One of the best 5-minutes at Money:Tech was a too-brief
presentation given by Craig Kaplan, CEO of PredictWallStreet, in the morning of
Day 2. Like the Motley Fool CAPS
community, PredictWallStreet (PWS) community members predict whether a stock
price will rise or fall – but in this community, they only look to what will
happen the next day. What PWS then does
is aggregate all those predictions and present that data back to the
community.
If you’ve spent time at Zecco over the past few months,
you’ve probably noticed our integration with PredictWallStreet. On a number of our quotes pages, we display
their widget on the right side. Once you
make an “Up” or “Down” prediction on the direction the stock will head the next
day, you can see how the rest of the community thinks. This gauges market sentiment and can be an
important data point for short-term investors.
What was most compelling about Kaplan’s presentation was the
accuracy of the forecasts recently. They’ve
recently put out a white paper showing how they’ve managed to harness the
collective intelligence of their predicting community to create real
alpha. They have started to generate
real forecasts on the predictions of their users, and have had great success
doing so. Their forecasts, in fact,
outperformed the S&P 500 by around 40%!
This is exciting stuff.
We’re proud to be working with PredictWallStreet and bringing their
intelligent predictions directly to you in our research center. And so we are very happy to hear how
successful they have been – and how their successes can make us all better
investors.
Photo of Prediction Panel from duncandavidson on Flickr