blog | Stockezy

Since its launch in August of 2008, Stockezy has been continually enhancing their product offering and community features to become a financial learning power-house. Some of the more popular learning tools available today include Stock Picks, Market Outlook and Opinions, a Question & Answers forum, News Articles, Blog Posts and Stock Based Community Sentiment. 

This guide will explain you how to leverage Stockezy for financial learning and using the collective wisdom of the community to make more informed and intelligent investment decisions.

Steps to Financial Learning:

1. Opinions:

Start with our Opinions section, this section contains research and market reports from credible investors from all parts of India. The Expert Opinions section combines opinions from Finance Clubs like IIM-Lucknow Credence Capital and best performing community members. The highlight of this feature is the availability of daily Market Outlook and Nifty Trading Ideas, which are being published by the community members. The Experts Section also provides Stock-Futures trading tips, Nifty Futures & Options Strategies, complete with all details on when to enter and when to exit a position.

Learn More about Opinions (Slide-cast): How-to-Guide-for-Opinions

2. Share-Links, News Articles, Videos and Blogs

The world wide web is a vast ever expanding resource of news articles, educational materials and useful information. Each time when you browse through an online financial journal, or read up the latest news about a company, you only get the perspective of the author. Would it not be just great if you can also get the perspective of similar investors? Indeed it would. Hence the Share feature on stockezy. You can submit interesting links to articles, blog postings and also embed videos and share the information with the stockezy community.

As an extension to the share feature we have also created a Blogger Network, where we invite prominent bloggers from the finance & investing space to share their latest articles. Blogger Network is Invitation only, making it the one stop shop for best content on variety of topics covering both Indian and international stock markets.

You can find all the content from the bloggers here

Learn More about Share-Links (Slide-cast): How-to-Guide-for-Share-Links

3. Stock Picks:

The Stock Picks feature is the most unique stock picking application, which provides buy-sell recommendations complete with Entry Price, Time-Frame and expected Target Price. The feature also divides picks in to clear buckets as Day Trades, Short Term, Medium Term and Long Term. Stockezy’s automated monitoring system, analyzes each pick against real market data every minute and updates information as Pick Return and Accuracy. This allows users to easily find the best performing picks and use the recommendations to invest and profit from.

Similar to other stockezy features, you can find Expert Pickers, Finance Clubs and also track Top Performing members based on rank.

Learn More about Stock Picks (Slide-cast): How-to-Guide-for-Stock-Picks

4. Investors Help Investors Find Answers:

The Question & Answers forum completes stockezy as a complete social investing community and a source of learning for new investors. Users can ask questions about a variety of categories from Personal Finance, F&O, Technical/Fundamental Analysis and Investing in general. The Finance Club students and Experts also provide answers, which can be found here

Learn More about Answers (Slide-cast): How-to-Guide-for-Answers

5. Stockezy Tweets

This is a ‘twitter’ clone with a twist. It is where all the stockezy active market traders and investors come together to discuss live-market-events. The chatter in the tweets begins before market opens and continues in to market closing. It is the best place to find F&O calls with community experts giving live calls and providing guidance to the investors.

Stockezy is committed to use the power of the internet to discover hidden investment talent and to provide social networking tools to help investors make more informed and educated financial decisions.

Stockezy has been contributing to the financial blogging boom in the country. We have been experimenting with the Stockezy Blogger Network with a “beta” level service for the past few months to promote Financial Bloggers in the country.

Today, as 2009 comes to close, we are happy to announce that this service goes out of “beta” with an official launch. Stockezy members can now track the bloggers at the ‘Blogger Network Page’ (URL: http://www.stockezy.com/bloggers/links/)

Requirements to Join Blogger Network:

• You need to be a financial blogger writing on topics related to Stock Markets, Economy, Personal Money Management, etc.
• You need to be a registered member on Stockezy with regular contributions to different sections like - Opinions, Share-Links.
  
  

If you are financial blogger and interested in joining the network, email us at - info@stockezy.com with your profile and blog information and the team will get in touch with you.

Why you should join the Blogger Network?

• Targeted financial audience in India around 50,000 unique visitors a month
• Earn credibility in Markets through your research material.
• Availability of micro-blogging tools like Opinions, Share-Links, Tweets

Stockezy offers many other services to connect Bloggers with their targeted audience:

Share-Links: Bloggers can share their article or video links with a preview description to attract readers on to their blogs.

