StockPickr

» see stockpickr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

StockPickr began as personal software. James Altucher built it to find trade ideas by looking at what the best funds were holding, and in late September 2006 he opened it to the public, explaining on somebody else's blog that he had decided the more the merrier. The earliest capture of the site is 6 October 2006 and it is four kilobytes. TheStreet.com formed a joint venture around it on 3 January 2007, taking 49.9 percent, and announced the purchase of the remaining 50.1 percent on 25 April for 1.5 million dollars in cash and 329,567 shares, about 3.5 million dollars of stock. The filings put total consideration at 5,078,315 dollars, of which 4,567,116 was goodwill.

The growth that followed was fast enough to look permanent. By January 2007 there were more than 10,000 portfolios and 2,500 users. By August there were over 100,000 users and ten million page views a month. Time magazine listed it among the 50 Best Websites of 2007 on 8 July, in the news and information category, and TheStreet pointed out in its own quarterly release that of eleven sites named there, StockPickr was the only investing site. At the end of 2007 its parent told shareholders the site carried more than 800 professional portfolios and more than 130,000 posted by individual investors.

Nobody ever announced the ending, and the ending happened twice. The articles stopped on 24 November 2014, and the same three datelines sat on the homepage through captures taken in 2015, in 2016 and in July 2017. Underneath them the automated parts kept working, so the page size drifted by a few bytes a day for two and a half years while the Buffett and Soros holdings refreshed on schedule. The last working capture is 18 July 2017. By 4 August the address answered with a redirect to TheStreet, and it still does.

The whole site rested on a piece of American paperwork. A fund over a certain size has to file a quarterly list of what it held, and those lists are public, which is why a programmer in New York could publish Warren Buffett's portfolio without asking Warren Buffett. There was nothing to read like that where I was sitting. The distance here is a disclosure rule, not an ocean.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the matching worked ~

The mechanism is the part worth keeping, and most descriptions of it stop at republished filings. StockPickr used the filings as one corpus and the users' own published portfolios as another, then ran a collaborative filter across both, so when you entered your holdings you got back the professional and amateur portfolios with the most overlap, plus everything else those portfolios contained. Barry Ritholtz, writing about it in October 2006, said people were calling it a MySpace for stock picking and that Amazon's recommendation engine was the better analogy.

Around that sat the furniture of a 2007 finance site: daily screens for gainers and unusual options activity, Cramer's lightning round, insider buying, a stock game, a blog search engine called StockBlogr, and an Active Trader section that published backtests with the Wealth-Lab code attached. The most used part, by Altucher's own account, was the free question and answer board.

~ out of the filings ~

The clearest record of the death is in TheStreet's annual reports. The 10-K for 2015, filed in March 2016, still lists Stockpickr among the advertising-supported properties. The 10-K for 2016, filed on 20 March 2017, does not mention it once. MainStreet and BankingMyWay disappeared from the same document, and the same filing explains why: 46 percent of revenue that year came from the business-to-business side, from The Deal and BoardEx, where the subscribers are institutions rather than readers.

So the site became a redirect thirteen months after it stopped being a thing the company mentioned to its shareholders. The legal entity lasted longer than either: Stockpickr LLC of Delaware is still listed as a subsidiary in an exchange agreement dated 10 November 2017.

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