Barron’s (sorry, it’s behind a pay wall) profiled blogger/analyst TraderMark in an article entitled ‘A New Kind of Fund Manager‘ this weekend. With a ‘New Rules‘ twist, TraderMark runs his website, FundmyMutualFund.com, in an effort to raise $7M from readers. In addition to being an excellent blogger with an unbelievable amount of transparency into his investment process, TraderMark runs the Rising Tide Growth portfolio on community investing site, Marketocracy.
TraderMark is almost half-way to his goal of raising $7m via a combination of:
- blogging and syndication: TraderMark provides a tremendous amount of transparency in his trading. According to the same Barron’s article, “It’s the rare fund that reports performance and changes to its holdings more often than quarterly — and usually a month or more after a quarter closes”.
From here, TraderMark gets his content out in front of other bloggers and readers via long-tail aggregation sites like SeekingAlpha.
- participating in expert investor networks: TraderMark publishes results in near-real time fashion through participation in communities of investment experts. Marketocracy is “a research company whose mission is to find the best investors in the world and then track, analyze, and evaluate their trading activity. The company’s affiliate, Marketocracy Capital Management, is the investment advisor for the Marketocracy family of mutual funds and uses the research generated by Marketocracy Data Services.”
- Marketocracy provides tools and metrics for arm-chair investors and professionals to pick and manage stocks as if they were running their own mutual funds. Marketocracy then invests in some of the best ideas generated by the community.
The analyst/fund manager of the future should utilize all these tools to help build and market his fund. It would be interesting to see/hear of other early examples of funds being raised via this route.
