We conceived KaChing as the ultimate destination for investors to see how good they really are. The only way to tell how good you are is to compare yourself to others. As a result we have attempted to create a wide variety of competition experiences. On KaChing you can compete with benchmarks, your friends, members who have a similar investment interest (value investing, tech investing, technical analysis, etc.) or everyone on the site. In each case we have attempted to make it easy to analyze your fantasy portfolio and portfolios managed by others.

Competitions are ranked by performance, but any sophisticated investor will tell you that you can’t evaluate performance without also looking at risk. After two months of results on the site we provide nine different ways to evaluate risk. Academics will tell you that risk is defined by volatility, thus we offer metrics like standard deviation, downside deviation, Sharpe ratio and Sortino ratio. Personally we would prefer to give money to a manager who has highly volatile results but never loses money. You decide for yourself.

We also realize that sometimes good performance can be the result of good luck. If a member produced great returns, but a small percentage of his or her portfolio is comprised of stocks that conform to the member’s stated investment style (growth, value or blend), then we would say that member is lucky. Again we provide the data. Tell your competitors what you think of them in the message boards we provide for each competition.

We encourage all our members to publish the rationale behind each of their positions under “Research.” You are welcome to comment on each others’ research as well as rate it on a scale of one to five with five being the highest. Every member’s rating is published alongside their profile, so you can see how much thought went into their decisions.

The goal of the site is to provide all of the professional tools an outstanding investment advisor would use to evaluate a manager’s investment performance. In addition we have attempted to provide tools like the trade monitor to inform you of your competitors’ actions and a message board to ask questions or foment competitive chatter. How you use it is up to you. We just hope you have fun. Please let us know how we can improve the site by responding to this blog. We can only get better with feedback from our community.

Thanks,
The founders of KaChing