Know more about Share-Links (Slidecast): How-to-Guide-for-Share-Links

Opinions: It is a simplified blogging platform for Financial experts to publish Market and Stock related opinions.

Know more about Opinions (Slidecast) : How-to-Guide-for-Opinions

Stockezy Tweets: Bloggers can also converse with like-minded users in real-time.

Know more about Tweets (Slidecast): How-to-Guide-for-Tweets

Media Mentions: Indiaprwire, PR, Indiaprline

Stockezy is striving hard to churn out great features in minimal time and we are doing great on this front as we have just introduced 2 Expert sections for Opinions & Stock Picks.

The new section will help you in filtering out Expert players in those sections - Opinions & Stock Picks, and we hope it will mint a lot of profit for investors who wants to follow effectual advice on stockezy.

Expert Opinions:

Opinions is currently gaining a lot of credibility & spike in traffic.Investors are flocking on to Opinions to get daily nifty strategies from experts like Rajesh Ganesh,Zahid latif and end-of-week overview from IIM-Lucknow based Credence Capital.

We thought it would be wise to segregate & reward successful guiders by giving them expert tag-section.The new Expert Section will cover opinions from experts like Rajesh Ganesh,Archana Debnath,Zahid latif,IIM-Credence ,Samir Bhai & Amit Shah at current and more additions will happen in future.

To gain immensely make it a habit to browse Opinions section whenever you visit Stockezy and even the Expert Opinions section.Every morning before market open, you will find updates which will make you ready for the trading day ahead.

If you have doubts or questions on particular opinion you can ask it by commenting on the same page.

To know more about Stockezy-Opinions(Check this Slidecast) : How to Guide for Stockezy Opinions

Expert Stock Picks:

Stock Picks is the most buzzing section at stockezy as we currently see thousands of stock picks getting recommended each month.The introduction of rating system was the first step to bring out successful stock pickers and give them credibility for their investing acumen.

Today we have launched an Expert Stock Picks section wherein recos from Stock gurus will be shown. These stock gurus are selected on the basis of returns they generate in their Stock recos.

To check the detail performance statistics for each Expert stock guru click on their Picks profile link on right side.

You can also check Top Stock Pickers here : http://www.stockezy.com/members/

To know more about Stock Picking,Check this(slidecast): How-To-Guide for Stock Picks

To suggest any improvements or feedback you can ping us at stockezy [at] gmail [dot] com.

It has been a hectic month for Stockezy Team from preparing for ‘Stock Market Warriors’ Competition to solving last minute participants doubts.In the end we can proudly say we were able to triumph all quarters through the success achieved in this competition.

Some participants provided us with valuable feedback to help us improve this competition while some want this to become an annual event.All we can say is we are open to all their feedbacks and will revert with necessary changes.

The Competition in the end was won by Ankur Sharma and Vivek Jain from Management Development Institute.The 1st runner Up position was garnered by Gautham Balinga and Puja Shah(Management Development Institute) followed by Manish Baseer and Ajeet Kumar from IIM-Bangalore.

We Would like to Congrats ‘SMW-2009’ winners and also like to deliver ‘Thanks’ to other participants for making this competition a successful event.

In the meanwhile we would also like to Invite them to be more frequent contributor on Stockezy as this can help them earn more credibility in markets also helping general Investors in-between to benefit from their Financial acumen.

Hope to see you Next Year :)

The brightest financial minds from India’s top 18 B-Schools will be slugging it out in the biggest ever Online Stock Picking and Derivatives Trading Competition. The 2 week competition which started on 16th November will bring together nearly 1000 students, competing for the coveted title of Stockezy Stock Pundit 2009, and a cash prize of Rs. 25000. The competition consists of 2 rounds starting November 16 thru November 27.

Round 1 (Nov 16-20) - Intra-College Stock Picking competition.

Round 2 ( Nov 23-27)- Inter-College Derivatives Trading Strategy competition.

The complete competition details can be found at: http://stockezy.com/competition/details/

The Competition, first of its kind conducted online will see participation from MBA students across 18 reputed B-Schools including all 7 IIMs and other prominent schools like, XLRI, SP-Jain, FMS, IIFT, MDI, IMT, IIFT, IIT-Bombay,NITIE, IFMR and NMIMS. The competition will allow students to test their stock picking abilities and at the same time connect with stock market enthusiast from the Indian investor community.

