Doing for the Stock Market What I Tried to Do with Reverse Mergers
By David Feldman at 13 December, 2008, 6:27 am
It’s no secret that successful stock traders have been confined to an exclusive club, and that consumers and even smart businesspeople without trading expertise lose billions annually because they lack the skill and confidence to properly invest. One company wants to put all that to an end today with the launch of WeSeed.com, a new community investing website dedicated to demystifying the stock market and enabling real, everyday, people to learn, share, grow and invest on their own terms.
“Today we say goodbye to the old school financial mumbo-jumbo that intimidates even college-educated investors,” said Jennifer Openshaw, WeSeed’s president and co-founder. “With the help of WeSeed, Americans can finally approach the stock market on their own terms by tapping into what they already know and love, whether it’s food, fashion, technology or even the industry in which they work. By leveraging the power of community, the 100 million Americans who don’t currently invest can learn the basic fundamentals of stock investing and become smarter, more confident, better informed and even more competitive in their jobs.”
Building on the “invest in what you know” principle popularized by Peter Lynch, former Fidelity Magellan Fund manager, WeSeed embraces the speed and power of the World Wide Web to bring that theory into the 21st Century. WeSeed is about community, not individualization; sharing, not greed; wisdom, as well as knowledge.
But it’s not just consumers’ basic interests or industry knowledge that can be utilized. At WeSeed, consumers also look past the everyday brands and products they’ve come to know and love and consider the companies behind them. WeSeed taps into the collective wisdom and insight of its community on preferred brands and products, helping users decide what stocks might be worth buying. WeSeed is the only online community that enables consumers to start with what they already know to get stock ideas and then test their instincts in a safe, risk-free, virtual-trading environment. The WeSeed site offers a safe place to learn and grow with absolutely no risk.
I have no financial or other interest in WeSeed, I just think it’s cool. When even I feel, as a securities law expert, that I don’t understand many aspects of how the stock markets work, how do any of us stand a chance? This site may help demystify things just as I tried to do in reverse mergers with my book.
Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.
Allen Taylor
Hey David-
Thanks for the thoughtful review of WeSeed.com. You’ve captured the goal of what we’re trying to do, which is to break down the distance between everyday people and the stock market (the “Wall Street/Main Street” analogy is tempting, but we’ve all probably heard that a few too many times over the last several months).
You mentioned Peter Lynch, whose “buy what you know” theory is one of the guiding ideas behind WeSeed. Too many people think of Wall Street as this big, scary place where MBAs in $4,000 suits do all sorts of complicated things to earn (and lose) a lot of money. But if regular people just invested in what they know, they could empower themselves and probably do pretty well. For instance, think of how you’d be doing if you’d thrown down a few bucks in 1980 on that company that makes those cool new running shoes. That would be Nike.
Thanks again for the write-up, and please let me know if you have any more thoughts or questions about WeSeed.
-Joel
Its really very good to see all the useful information in one blog. Very informative blog. Good thing is that you have covered everything from Economy to Stock Market.
Allen, Joel and SI - thanks for the nice words!