It’s once again a great pleasure to offer a guest post from our good friend Marriott, who works in the financial industry in Washington, D.C. Marriott last wrote about climate-ready crops in May.
In December 2008, kaChing received the blessing of the SEC to become a Registered Investment Advisor. kaChing is a social networking and investing website that allows individuals to create sample and fictitious portfolios. They can then share these portfolios with other individuals on the network and compare their successes and failures.
Now, in principal, this is a great feature of education that is much needed for the modern investor. Individuals can learn as they invest the money they wish they had, or they can follow other individual’s portfolios to see how they succeeded and failed. The idea of using play money to learn about investments is not original to kaChing. Over the years there have been several ways for individuals to test their investment ideas, methods and strategies before putting their life savings into play. That’s a great system.
kaChing’s recent move ruined what they had, in my humble opinion. By becoming a Registered Investment Advisor with the SEC, they have gone into the business of selling advice on investments. It works basically like this (my own spin is applied): if you are an 18 year old hotshot with some investment ideas and your allowance doesn’t provide you with the capital to make investments with real money, you can open a trading account through kaChing. If your ideas, no matter how crazy, actually start to do well and other social investors take notice, then you can charge a fee for the ability to track your portfolio. Of course, kaChing will take a small part of this fee for providing the connection services. Once people pay the fee to track your portfolio they can link their own grown up money accounts to your fictitious one and try to replicate your stellar returns.
Despite my beliefs in the free market, the survival of the fittest, and stupid is as stupid does, I have a few major problems with kaChing’s new business model.
1. Monopoly Money Doesn’t Pay The Bills
When you make investment choices with fictitious accounts, there is an absence of risk. This means that you are willing to make bigger bets at a bigger cost. Hey, if you lose it all, the only thing that is damaged is your point total; at least you don’t lose your mortgage. Once people are linking their IRAs, trusts, and life savings to your investment decisions, they are assuming that your performance as a money manager is dependent on some form of risk tolerance. The truth is that everyone has their own individual risk tolerance. In other words, everyone is willing to risk a certain amount for the potential to gain another amount. If it was real money, a lot of kaChing’s top managers wouldn’t be making the decisions that are getting them the attention on the website.
2. Absence Of Accountability
What happens when that manager who is up 178% for the last month is down 506.7% this month? Nothing. And the reason is because these individuals are not held accountable for their investment decisions. Sure they want to do well so that they can make more money by becoming tracked by more investors. But truthfully, they may not care one way or the other if your investments are going up or down or sideways. When you use a financial advisor at a stock brokerage or investment advisory firm they are held accountable by their firm, the SEC, the competition of other advisors, as well as your ire. To me there is a fundamental problem with our investing population if we start to trust our savings and investments with individuals we’ve never met, based solely on their performance on kaChing.
3. Investing Is Not A Game
As we have seen over the past year, the markets can be BRUTAL. Companies fail, stop paying dividends, have bad strategies, go into bankruptcy and dissolve everyday. That’s a fact of the free market. The stock market is an amazing entity that allows the investor to take part in the unlimited potential gain and potential loss. When you are investing in the market you should have a plan. Now while that plan can be to follow the high school quarterback’s investment choices on a social investing website, I suggest that you go with something more tailored, developed, balanced, and adaptable.
In my mind, using the kaChing system for your life savings is the equivalent of writing a check, taking it to Atlantic City, walking into the dingiest of Casinos, sitting down at the coldest of cold roulette tables and putting it all on Black 13, because its your lucky number. When the wheel stops spinning you may have 35 times as much money as before (you may have put your money with the one of the guys on kaChing doing a good job) or you may have nothing, zip, zilch, nadda, zero…
No matter what, I want you to remember one thing: Markets are difficult. Professionals, individuals, endowments and institutions have strived for decades to master them. And to be frank, not a single person, professional or otherwise, has “mastered” the markets to date. In the end it is your money to invest. Whether you use kaChing or another advisor, make sure everyone involved understands your risk tolerance and other investment guidelines (such as timeline, goals, etc.), hold them accountable for their decisions, and take it seriously.
So have fun with sites like kaChing, but tread carefully when it comes to putting your cash with some 18-year-old “investor” who is up 177.8% on his fake kaChing account.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user d70focus.
Subscribe by feed
Subscribe by email
Follow on Facebook
Great point, Matt. Thanks for this very interesting article. I was unaware of KaChing but my sentiments about the need for more reason and responsibility when it comes to the stock market are closely aligned with yours.
Awesome post, definitely agree that when one is playing with 'play money' they will take bigger risks that they normally would avoid in real life. It does not convey the same sort of cautious behavior someone would exhibit if their mortgage was on the line.
Awesome post, definitely agree that when one is playing with 'play money' they will take bigger risks that they normally would avoid in real life. It does not convey the same sort of cautious behavior someone would exhibit if their mortgage was on the line.
Absence Of Accountability this would be the biggest caveat to investing.