For the better part of the last 10 years one of my hobbies has been sampling the best the Internet has had to offer in investment research tools. I’ve dabbled in developing my own technical analysis algorithms, have done a fair amount of day trading and have taken some more traditional long positions in companies I believed in. Online investment tools have come quite a long way over the years, but one of the recent fads that the “Web 2.0″ wave of innovation has brought us is the concept of social investing.

Social investing sites such as Covestor.com, Cake Financial and several others have done a great job of bringing all types of (typically) non-professional investors together. Their sophisticated platforms allow members to enter their brokerage account login credentials (a little scary, but most of us swallow hard and do it anyway out of curiosity) in order for the site to “verify” your trades. Your trading activity is downloaded into the database and the site assigns a percentage of your portfolio each equity occupies. The number of shares (amount of cash you’re playing with) is not published in order to protect your privacy. The idea here is that, because the equities are verified by the site to exist in the member’s brokerage account, full-disclosure is satisfied and anything that member writes can be judged fairly by the readers. Many of the more active members on these sites keep blogs and write publicly-viewable messages about their rationale behind trades. In fact, when Covestor detects that you’ve made a trade in your brokerage account, they will email you asking for your rationale in the form of a mini blog post on covestor.com.

So, the first thing I did was pick the top 3 or 5 members on Covestor as ranked by their portfolios’ performance. The site has very nice graphs that show members’ performance against other indices like the S&P 500. After following a few of these members I noticed that a lot of their trades were solid (and common) like BUY APPL @ 110 or other fairly safe bets. This made their track records look decent and they typically edged out the market. Other equities they had would typically take up < 10-15% of their portfolio and would be very small-cap companies. These stocks would have a lot of blog posts associated with them and you could see the record of the member buying the stock all the way down a hill, often with comments to the effect of “time to load up, this one is on sale”, etc. Any time there was a pop in the price, you might see something to the affect of “you like that 200% gain today? More where that came from!”. But, the overall performance of the stock since the member initially bought in would typically be abysmal. Often you’ll see other members posing (publicly viewable) questions to the trader to the effect of, “I see you’re taking a bath on XYZ but you keep buying it up … you must have some inside info”, etc. That is often enough to get the degenerate-gambler-day-trader to jump in on the action and wait for that next 200% pop.

The first few of these I encountered made me think, “Well, the guy obviously believes in this stock because Covestor verified his ownership of it”. But, Covestor and others don’t publish how many shares the member owns! This trader could own literally 1 share to begin with and then keep buying 5 or 10 more as the price drops just to back up his public enthusiasm about the “sale”. Then, in another brokerage account not connected to Covestor (and therefore not publicly viewable), he may be making very different trades.

Call it pump-and-dump 2.0. It’s analogous to how the spam kings of yesteryear would pump penny stocks for a week then dump them after enough suckers bought in. I think Covestor and others are great sites with impressive platforms and very innovative features. The first one who figures out how to solve this problem, though, will certainly have the advantage. The only way I can think of off the top of my head would be if the site were to award different “badges” to positions in a trader’s portfolio. One badge could signify that the position is in excess of a certain dollar amount (proportionate to the share price). This would give users that track the trader a little more comfort in knowing that this is less likely to be a pump-and-dump trader.

For many years, new technology and gadgets have often wasted more time than they’ve saved. Only recently have I been mildly satisfied with my latest entanglement of services and devices that I rely on to run daily life. Here is my current run-down.