All the colleges live performance,ranking can be found at the Leader-board http://stockezy.com/competition/

The first leg of the competition starts on 16th November. Students from each participating B-School will make teams of 2, and try to pick winning stocks and cumulate the maximum returns in the 5 day period ending November 20th. Top 3 winning teams from each college will advance to Round 2.

Round 2, (Nov. 23 - 27) will allow participants to trade Index/Equity Futures & Options. Students will submit their daily Derivative trading strategies before market open. At the end of the competition, the team generating maximum Profit from all the strategies will be judged as the winner. The Top 3 winning teams will receive a cash prize of Rs. 25,000, Rs. 15000 and Rs. 10000 respectively.

Tushar Makhija,Co-founder & CEO ,Stockezy said,”Stockezy has taken various initiatives in the past to promote intelligent financial Investing in India.This competition allows Indian B-School Students to showcase their financial wisdom and earn recognition for their investing acumen.Indian Social Investing audience will also benefit from the event as they get an opportunity to experience first hand the investment strategies from B-School students, who are very much the future successful bankers, analysts and savvy investors of India.”

Stockezy,a pioneer in Online Social Investing space has also tied-up with IIM-Lucknow based Credence Capital to bring effectual Investing knowledge to retail Investors.Credence Capital is also the student organizing partner of this PAN India B-School event. Stockezy is also credited with taking the social investing philosophy online in India and allowing investors across India find a common ground to discuss stocks with other investors aiming for similar financial goals and aspirations.

Online coverage : IndiaPRWire , WATPR , Pluggd.in , Prlog , PressMethod ,FPR

Stockezy again finds mention on WATBlog , highly admired Web,Advertising & Technology Blog in India.

Social investing sites could be used as a financial learning tool for new market entrants and students.At the same time it could serve as a forum to ask Investment related queries and doubts.Traditional stock portals are unable to serve dynamic stock market audiences thus paving way for many social investing portals to succeed.

Investors can really benefit from online social investing sites like Stockezy as it helps them to interpret the community sentiments prevailing across stocks & markets. Twitter and Facebook has facilitated a lot of innovative ideas in Social networking space, its time stock market Investors also starts to profit from online social investing.

Read full article here: WATBlog

Stockezy is been buzzing across all major media publications across India. After getting featured on Business Standard , Reuters , Mumbai Mirror VCCircle,WATBlog recently, we are now covered by Business line - a major Business daily in India.

Business Standard , “Today StockEzy.com, with 5,000 registered users and over 50,000 visitors a month, offers an online platform for like-minded investors to exchange ideas, share market insights and grow together.It is by the members for the members. The site managers do not publicise or promote stocks for a fee.”

Read it here : Business Line

Stockezy seems to be on roll as we are being mentioned frequently in Main-stream media.We are being hailed for continuous dedication in introducing new features and tie-ups.

Read More here : WATBlog , Mumbai Mirror .

Indian Online Social Investing has got a major encouragement as IIM Lucknow based Credence Capital has decided to join the bandwagon Courtesy Stockezy - India’s 1st Social Investing Community.Credence Capital currently Manages One of the Largest Student funds in India.Their expertise relates to profitable stock market trades and correct market views predicted in past several years.

Its been one month Since the Credence Capital team has joined Stockezy as Experts .The response has been phenomenally good as Community members have largely benefited from this association.

The association would also see Credence Capital providing a weekly newsletter as well as a Fortnightly newsletter explaining market insights and discussing trading strategies with the community. The fortnightly newsletter would consists of 3 separate Nifty Trading Strategies to benefit investors with varying risk appetite i.e Very aggressive traders,Moderately aggressive and least aggressive.

Credence would also help to answer finance and investing related queries of novice investors coming to Stockezy.

In addition to the above, the Credence Capital team is also working with Stockezy to provide Stock Recommendations for the community.Till date - Credence Capital has provided many successful Stock Picks on Stockezy.

Credence Capital Profile: http://stockezy.com/profiles/credence_iiml/

Credence Capital’s Newsletters: http://www.stockezy.com/opinions/credence_iiml/

Credence Capital’s Answers: http://stockezy.com/answers/user/credence_iiml/answered/

Credence Capital’s Stock Picks: http://www.stockezy.com/picks/credence_iiml/

Stockezy,a pioneer in Online Social Investing has always taken the initiative to bring forward the brightest Investing Talent On to its Social Investing Community Platform. Stockezy,India’s first Social Investing Community now boast of several influential financial bloggers and Stock market experts in India.

