Site Lets Investors See and Copy Experts’ Trades

From a NY Times article.

The trouble with mutual funds is that investors can feel as though they have put their money in a black box. The 90 million Americans with money in funds know little about fees, what securities their money is invested in and who is in charge.

Daniel Carroll, who started investing when he was 15, thinks he has a way to let average investors learn about investing while experts manage the money. In 2008, he started KaChing, a Web site where 400,000 amateur and professional investors manage virtual portfolios. Others have logged on to see what the investors on the site are doing and make the same trades in their own real portfolios.

On Monday, KaChing is to add a new twist. Customers can set up brokerage accounts that automatically mirror the trades of a money manager, some of them professionals.

“The idea of an asset manager showing all his research, his holdings — it’s unheard-of,” said Mr. Carroll, now 27 and the vice president for business development at KaChing. “In the financial industry, the idea is that information is currency; they protect it with their lives.”

Individuals are desperate for advice and transparency from people who help them manage their money, and mutual funds do not provide enough, said Andy Rachleff, KaChing’s chief executive and a longtime venture capitalist who co-founded Benchmark Capital.

“The mutual fund industry is a $10 trillion industry that has seen no innovation for 25 years. The Internet has had no impact,” Mr. Rachleff said.

KaChing has attracted a roster of prominent early investors from Silicon Valley who have financed the company with $3 million. They include Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape; Kevin Compton of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; and Jeffrey Jordan, chief executive of OpenTable, the online reservation service.

The angel investors have also been investing their own money through KaChing during the pilot period. “The concept is great — the ability to tap into not just the wisdom of the crowd, but to be able to identify and invest with the particular geniuses in the crowd that stand out,” said Mr. Andreessen, who has invested $100,000 using the site.

Customers will be able to open a brokerage account with Interactive Brokers and link their account with their choice of investors on KaChing. KaChing charges customers a single management fee of 0.25 percent to 3 percent, set by each investor. KaChing keeps a quarter of the fee, and the investors get the rest.

Each time the investors make a trade, KaChing will automatically make the same trades for the customer. Customers can log on whenever they want to check their portfolio’s performance. They can send the investor private messages and receive alerts if the investor does something unusual. With the click of a mouse, customers can stop mirroring an investor.

KaChing rates investors on the site by giving them a score the company calls Investing IQ. The formula is modeled after one used by managers of Ivy League endowments, Mr. Rachleff said, and considers risk-adjusted returns, whether investors stick to their strategies and the quality of the research they provide to explain their ideas.

So-called genius investors are those with high scores that have at least a yearlong record on KaChing. The genius investors sign regulatory documents that they will not break the law, including “front-running” stocks, which is the illegal practice of buying or selling a security for their own account with the advance knowledge of pending orders.

KaChing monitors trades in the personal brokerage accounts of each of its model investors and their families. The site is also a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Only a dozen people have qualified as genius investors so far. They include a retired lawyer in Omaha, a student at Chapman University and the founder of a Bay Area investment firm.

For investors, KaChing is a way to make some money on the side or expand their existing business. Andrew F. Mathieson, founder of the investment firm Fairview Capital in Greenbrae, Calif., said he hoped to use KaChing to cater to people who did not meet the firm’s million-dollar minimum.

“Most investment products are sold rather than bought,” he said. “Our vision of this is it’s a product that will be bought by investors on the basis of the information we’re putting on the site.”
Recommend More Articles in Technology » A version of this article appeared in print on October 19, 2009, on page B4 of the New York edition.

Toyota Midnight Rider Tundra Tailgater

Sweet party truck!


Normally when we feature a cool car we like to tell you about the engine power, but in the case of the Toyota Midnight Rider Tundra Tailgater by Brooks & Dunn we're stuck on the accessories. This flatbed packs a 42 inch HDTV and Kicker sound system, a BBQ grill, beer tap and ice chest. Designed with Brooks & Dunn's truck/country music fans in mind we suddenly feel the urge to follow the band on their 2010 farewell tour in one of these bad boys.

Check It Out

Now imagine you're prey

Experiencing the Void

A proposal for the Guggenheim Museum's Rotunda which is part of the 50th Anniversary celebration from Julien de Smedt. Unfortunately, this is only a 2D project, and there are no plans that I know of for making this real.

Hermes' Tokyo Window Display

An eye catching and artistic yet wonderfully simple store window display.