• Email: I use my own domain(s) for email and Google Apps for Domains has been the best solution yet. I’ve been running it for about 16 months now after using MS Outlook for almost a decade. The free version has 6.5+GB of space and the Premier Edition gives you 25GB for $50/yr. It also allows you to POP3 or IMAP mail in/out of the system. I imported all of my old email so I can use the search feature (it’s Google, the search rocks) to go back over a decade of mail. A lot of people like to keep all their old email (like Mark Cuban, who should definitely check this out). Cost: $0.
• Calendar: Google again. It comes with the Apps for Domains package. I like keeping multiple calendars (work, personal, financial/investment, birthdays) so you can turn them on and off as you need them. I also like the database of calendars Google keeps that you can search through and add to your own. That is the only way I know which sports games on are and when. Also, it finally 2-way auto-syncs with my BlackBerry with the new Google Sync for BlackBerry. Cost: $0.
• Tasks: I still can’t figure out why Google hasn’t made even a primitive task manager part of their online suite that is slowly eroding Outlook’s market share. Until they do, I’ll be a faithful user of RememberTheMilk.com. It lets you create multiple task lists, set due dates, add notes and associate links all very quickly. They are also one of the earliest adopters and best users of Google Gears so the task system works when you’re offline and will sync later when it detects a connection. I use this on multiple machines throughout the day and it does a great job of staying in sync. The only thing they really still need is BlackBerry sync (they have a Pro Version ($25/yr) that syncs with iPhones or Windows mobile devices). Cost: $0.
• Chat: Because I really only chat with people in my organization (which runs Google Apps), I really only need GChat (Google Talk). They have a great BlackBerry client, though, which can tell when you’re not at your PC anymore and will send chat conversations to your BB (which blinks red when there are new IM’s). All your chats are logged and searchable later (unless you tell it to go “off the record”) Works flawlessly. Cost: $0.
  • www.blackberry.com/GoogleTalk from your BB browser.
• Phones: I still have 2 phones because I haven’t found one yet that is durable enough for all of life’s activities (and I like redundancy).
  • Motorola K1M KRZR (Verizon) - horrible UI but very small, durable and cheap/easy to replace if lost.
  • BlackBerry 8830 (Verizon) - A great device, though I’d use a Curve if Verizon carried it. And it obviously has a lot of support from the Google Apps.
• Backups: Both desktop and web server backups are very important in my (and most peoples’) business.
  • Desktop files: I’ve been an avid user of FolderShare.com for quite a while now and it has always been there for me (it even survived being acquired by Microsoft!) It is a small desktop client that runs in Windows or OSX and monitors directories you tell it to watch for changes to files. When files are created/changed/deleted, they are sent to the other machines in your FolderShare network that are currently online. It does so in a peer-to-peer fashion so your files never touch a Microsoft server. You can also access all of your files via foldershare.com (as long as the client machines are on and connected). This has saved me countless times when I’ve been on the road and needed a file I forgot on my desktop. There is a lot of buzz these days around backing up to “The Cloud”, but I see no reason to move away from FolderShare anytime soon. Running it across my home and work machines has allowed me to stop paying for and bothering with expensive RAID arrays as well. Oh yeah, and it’s free.
  • Server files: I also have a leased Linux web server that I host a few non-mission-critical web sites on (like this blog, for instance). Even though it is not mission critical, I’d rather not lose everything when it inevitably dies. I also would rather not pay for expensive RAID gear or managed backup services. For this reason I use a nightly RSYNC via SSH to backup to another Linux web server. This isn’t an extremely process to set up, but if you do the following 2 how-to’s in order, you’ll be set. You’ll need some Linux CLI knowledge but nothing hard-core.
    • Setup an account between the 2 servers that can SSH from client to server w/o a password.
    • Setup the automated RSYNC over SSH of your web and database files.

This technology changes and typically improves almost every month - especially the Google offering. I’ll probably end up jumping on the iPhone bandwagon, too, once the next version is released and they start using a real network.

I have a PO Box that receives all of my bills, etc. because for some reason I felt that USPS would be reliable in this domain where they have failed in so many others. When I visit the post office to fish mail out of this box every two weeks or so it is invariable overflowing with direct [junk] mail advertising. I’ve used services like CatalogChoice.org to successfully end delivery of unwanted catalogs and some of the mail is from organizations that I’ve donated money or property to (which is sad because now when I get ready to donate to an organization that I haven’t donated to before I get a flash of my overflowing PO Box getting fuller yet). None of these junk mail sources, however, compare to the venerable American Express marketing machine. I am a card holder of their’s but am on the paperless billing system so literally none of the mail they send me has anything to do with my account. In fact, they often try to get me to sign up for the very card I carry in my wallet. I get probably 10-15 pieces per month from them ranging from credit card offers to vacation offers to mortgage offers.