Tushar Makhija commented on this association ,”In a time when there are numerous tipsters ready to swindle the novice investor of their hard earned money, this initiative by the students of IIM-L and Stockezy to come forward and create an Online platform to educate and empower the new Investors would highly benefit the Online Social Investing Eco-System in India.The investing knowledge from Credence Capital would not only help the investor in avoiding risk but would surely help them to Increase their returns.”

About: Credence Capital

Credence Capital [ http://synapse.iiml.ac.in/credence/about ] is a student-run fund that aims to further IIM Lucknow community’s knowledge in financial markets, asset markets and personal finance through practical exposure to trading and investment analysis.

Credence Capital manages one of the largest student-run funds in India. It invests student funds in both the Indian equity and derivatives market. The focus is more on the means and methods of generating returns rather than the returns themselves. However, Credence Capital has also managed to beat the markets in the equity and derivatives fund over the past two years.

Read More about this news here: WATBlog , VCCircle , Reuters India , Pluggdin

Are you a novice who has just entered the stock market? Or even if you are an expert in stocks and shares and know your market, then here is a user-friendly option for you to get updates and details for investors or businessmen.

Now any finance related information and queries will be available at the click of a mouse. Log on to Stockezy, which India’s earliest online social investing community (OSIC) designed to connect Indian stock market investors. It provides an effective platform for like-minded investors to exchange ideas, share business insights and take educated financial decisions.

In addition to stock picks, market news and opinions, Stockezy provides online services like portfolio management and also offers free web-based social utility to build new connections, collaborate and work together for mutual benefit. “Just as Facebook allows one to find friends across India, now investors could find investing buddies from all over India,” said Tushar Makhija, founder of Stockezy.

He added, “Evening discussions with friends moved to more formal planning, design and implementation which eventually led to the idea of an online social investing community leading to the birth of stockezy in early 2007.”

It was started by three Silicon Valley boys including Tushar Makhija in August 2008 with a mission to provide a complete platform for online stock-networking to the investment community. Stockezy today has over 5000 registered users currently. It helps people to understand business jargon and has ample ‘user-generated content’ in the form of stock recommendations, blog posts, finance and resolution of investor related queries and videos.

“When we first launched the site, many users who added stock picks (buy and sell recommendations) were traders and well-versed investors. The opinions and share links section on the site was mostly visited by bloggers who shared their thoughts and market insights,” said Tushar.

He added, “We saw high daily hits on the site, but not much participation in comments. Then we realised that many of our users visit the portal to seek information and advice.”
Hence to cater to the needs of a passive user, they created the question and answer section. New investors as well as users who wanted to gain more information or have their queries answered started participating very actively.

Another cool feature where there is a lot of interaction is the Tweets, a twitter clone, to exchange messages during market hours. “The social networking features of following friends, messaging and tweets make the portal an easy transition for avid users of other popular social networking websites,” informs Tushar.

Read the article at: DNA India

Stocks and social networking are as far apart as you can imagine. But even if they say water and oil don’t mix, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. So, when stockezy.com, a portal claiming to be India’s first social stocks investing community launched its Beta version 2.0 last week, we had to take a closer look.

Simply put, stockezy.com comprises a network of reliable opinions on the stock market, which are then studied and analysed. Based on the outlook of the users, stock market greenhorns can learn to make financial decisions.

Tushar Makhija, co-founder and CEO of stockezy.com, lets me in on the 1, 2 and 3 of stockezy.com. “My friends Nikhil Badwe, Rushabh Doshi and I were studying together at the University of Southern California when we realised just how powerful Facebook and Twitter were. It was then that we thought of helping novice stock investors in India via a format like Facebook and Twitter,” Makhija explains. Makhija declares that many people find dealing with stocks daunting, and this is one way of explaining how the market works to the layman.
You can add friends and update your status just like in Facebook.

Features include blogs, uploading images and videos from Youtube or CNN, updates from the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange and creating portfolios, among others.
Makhija also stresses on the need to add portfolios. “We observe the investing patterns of our user and if we find him/her to be heavily investing in just one stock we advice them on diversifying their investments to minimise risks,” he says.

Last month, in an effort to reaffirm their mantra of online networking, chat bots in various IM avatars such as MSN Messenger, Gtalk, AOL and Yahoo Messenger were launched. These services are said to provide one-click access to real-time stock and news alerts.

