It’s the moment all you finance and stock market junkies have been waiting for: real-time, streaming, all-inclusive tracking of your portfolio drawn from whichever combination of popular brokerages you use.
Wikinvest, the startup perhaps best known for its customizable, embeddable, annotatable stock charts, is spreading its wings in the personal finance space with a new portfolio tracking program released Wednesday.
It offers dynamic real-time quotes and scads of research and metrics. But the most appealing aspect may be before any of that kicks in: Wikinvest has worked out the kinks with more than 25 brokerage firms, including E-Trade, Charles Schwab, Vanguard and Fidelity, to easily port over your account details -- and keep them synced on its site.
Adoption has been farily quick: in fewer than six hours, users linked in accounts totaling more than $100 million worth of securities, Wikinvest co-CEO Michael Sha told Wired.com.
Personal finance portfolios are everywhere -- offered even by media sites like Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. But generally speaking they have limited functionality, are difficult to set-up and need manual updating whenever something changes in one of your accounts.
Wikinvest reduces the friction of creation and maintenance by creating an onramp which seems ridiculously simple.
So, what took so long?
Sha has the answer -- which could be uttered by any startup about almost anything a startup does.
"Most of the big players are asleep at the wheel,” he says.