Having recently been inconvenienced by this waste of paper and time spent at the post office, I decided to give their general customer service line a call (800-528-4800) to see if there was anything I could do to stop the flow. Their always-friendly agent responded immediately to my request to be removed from the direct mail list as if she’d been training for it for months. She then went into script mode and quickly read me the list of things I was being opted out of. Within seconds I zoned out and tried to politely let her finish (for some reason I feel guilty hanging up prematurely on overly-polite customer service people). A few key words in her monotone caught my attention, though, so I grabbed a pen and asked her to repeat the list, more slowly this time. Here is how it read:

“You are now being opted out of the following programs with American Express:

1. Telemarketing
2. Banking offers
3. Offers from 3rd parties (little scary)
4. Amex news (huh?)
5. Affiliate sharing of credit history & report (WOW)
6. American Express sweepstakes”

The entire call took about 3 minutes and after letting my mind wander on #5 for another 3 minutes, I decided to post this entry.

Incidentally, this got me search for other opt-out stories and I came across this nice and compact opt-out script.

We’re looking for a sharp and experienced MySQL DBA to work in our San Francisco office full-time.  The team is growing quickly and this will be our first DBA hire.

MySQL Database Administrator

Here is a new business for you - I’ve even given you the tagline. Please, someone start this. With the pool of talented programmers running dry these days in San Francisco, I’ve resorted to working with recruiters to help find qualified and skilled candidates. The fees are hefty - 20-30% of the employee’s first year base salary plus many of them even want stock in the startup - sometimes as much as the employee they place gets! Recruiters are very easy to find these days. In fact, they seem to find you even when you’re explicitly not looking for one. For instance, Craigslist has a box you can check that says “please, no recruiters”, yet the majority of responses I get from the ad are from recruiters. I’ve decided to allow about some of these recruiters to send me resumes. After all, they all work on contingency so I only pay if they place someone.

Some recruiters will want to come out to your office and soak up hours of time chatting about your “culture” and what you are looking for in a developer (as if “LAMP” skills needed more explanation).   Although the face-to-face does add some value to the process, I think this is mostly a networking play on their part to forge a relationship and make sure their future unsolicited email to you will at least be opened. Many of the recruiters we’ve had come by the office wrote vigorously on their notepads as we described the very basic skills we were looking for (I got the distinct feeling they hadn’t heard of PHP or MySQL before). Others (mainly the ones from Craigslist) will just start showering you with resumes once you’ve given them permission.

Both groups send plenty of unqualified candidates - obviously more from the ones that don’t stop by in person. I have some great and rather embarrassing stories about many of these recruiters already just after a few weeks of working with them. I have yet to see any “hireable” candidates through this channel.

I wish there were some sort of a directory I could reference each time a recruiter contacted me to see what the community thinks of his or her performance. I’d like to know:

• What kind of luck other employers have had with the recruiter.
  • What is the ratio of good resumes to bad ones?
  • Do they do ridiculous things like send candidates who aren’t willing to commute to your office after you’d been clear about the fact that you need someone in-office?
  • How many actual hires have come from the recruiter?
• What the candidates think of the recruiter.
  • Does the recruiter thoroughly test and get to know the candidate to ensure more efficient placement?
  • Is the recruiter responsive to calls and emails?
  • Does the recruiter provide feedback when an opportunity is not right so the candidate may learn and improve their skill set?

It’d be nice to have all of this information in a publicly viewable, yelp-style site. If the site got enough audience it could probably get into the job listings business itself! But remember (see previous post about job boards) - keep the listings free!

RecruiterWatch.com (taken w/ no site)
RecruiterWatch.net (available)