View from the Top

The Burj Dubai's spire lets one person see the world. Luckily that person has a video cam so we can all share. Burj Dubai is currently the world's tallest building, in a country sitting on the some of the world most serious debt right now...

Movie Trailers

Mashup trailers for modern movies in the style of movies from the 40s and 50s:

I can't imagine how much work and time went into these! Pretty cool...

Camouflage artist Liu Bolin

These are photos not photoshops... More of his work here: http://www.ekfineart.com/html/artistresults.asp?artist=82&testing=true

Learning His Body, Learning to Dance

A dancer with Cerebral Palsy teams up with a choreographer that significantly changes his adaptations to his disabilities that doctors and other professionals have been unable to help him with. This article was particularly interesting to me in the way it represents how we limit ourselves based on the preconceptions that others have, and how there is so much information out in the world that has not been crossbred and allowed to germinate.

An interesting read: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/arts/dance/25palsy.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

Police Take Notice

I saw a sign today that said "Bank of America business only. No Soliciting or Trespassing. Police Take Notice."

Does that mean that police notice you trespassing (highly unlikely since this was inside an office building) or does that mean police please take notice of people who may trespass here? It is a choice between a sign that is unlikely to be effective and poor grammar...

A 1936 Stainless Steel Ford Coupe

A handsome polished, stainless steel 1936 Ford Coupe, one of only 6 made, that was made as a collaboration between Ford and The Allegheny Ludlum Steel. Excerpted from The New York Times.


Photo by Richard S. Chang for the NY TImes.

One of the standouts was a 1936 Ford coupe that was made out of stainless steel and looked like an apparition on the lush green field. Its owner, Leo Gephart of Scottsdale, Ariz., stood proudly at its front bumper fielding questions from the crowd.

“They only made six of them,” he said. “Ford did it as a publicity deal for Allegheny Ludlum Steel. They were going to use the cars for promotion. They were going to make 10. Henry Ford ran six, and the seventh ruined the dies.”

Mr. Gephart said only one of the stainless steel Fords was delivered to a private owner, a dentist who had introduced stainless steel in dentistry.

Mr. Gephart first came across the car 40 years ago. “I told the owner to give me a call if he ever wanted to sell it,” he said. “He gave it to his son. Twenty years later, it was at a restoration shop. The guy at the shop was dressed up. He was going to a cruise. He told me he was going to give it to his grandson. I bought it from the grandson 20 years later.”

A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’

An examination of repatriating antiquities to their place of origin, a growing trend that is affecting great museums around the world. While I can understand a culture wanting its treasures back (I think immediately of how much richer a visit to The Forbidden City might be, for example), I also would feel much poorer if The Metropolitain Museum became a place to hold only American items, for example. From the New York Times.



Herbert Knosowski/Associated Press
A bust of Nefertiti that Egypt wants from a Berlin museum.

Zahi Hawass regards the Rosetta Stone, like so much else, as stolen property languishing in exile. “We own that stone,” he told Al Jazeera, speaking as the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The British Museum does not agree — at least not yet. But never underestimate Dr. Hawass when it comes to this sort of custody dispute. He has prevailed so often in getting pieces returned to what he calls their “motherland” that museum curators are scrambling to appease him.

Last month, after Dr. Hawass suspended the Louvre’s excavation in Egypt, the museum promptly returned the ancient fresco fragments he sought. Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art made a pre-emptive display of its “appreciation” and “deep respect” by buying a piece of a shrine from a private collector so that it could be donated to Egypt.

Now an official from the Neues Museum in Berlin is headed to Egypt to discuss Dr. Hawass’s demand for its star attraction, a bust of Nefertiti.

These gestures may make immediate pragmatic sense for museum curators worried about getting excavation permits and avoiding legal problems. But is this trend ultimately good for archaeology?

Scientists and curators have generally supported the laws passed in recent decades giving countries ownership of ancient “cultural property” discovered within their borders. But these laws rest on a couple of highly debatable assumptions: that artifacts should remain in whatever country they were found, and that the best way to protect archaeological sites is to restrict the international trade in antiquities.

In some cases, it makes aesthetic or archaeological sense to keep artifacts grouped together where they were found, but it can also be risky to leave everything in one place, particularly if the country is in turmoil or can’t afford to excavate or guard all its treasures. After the Metropolitan Museum was pressured to hand over a collection called the Lydian Hoard, one of the most valuable pieces was stolen several years ago from its new home in Turkey.