Read the article at: New Indian Express

By: Alisha Coelho Date: 2009-07-28 Place: Mumbai

It might be a nightmare for corporate productivity, but as professionals continue to throng to Facebook and other social networking sites, savvy businessmen are warming up to the idea of using these platforms to boost their company’s profile and productivity.

No marketing cost

Investor Tushar Makhija, who had been for long advising his friends on their choices in the stock market, finally decided to take it on social networking sites to increase his customer base.

Smart Move: Tushar Makhija who used Facebook to promote his startup venture Stockezy

“I’ve been an avid user of Facebook and Twitter for ages and so when I decided to open a company to dole out advice to people on the market, I found two tools to use that made my marketing and advertising costs nearly nil.

With a little streamlining, corporates will find that it is a great medium to introduce and discuss new products and ideas,” said Makhija, co-founder of Stockezy.

Raj Menon, COO of Contests2Win.com, says that viral marketing through social networking sites is the next big thing.

“Even when it comes to information of the high tide or the floods, the basic premise is that if I tell one person on a site, 10 of his or her friends find out too and it keeps growing. One must embrace it to grow these days,” said Menon.

Waste of time

Senior HR consultant to an MNC Arun Vishwanath believes that keeping a track of people on these sites helps them in head hunting.

“Through information that people put up on their pages, you can easily seek and search for people who are looking for jobs,” he said.

Others disagree though. A senior level official from a recruitment organisation said that many of their clients had restricted Internet access because of the long hours that employees spent on social networking sites.

“One reputed housing finance service organisation only allows its employees to access LotusNotes. At our 
own organisation, we have blocked access to sites where movie tickets can be booked,” he said.

Lost Hours

A recent survey by an American IT advisory firm, Nucleus Research, has found that companies that allow employees to access Facebook lost on average worker productivity.

77 per cent of the sample surveyed used Facebook during work hours

Of those using Facebook at work, 87 per cent could not define a clear business reason for accessing the site

Some employees use Facebook as much as two hours per day while at work

Read the article at: Mid-day.com

Three graduates from the University of South California decide to use a social-networking style to educate investors

IT WAS an idle decision to do more online than just check out friends’ updates on Facebook and Twitter that led Tushar Makhija, Nikhil Badwe and Rushabh Doshi to hit upon the innovative idea of using the social networking model to help novice stock investors in India invest better.

The San Francisco-based trio is the mastermind behind Stockezy, India’s first online social investing community. Based on the lines of Facebook and Twitter, the website currently hosts 3,500 active members and 7,000 visitors a month who use the portal to make smarter, informed investing decisions. The purpose of Stockezy is to let members create personalised investment strategies, analyse stock picks and most importantly make more money.

“We realised that in the past five years, more and more Indians are flocking the stock market with a view to make quick money. But there is also a lack of connectivity and discussion amongst these firsttime investors who depend heavily on the opinions of friends and families while buying or selling a share. Our site, www.stockezy.com, is like a niche Facebook, where we try to de-jargonise the business of investing and simplify the complexity of the stock market for the layman through the social networking concept. You can add friends and update your status just like Facebook,” says Tushar Makhija.

The University of Southern California pass-outs came up with the idea in early 2008 after which Stockezy went online in August last year. The website’s much visited `Stockpicks’ section is a platform where users can make recommendations about which share is worth buying or selling. A user can also share a news article by bookmarking it or posting the link for others.

“A news article usually has a journalist’s or analyst’s view but here, members share their own views and comments and gradually a discussion is woven around it,” Makhija says. Apart from links, the site also allows one to upload images and videos from Youtube or CNN. The website receives data updates in the form of stock quotes and charts from Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange every two minutes. Users also get sector-wise performance for Indian stocks, return on investment, and comparative charts for India’s volatility index to allow users to gauge collective market sentiment through easy interface.

Sankalp Shah from Mumbai, who has been a regular user of the site for the past one year says, “It has helped me in understanding others’ views because I am more of an advisor rather than a follower. I contribute more in terms of opinions and market outlook for others to study and decide and follow at their own risk. It can be a good place for new people in the market to know how the game is played in the market and observe, analyse and learn things themselves.”

The site also allows users to create their own content through blogs and by creating one’s portfolio. A portfolio has a tracker application where you can add and share your day-today transactions. “We observe the investing patterns of our user and if we find him/her to be heavily investing in just one stock we advice them on diversifying their investments to minimise risks,” Makhija says.

In short, Stockezy is, as their tagline says, all about `being Bullwise & Bearaware.’

Read the article at: Indian Express