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Investable, Idea-Tracking and Networking Service for Financial Markets, Launched in Australia

Posted: 07 Dec 2011

A trio of finance professionals has launched Investable (www.investable.com), an online investment idea tracking and networking service for financial markets.

The site, co-founded by CEO Ben Freischmidt, Lachlan Heussler, co-founder and business development manager, and Fil Mackay, co-founder and chief technology officer, was launched last month and is designed to appeal to a broad universe from retail investors to investment professionals who want to exchange, monitor and validate investment ideas for shares, indices, derivatives, ETFs and other listed securities.

“What we’re trying to do is take an existing, high-end premium services—institutional alpha capture—which is trying to ascertain who is delivering value and who is not on the back of their ideas,” Freischmidt says. “Where Investable is different is that we create a universal/broad market service. We think the technologies now, from a cost and implementation [perspective], are accessible such that anyone in the industry can use. There are no barriers to entry to creating the universal service.

“What you’d probably find is the research-driven end of the market might use the qualitative factors of the service a bit more,” Freischmidt continues. “A good example of this might be a portfolio manager facing a research person at a large investment bank and being able to question a company model based on the recommendations on the site. At the retail-oriented end, you’d be less focused on the qualitative factors and more on pure performance, but really, the service is open to anyone that is associated with investment decisions.”

Investable’s basic service is free, but users are not allowed to create anonymous user names. The site offers more premium service levels, such as monthly research into listed securities; recommendation skew between buy, hold and sell ideas; most/least favoured securities; MSCI GICS sector decompositions; holding periods; investment timeframes; market capitalizations; style factors; relative returns; and time series analysis.

“Our whole business model is giving the basic service for free and monetize more premium-level services,” Freischmidt says. “We cover every listed security on the ASX market; that’s what we’re doing on the market—it’s mainly an equity-based product. It provides feedback on any market where we can get third-party independent pricing. We are also looking at adding managed funds for unit pricing, credit, fixed income and FX.”

Freischmidt does not provide specific information on the number of registered users on the site, but noted that the service was a new concept and that initial efforts by the three co-founders have focused on marketing to and educating the Australian marketplace.

“A lot of people are doing this informally—a broker might give a recommendation on an equity, for example, and even the information efficiencies and administration efficiencies are quite well referred,” he says. “I think the difference here is the formal recommendation space. That is quite an easy source to reference in time; I can go back and verify. People are using the service—some are using just for themselves, but you get others who are using this to benchmark their own performance.”

(RA)

If you have any comments about this story or news tips, contact Christopher Gohlke in New York at cgohlke@globalcustodian.com or Janet Du Chenne in London at jduchenne@globalcustodian.com.