Restricting the export of artifacts hasn’t ended their theft and looting any more than the war on drugs has ended narcotics smuggling. Instead, the restrictions promote the black market and discourage the kind of open research that would benefit everyone except criminals.

Legitimate dealers, museums and private collectors have a financial incentive to pay for expert excavation and analysis of artifacts, because that kind of documentation makes the objects more valuable. A nation could maintain a public registry of discoveries and require collectors to give scholars access to the artifacts, but that can be accomplished without making everything the property of the national government.

The timing of Dr. Hawass’s current offensive, as my colleague Michael Kimmelman reported, makes it look like retribution against the Westerners who helped prevent an Egyptian from becoming the leader of Unesco, the United Nation’s cultural agency. But whatever the particular motivation, there is no doubt that the cultural-property laws have turned archeological discoveries into political weapons.

In his book “Who Owns Antiquity?”, James Cuno argues that scholars have betrayed their principles by acquiescing to politicians who have exploited antiquities to legitimize themselves and their governments. Saddam Hussein was the most blatant, turning Iraqi archeology museums into propaganda for himself as the modern Nebuchadnezzar, but other leaders have been just as cynical in using antiquities to bolster their claims of sovereignty.

Dr. Cuno advocates the revival of partage, the traditional system in which archeologists digging in foreign countries would give some of their discoveries to the host country and take others home. That way both sides benefit, and both sides have incentives to recover antiquities before looters beat them to it. (To debate this idea, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

As the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, Dr. Cuno has his own obvious motives for acquiring foreign antiquities, and he makes no apology for wanting to display Middle Eastern statues to Midwesterners.

“It is in the nature of our species to connect and exchange,” Dr. Cuno writes. “And the result is a common culture in which we all have a stake. It is not, and can never be, the property of one modern nation or another.”

Some of the most culturally protectionist nations today, like Egypt, Italy and Turkey, are trying to hoard treasures that couldn’t have been created without the inspiration provided by imported works of art. (Imagine the Renaissance without the influence of “looted” Greek antiquities.) And the current political rulers of those countries often have little in common culturally with the creators of the artifacts they claim to own.

Dr. Hawass may consider the Rosetta Stone to be the property of his government agency, but the modern state of Egypt didn’t even exist when it was discovered in 1799 (much less when it was inscribed in 196 B.C., during the Hellenistic era). The land was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and the local historians were most interested in studying their Islamic heritage.

The inscribed stone fragment, which had been used as construction material at a fort, didn’t acquire any significance until it was noticed by Napoleon’s soldiers and examined by the scholars on the expedition.

When the French lost the war, they made a copy of the inscriptions before surrendering the stone to the English victors, who returned it to the British Museum. Eventually, two scholars, working separately in Britain and in France, deciphered the hieroglyphics.

This all happened, of course, long before today’s nationalistic retention laws and the United Nations’ Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. But what if the Rosetta Stone were unearthed in modern times?

Were the Rosetta Stone to appear on the artmarket without the proper export permits and documented provenance, Dr. Cuno says, a museum curator who acquired it would risk international censure and possible criminal charges. Scholars would shun it because policies at the leading archeological journals would forbid the publication of its text.

“Not being acquired or published, the Rosetta Stone would be a mere curiosity,” Dr. Cuno writes. “Egyptology as we know it would not exist, and modern Egyptians would not know to claim it as theirs.”

The Supreme Council of Antiquities wouldn’t even know what it was missing.

Books: The Architecture of Additions: Design and Regulation by Paul Spencer Byard

Books: The Architecture of Additions: Design and Regulation by Paul Spencer Byard

Lookout Tower by Avanto Architects | CoolBoom

Lookout Tower by Avanto Architects | CoolBoom

New Scientist Invention blog

New Scientist Invention blog

interesting elevators « deputydog

interesting elevators « deputydog

fake window from blind

http://pipeline.gnr8.biz/index.php?task=home&id=92

Portfolio of Jesse van Dijk

Portfolio of Jesse van Dijk

How to add a USB port to your Alarm clock as a Power outlet

From Engadget.com is an article on How to Add USB power to your alarm clock, so that you can attach USB powered devices such as lights, etc. McGyver, eat yer heart out!

Movie Trailers

Mashup trailers for modern movies in the style of movies from the 40s and 50s:

I can't imagine how much work and time went into these! Pretty cool...