If you’re lucky enough to be a high net worth individual, you’re probably going to have dozens of personal financial advisors running circles around you, showering you with advice on how to invest your money. The richer you are, the more complex the financial instruments your personal financial advisor will suggest you invest in, and the bigger the words they’ll use to describe the simplest of things: and this will make you feel good. “This attractive woman is actually quite intelligent”, you’ll say to yourself.

I’m a young professional, and I cannot afford a personal financial advisor. To be honest, I’m also a little bit more comfortable managing my own money - it forces me to know what’s going on, and forces me to understand what I’m getting into. It makes me feel like I’m more in control of my finances. Having worked in Financial Services, I’m a little luckier though - I’m slightly more used to all the jargon. But what about those retail investors that haven’t worked in financial services - and don’t have advisors from large banks with European sounding names?

For the west, there are resources such as Investopedia.com and Fool.com that seek to demystify investing. They’re simple, straightforward and down to earth in the way that they explain financial concepts. Take Investopedia’s glossary - a simple but comprehensive tool that gets the job done. While you can use these sites to understand investment terms and some basics of investing, I do feel that because India, like every other market is has its unique characteristics, rules and regulations, and ‘hot topics’. Take ‘particiapatory notes’ (p-notes) for example. If you search for p-notes in the glossary, you’ll definitely get a result. However, it does not go into nearly enough detail, in my opinion (read my post which attempts to explain p-notes here). P-notes was, and still is a major topic of importance as far as the Indian market is concerned - but not such a big deal as far as the US markets are concerned, and since Investopedia has a US focus, it doesn’t really elaborate on it very much. Even if there is a common term - the examples that are given are often very US centric, which I think sometimes makes it a little more difficult to relate to.

Even if you try Wikipedia - you’ll find something a less than satisfactory (indeed a slightly confusing) article that might left you more confused than you were originally.

While sites such as InvestYogi are making a gallant effort to build a library of how-tos - including a bunch of videos - these topics are on all topics that are personal finance related - covering everything from taxes to life insurance. One thing that they have gotten very right is their decision to use a Wiki platform for the how-to section of their site.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an Investopedia equivalent for the Indian market - with articles written specifically for the Indian investor?

The issue here is that there’s this is a gargantuan task - there are literally thousands of investment terms that need to be explained, with examples, and hundreds of education articles of that need to be written. The one answer is to take a cue from InvestmentYogi and use a wiki platform. Initially however, this community needs to be very carefully and stringently regulated by the developer of the wiki, until it becomes large enough to regulate itself.

Some of you may think - why bother creating another wiki - surely you could just use Wikipedia? True - you could, but I think you’d have a tougher time driving people in your own network (critical to get the momentum going) to contribute. Moreover, whoever takes this on in a serious way would have to devote a lot of time and energy to this - in fact I think that this would probably be a full time job - and unless this person has a trust fund or has already made his millions of rupees - it would be really quite difficult to sustain themselves without going through, say, the ad supported route.

What do you think? Would something like this be worthwhile? What would make a wiki like this work?

Tags: Collaboration, Finance, Investor Education, Social Investing, Social Networking, Stock Market, Wiki, Wisdom of the Crowd

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.