Why create new, unfounded and unproven investment strategies when you can piggyback on top of the world’s best investors instead? Lots of investors are using the ideas of guru investors like Ken Heebner and Warren Buffett to mimic their investment strategies or build an all-star portfolio based on the best ideas of leading hedge fund and mutual fund managers. Check out our easy how-to guide for piggyback investing.
A highly-anticipated website launched today named alphaCLONE. Mebane Faber, a frequent contributor to SeekingAlpha and fan of endowment investing (Check out his recently published book entitled The Ivy Portfolio: How to Manage Your Portfolio Like the Harvard and Yale Endowments) is one of the co-founders.
According to their launch materials: We built AlphaClone to serve as an intelligent market guide to self-directed investors – both individual and professional. Given the market turmoil over the last year, there has never beena better time for a service like AlphaClone for investors like you to intelligently research and track how the world’s top investors are deploying their capital in US equity markets.
So, how does it work?
Users can search using a variety of criteria through the portfolios of specific fund managers from over 230 funds tracked by alphaCLONE. Once a user finds a portfolio he/she is interested in (say, Warren Buffet, Carl Icahn, etc.), users are given a variety of tools to monitor performance of current and past holdings, changes to the portfolio (recent buys and sells). Users essentially “clone” portfolios, or copy them to be able to monitor performance.
Users can not only track individual funds but also pre-defined groups of funds and track the best picks using some type of collective intelligence. One such clone is the Tiger Cubs clone (see it here) that tracks the top picks of hedge fund managers who where former proteges of Julian Robertson, one of the most successful hedge fund managers in history and founder of Tiger Fund Management.
Pros of alphaCLONE
- lots and lots of information on hedge fund portfolios
- powerful search functionality
- free version (there is a premium one) is pretty robust
- predefined groups of funds is a great for idea generation and tracking strategies
- displays ins-and-outs of positions in the fund and changes in relative weightings
- great display of things like performance of best stock pick, annualized data, long vs hedged holdings
Cons of alphaCLONE
- site is very busy and it’s not easy to understand everything that’s going on
- premium pricing at about $100/month is steep but priced for high end investors
- OK, I didn’t spend SO long on the site but found it very distracting
- next step would be to create a real trading platform to implement the strategies developed on the site or plug into existing online trading to for trade execution (like SmartStops has done with Ameritrade).
Piggybacking 2.0
We’ve discussed using StockPickr.com, the first site to make piggybacking easier and more accessible for most of us. alphaCLONE is StockPickr on steroids. While both sites suffer from being very busy, alphaCLONE provides better search functionality, broader monitoring of professional portfolios, and tools to help investors both create and track portfolios piggybacking on top of the world’s best investors.
