik) to chime in. We are hard at work on the first release, and the October deadline seems manageable. The back-end prototype is almost ready (database, downloaders, cleaners, and such). It’s now time to develop the v1.0 (v0.1?) of the analytics and our online community platform.

Meanwhile, here is an interesting article @ BusinessWeek: Social Networking Hits Investing

“We see today’s consumers aren’t content to sit back and have their entertainment sent to them, or their news or, increasingly, to have financial advice sent to them,” says Donato Montanaro Jr., co-founder and chief executive of TradeKing, which launched in December, 2005. “They demand to be part of the conversation that impacts their lives, and we are empowering that conversation.” Investors in TradeKing include Battery Ventures Partners, and O’Malley sits on TradeKing’s board of directors.

TradeKing allows all of its members to have their own blogs through which they can share investment strategies, or even thoughts about the political landscape that may affect future market conditions. The site’s key innovation is its Certified Trades capability, which allows users to reveal what they have bought and sold and at what price.

I admit that this warms my heart: VCs investing in a social network focused on active investors & traders!

Moneyoga too will offer some of these features (eg. pages for registered users that show their strategies/portfolio picks). Of course, we aren’t an online brokerage, whereas the companies mentioned above (TradeKing, Zecco, ThinkOrSwim) are brokers first and foremost. Regardless, the community-approach to investing & trading seems to be gaining acceptance.

Note that this isn’t all that new: how many of us checked out the message-boards at Yahoo Finance, Silicon Investor, etc. during the 1998-2000 dot-com bull run? The problem is that the signal-to-noise ratio (or information-to-spam ratio) was, and continues to be, extremely low. You would have to parse hundreds of messages before you come across something of value - something actionable like an investing/trading idea, a better/cheaper/faster data source, a new discount brokerage, a new futures & options strategy, etc.

Moneyoga plans to address this specific problem: how can you leverage the “wisdom of crowds” and create a balance between ease of access and quality of information. There are enough purveyors of stock ‘tips’ in India to last for a few generations of bull & bear markets: we don’t intend to become yet another!

Our power at your fingertips: We are taking a data and system-based approach to the Indian markets, and developing the technology platform for it. But the ultimate goal is to let the community take advantage of it!

Take futures & options as an example: investors & traders in India are relatively new to these instruments. Moreover, F&O data is not readily available - even if it is, you can’t easily mine it for tradable patterns or information about the underlying stocks. If we can address the data & accessibility issues, imagine what an active Moneyoga community could come up with. If you are a beginner, you get a primer on how to interpret and use F&O data for investing; if you are an active F&O trader, you get to share your insights with the community and get ideas for new strategies along the way.

As you can see, I’m excited about this - now back to coding, testing, debugging, trading, blogging and other such fun stuff.