We’ve spent time exploring expert investing communities on the site recently. Activity in these communities contribute to certain experts bubbling up to the top, thereby revealing and tracking those actions of a select few emergent experts.
We now turn our attention to sort of the other side of the coin: crowd sourcing for stock picks. Crowd sourcing or alternatively, the wisdom of the crowds, dictates that there is certain value in the aggregate opinion of the crowd and that opinion is actionable for investors, in our case.
We’ve had the opportunity to discuss this model with Stephanie Gerson, Social Media Strategist for a recently launched site called Piqqem, focused on harnessing crowd sourcing specifically aimed at publicly traded stocks.
What’s the 
elevator pitch for Piqqem?
SG: Piqqem is a new way to predict the movement of stocks. It’s new because it leverages the wisdom of crowds. Specifically, Piqqem captures users’ stock predictions, analyzes them, and then displays aggregate results back to the users, enabling them to see what ‘the crowd’ thinks about particular stocks. As opposed to other social investing sites that try to find the best pickers in the crowd, Piqqem aggregates the opinion of the crowd, therefore capturing and displaying the stock market wisdom of crowds. Please see the attached summary for a longer elevator ride.
How is this different than other expert communities like CAPS and Covestor?
SG 
iqqem differs from other sites in that we believe the crowd has more knowledge than any single individual. Instead of looking for the best individual stock picker and weighting votes based on investment ability, which is what CAPS and other social investing sites do, we look at aggregate opinion and allow everyone to vote as much as they want. This orientation towards crowd wisdom manifests itself in our crowd indicators, such as top rated stocks, most active stocks, stocks with most rising sentiment, and stocks with most falling sentiment.
OK, I understand the difference between locating and following individual experts. Piqqem focuses on community sentiment. How is this useful for investors? Are you going to put metrics behind the indicators, to give depth to them beyond just ‘positive’ or ‘negative’?
SG:Three answers:
1. Piqqem is useful for investors as a source of financial information, and a unique one at that, because it leverages the wisdom of crowds. That said, we’re not suggesting that Piqqem is a silver bullet, but that it should be used in conjunction with other sources – such as expert analysis, the market, and yes, other social investing sites.
2. We have Wisdom lists of crowd indicators, which include Top Rated (‘positive’) and Lowest Rated (‘negative’), but also other metrics such as Rising (equities with the most improving sentiment) and Polarizing (equities the crowd agrees the least on).
3. Regarding depth, users can also make User Takes (comments on their predictions) and Price Piqqs (predictions of stock prices at future dates, which have more ‘depth’ than ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ arrows).
How big does the Piqqem community have to be to register statistical significance in the rating system?
SG: We believe that a relatively small number of people can spot a trend in some stocks – perhaps as few as a few hundred active users for certain stocks. Obviously, the more the better though
You’ve assembled an impressive roster of talent for a young company. How are you planning on leveraging this talent?
SG: Yes, we are very proud of our investor roster. They are a diverse set of individuals and they each help us in their own unique way.
What’s the next step for Piqqem?
SG: Our current focus is to grow our user base. However, like most technology companies our engineers continue to work on many interesting innovations that you will see released in the not too distant future. Unfortunately, we can’t pre-announce those features just yet.
Thanks, Stephanie.
