Establishing a Track Record

Part of this process is to establish an audited track record. I am beginning that process by using covestor.com .

Covestor is a 2007 startup that allows members to create audited track records of their trades, allowing them to gain recognition (and in the future earn fees from their recommendations). The site allows members to track others' performance and follow the trades that they make. Membership to Covestor is free.

You can record your trades on the site manually after you make them, or you can "auto-confirm" trades via a download from your brokerage (extremely cool), which will then update the Covestor site about 15 minutes after you trade (they work with most of the major brokerages). The connection to your brokerage is secure; Covestor works with Yodlee (a major provider of data aggregation technology) to create a "one-way" view of your data.

Your identity and individual data can remain private; also, Covestor 'normalizes' your investments so that people are seeing scaled trades instead of actual amounts (they do label your account as a 'small', 'medium', or 'large' account however for purposes of tracking). You can also choose whether to allow your picks to be accessed by anyone on the web, or by members only. Good stuff.

More about Covestor: http://www.covestor.com/about/news

To start my track record, I am starting with a couple of small IRAs: my IRA and my wife's IRA. This is an active trader account -- trades held anywhere between 2 to 10 days. The represents about 10% of active trading assets. You see the Covestor widget on the right hand side of the blog -- click to see my performance. This account is very aggressive and has wild fluctuations in account equity -- it is not representative of my investment results (whether it is doing well or not).

I plan to add my more traditional investment accounts and larger accounts later. But I needed to start somewhere.

My track record for my IRA trading account: My Track Record

Why This Blog?

As I strive to become a better investor, trader, and financial expert, I anticipate several needs that this blog may be able to help address:

• A need to journal my trades. If I am going to become a better trader, I need to write down my trades and my rationale. That way I am accountable and I am forced to reflect on my learnings and mistakes. Creating this blog is the beginning of that process -- it provides a very convenient vehicle for creating a journal by day, and to do it in a more public way (the accountability part!).
  
• A need to crystallize my ideas and thoughts. As I read and experiment, I find that have all kinds of ideas that I need to get down in writing -- what looks interesting, what I might give a try, what ideas might I need to test further, where the resources are that might help me....many times I find if I don't get them down, some of them just vanish into thin air (especially the older I get).
  
• A potential way to build credibility. I don't know where this journey will take me -- I am hopeful I will continue to become more effective in managing my own investments well, but there is the possibility of going beyond that -- if I ever am going to take a more "public" path -- perhaps become a financial planner, investment adviser, or financial writer, I will need to be able to effectively and lucidly express my strategies in order to establish credibility with others.
  
• Giving others ideas. I have spent a lot of time reading and researching ideas to make outsized rates of return. I would like for others to get the benefits of my own insights -- especially those who are newer and might be following along (empathy!!!) -- maybe I can suggest strategies, investments, reading material, websites, and/or other resources to help others get an edge.

Next: another thing I have a high degree of urgency around is establishing an audited track record. I'll talk more about that in the next entry.