Fantasy Football Meets Wall Street

Leave it to the guys from Harvard, eh? Right now, when everybody and his cat are trying to figure out what’s happening in the stock market, three entrepreneurs out of Cambridge, Mass. are gathering the best financial minds in the business to figure it all out for you. It’s called Fantasy Investing and it can be found at www.updown.com. This is a Web site launched by these Harvard Business School students. Each partner, it is said, has a significant start-up experience, and shares a common vision to revolutionize the investing world.   In effect, The UpDown is a community for stock investors.

It provides a platform where investors can view, share, and rate high-quality stock analyses and investment ideas. It also filters, aggregates, ranks, and presents the user community's investment ideas to the benefit of all its members.   Michael Reich, Georg Ludviksson, and Phuc Truong are the Harvard guys and they say that they have added a new and exciting twist to the frenzy created by fantasy sports leagues by establishing a social networking component to their Web site. They claim it will achieve great success in a new demographic market catering to financial investors.   In effect, The UpDown is a destination for investors to collaborate and compete using virtual portfolios and real-life brokerage simulations. The interactive social network then provides its mem ers with an opportunity to make real money derived from their on-site analyses and portfolio performance against the standard S&P 500.   According to CEO Reich, The UpDown brings together a community of investors who are driven to the site to share collective wisdom and compete among friends with real-time stock investments. Actually, the site is a free one where anyone can join, create a profile, and start building and managing their own virtual portfolio using $1 million virtual dollars while engaging in a real-life trading environment. Members can also write stock analyses voting a particular stock “up” or “down” and providing supporting arguments while the rest of the community then has the opportunity to rate the quality of the analysis.   Reich says that this site will “challenge the way investment management works today by collecting the trading activity of our members and using community knowledge to manage a real-life investment fund where profits are shared amongst the community.”  

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