CollabInvest Articles, Tips and Tricks

Technorati Blog Index

no_author@no_author.com — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:58:23 EST

I've listed this blog in the technorati blog index and as part of this process they ask to verify the authorship of the blog using a unique key:

R6CPWPQMGFW7

Stock Chart Tweets

no_author@no_author.com — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:20:10 EST

Too many times while participating in online investing forums or having conversations on Facebook or twitter, I've wanted to link to charts with annotations to highlight some point or question that I've had. In reading the posts of others, most don't link to charts or when they do, they link to plain charts where the point gets lost.

To address this and make engaging in online investment discussions easier, we've added a SHARE button to Personal Stock Monitor charts that allows you to upload an annotated chart along with a microblog update (a so called 'tweet').

For example here's a 1 year chart of CSX with some annotations and an update.

Each post gets it's own unique web URL, called a permalink, which you can send in email or post to other sites. Each post also has a convenient little "Share" link that lets you cross post the chart to other sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Beyond just having a convenient way of sharing a chart, you can invite people into a conversation around your chart. Other CollabInvest members can post comments to your chart and you will automatically be notified when this happens.

You can see the posts of other members by going to the home page and clicking on the All Public Updates link.This will show you a list of all the most recent posts made by anyone who has a their profile set to public.

From this list you can choose those you would like to follow. By default, after you log in and go to the homepage you'll see only those posts by your friends and those you are following. As such this is a hybrid of the approaches used by Facebook and Twitter.

From your own profile you can get a list of who you are following and who is following you.

You can opt to set your profile privacy setting to "Friends Only" which will prevent anyone who is not in your friends list from seeing your posts.

To lock down your profile completely, you can set your privacy setting to private.

In your posts, you can opt to direct a post at a given member using the @ symbol. For instance, if you add @Yermo to your post, I'll get an email indicating that you've sent me a direct message. This is a good way to alerting someone to see a chart (if they are member).

You can also tag posts into categories using the twitter like #tag notation. This lets your organize your posts.

A little off-topic - an interesting thought provoking article on designing social software.

no_author@no_author.com — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:16:29 EST

CollabInvest is a social networking site for investors. As such it faces the same kinds of challenges that sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter face. Here we have the added complexity of that conversations about investing and trading are very data heavy. To have meaningful conversations, we need to be able to conveniently express complex concepts involving such "words" as charts, trends, indicators, alerts, watch lists, stock picks, and tickers and do so in a way that's natural and effective. I want to do more than just show you a chart. I want to be able to send it to you as just another "word" in a sentence. I want you to be able to "speak" that chart back to me. I want to be able to do the same with all other other "words" involved in investing.

A friend pointed me to this thought provoking article: Social Software the Other Design for Social Impact .

Our goal with CollabInvest is to create a convenient and effective environment for having investment and trading related conversations.

Article about Personal Stock Monitor written by CollabInvest user BillD1957

no_author@no_author.com — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:37:25 EST

One of our customers that I've been chatting with quite a bit in CollabInvest is BillD1957.

To my pleasant surprise, he put together an introductory article about Personal Stock Monitor which I have attached below.

As Bill mentions, to date CollabInvest has primarily been used as a way to have in-software chats with Anatoly and I. We had always imagined that our users would establish connections using the Find Friends link and collaborate in real-time in the software. This is how we use it when discussing trading ideas.Unfortunately, as you've noticed CollabInvest does not feel very alive and to date few have used the real time collaboration features.

This is going to change very soon with some new features we're bringing online next week, which we hope you will all find useful.

Beyond CollabInvest, we have a number of features planned out for the software which we will introduce as we develop them. Some features, such as the next/prev arrow idea Bill suggested took very little time to implement and we were happy to do it. (Open a chart and see the two arrows next to the refresh button next to the ticker symbol at the bottom)

Other features, unfortunately, can take much much longer to develop. We very much would like to develop alerting on technical indicator values and portfolio value/XIRR over time calculations. These two are huge projects which will probably not get done for quite some time.

We typically prioritize features based on what our customers tell us they want. If we receive a particular feature from a large number of users, it gets priority.

There are other feature requests that only a few customers have mentioned.One such feature is setting alerts on total portfolio gain, loss, value, etc. (the total lines). This is one that we would have gotten around to "eventually" but it was going to take several days of fulltime effort to make happen. A customer, Dr. Mark Morris, for whom that particular feature was critical and time sensitive, opted to fund adding that feature to the next release. As a result, in the next release of Personal Stock Monitor and Personal Stock Streamer, you will be able to set alerts on total lines.

As I was mentioning to Dr. Morris yesterday, one of the challenges we face is that we actually rarely hear about your experiences. We are often left guessing as to what you would like to see and what you would think is useful. So, if there's a feature or improvement you would like to see to the software, please post them to the collabinvest forum so we can start a discussion. Obviously, we can't develop everything, but unless we hear from you, we won't know what you're looking for and more importantly we won't understand the /why/ behind the request.

Finally, if there's a feature you would like to see in the software sooner rather than much later for your brokerage, money management firm, trading group or other purpose, and you are willing to fund the development, please contact us.

(In a future release of CollabInvest I hope to add the ability for you to post your own blog articles like this one on the site in your own area. More on that later.)

Converting MSN Money Portfolio .MBF files to .QIF and the importing the data into Personal Stock Monitor

no_author@no_author.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:26:53 EST

We have learned that Microsoft is retiring their MSN Money Stock Portfolio on November 1st. It appears they are doing this without providing a transition path to other products.

After some experimentation, I've come up with a recipe for converting the Microsoft MSN Money .MBF format into Quicken .QIF format which can then be imported, transaction history and all, into Personal Stock Monitor. PSM has a free 30 day trial.

Here are the steps:

log into your MSN Money Portfolio Manager account. For my tests, i used the Investment Toolbox Portfolio Manager.
Select the Other Tasks -> More -> Files Options -> Backup .. menu option.
Browse for a folder that you can find again and save out your MBF Money Backup file.
In order to convert the .MBF file to a .QIF file you need to download and install a free trial version of Microsoft Money Deluxe. The download is available directly from the Microsoft downloads site. Click here to get a free copy.
Once you have downloaded and installed Microsoft Money and gone through the setup wizard, select the File -> Restore Backup menu option.
Select Restore from a backup file.
Select Let me browse for a different backup file.
Browse and select the .MBF backup file you created in step 3 above.
Click the Restore button when the dialog appears.
You will need to enter your MSN login id and password in order to open the backup file.
Once the file is imported select File -> Export.
Select Loose QIF.
Browse for a location to save the QIF file.
Select Investment.
Select the accounts you would like to export and click export.
Close MSN Money.
Download and install Personal Stock Monitor GOLD. 30 Day Free trial available.
Start Personal Stock Monitor GOLD.
Create a new blank account tab by selecting Account -> Create New Account Tab.
Name your new account tab.
The new account tab will appear at the bottom. Select it.
Select File -> Import.
Browse to select the QIF file you saved in step 15 above.
Select QIF Files.
Click open.
Click Yes to All to avoid having to add each ticker individually.
It will ask you where to put the tickers. Just accept the default location. Some tickers may not have a symbol in your backup file. Use the binoculars icon to look up the ticker symbol.

Once you have completed these steps all of your positions and transactions will be imported and useable from within Personal Stock Monitor.

To see your transaction history select the Transactions tab.

To see your current positions select the Current Holdings tab.

To post comments to this articles you'll need a CollabInvest account. You can register for a free account in the upper right. If you have questions, post them here or in the forum.