Investing in distressed mortgages — with Jorge Newbery

The Internet is opening up all kinds of new investment opportunities that many of us didn’t have access to before.

One way real estate investors have made lots of money over time was by investing in distressed mortgages. But for an individual to buy a single mortgage is pretty complicated, let alone risky.

Jorge Newbery founded American Homeowner Preservation (AHP), a crowdfunding site for accredited investors to invest in pools of distressed mortgages earning between 9-12% per year — all with a focus on helping people stay in their houses longer.

Jorge joins me on the Tradestreaming Podcast to discuss how investors should think about investing in distressed mortgages, the types of returns they should expect, and the growing popularity of this investment.

About Jorge Newbery

Jorge Newbery of American Homeowner PreservationJorge is the CEO and Founder of American Homeowner Preservation. He has been a principal in mortgage, property management and real estate brokerage firms

Listen to the FULL episode

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Who are the top product developers in online finance?

I know a few of these guys but I have to tell you — most firms in the online space either are on the prowl for top talent or extremely guarded of their own product devs.

It’s a hard skill product development — combining financial technologies and great user interface to help solve a specific problem.

Here are a few of the top product development professionals in the online finance space. Vote for your favorites or please — by all means — add your own suggestions (I just got the conversation started).

The top product devs in online finance

Will the future of wealth management really be “virtual”?

I’ve been chatting with a few friends over the past couple of days about which model will prevail for wealth management in years to come.

2 sides to the argument

Essentially, there are 2 sides to the argument:

  1. virtualists: The virutalists are banking on a future where investment advisors will prospect, deliver advice, and service clients over virtual channels (Internet, phone, chat, video conference). This is a boundary-less marketing environment and doesn’t put a premium on marketing to a local clientele.  That’s a world where there’s no tennis, no kids’ bar mitzvas, and certainly, no shoulder-crying on your advisor when markets go bad.
  2. ol’ skoolers: This camp doesn’t envision a world where the delivery of financial services changes very much from what it’s been traditionally. Advisors have adopted email and websites and yes, are beginning to use social networks but ultimately, it’s a face-to-face business. You may buy diapers online but you’ll never really buy financial services online.

It might be easy to dismiss the ol’ skoolers as just that — financial dinosaurs who just can’t face the digital future of the business. We’ve got plenty of analysis like this from kasina pointing to the future and it appears to be digital: Continue reading “Will the future of wealth management really be “virtual”?”

Making investing simpler – with Jon Stein

A lot of people don’t invest because it’s seemingly too complicated.

So many decisions to make, so much jargon, who to trust?

Jon Stein is the founder and CEO of Betterment which he describes as a mix between Apple and Vanguard. It’s extremely easy to design a fine portfolio.

By removing much of the noise that distracts investors, Betterment has developed a 95% solution for 95% of investors. Plus, the firm is rolling out some functionality for investors who want a little more flexibility.

Jon’s growing an online asset manager from the ground up.  He shared with me that Betterment has almost 10,000 customers already with mid-$20M under management (AUM), with many of them using the goals and planning tools the site has developed.

Jon joins us for this week’s episode of Tradestreaming Radio.

Continue reading “Making investing simpler – with Jon Stein”

Who are the top business development peeps in online finance?

Biz dev is the lifeblood of online finance (hey, I should know).

It’s deals and partnerships that are driving the growth of many of these top online finance startups.

I went through this list and named the top biz dev people in Finance 2.0. But the list is very incomplete — who do YOU think belongs on the list? 

Who’s the top business development person in online finance?  Vote below.

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Who are the top marketers in online finance?

The real story behind growth of online finance companies is that growing true Internet investment firms has moved from an exercise in mass-market brand building to true Internet marketing — including building sales funnels, conversion, and monetization.

So, who do you think are some of the most talented marketers in finance? I’ve put a few down in the list below.

Feel free to vote . Who else belongs on this list?

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Top CEOs of Online Finance

I try to do my best, covering the online finance scene. In top financial startups, we named some of the best, most interesting and compelling, the best websites for investors.

Now, I’d like to turn my sites to an ongoing experiment in crowdsourcing — who do you think is the best CEO of online finance firms?

I’ve started the conversation, naming a few of the top CEOs of startups tacking the investment space.

Who do you think should rank highest on this list? Who would you add/subtract from the list?

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The future of online finance and how to win — with Mark Clare [Tradestreaming Live]

Due to unfortunate circumstances (Mark is sick and we wish him well), we’re forced to call off this session.  We will reschedule shortly.

We’re following up last week’s event on global value investing with a live session with Mark Clare, investor, entrepreneur, and founder of ValueCruncher.

Mark’s written extensively about the competitiveness in the online finance space.

===> He’ll join us to talk about what the future of online financial content has in store, who’s positioned to win, and what other entrepreneurs and executives in the space can do to assure success.  If we’re lucky, he’ll talk about his own experiences founding and growing his own startup in the space.

Please join us Wednesday, July 27th at 4PM ET (1PM PT) live. Continue reading “The future of online finance and how to win — with Mark Clare [Tradestreaming Live]”

Investing: Being in it to win it

We’re looking at new schools for my soon-to-be high schooler son.

As parents, we’ve made so many mistakes, learning and futzing things up as we go.

I’m not the same parent as I was 13 years ago.

Investing as learning process

investors get better by learning

Investing isn’t an activity — it’s a process.

Tradestreaming is all about learning from  — and sharing — what we’ve experienced.

From my interview earlier this week with Jonathan Clements (author of The Little Book of Main Street Money and previously the personal finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal)):

A lot of what it takes to become a good investor and a good manager of your money is just time.  Think about people’s learning curve — in some sense we don’t really get an opportunity to become experts in money management unless we really put our minds to it.  Most of us will only buy 2 or 3 or 4 homes during the course of our lives — we never really get the chance to become experts at that.  So, there’s a good chance that we’re going to mess up.

Similarly, we only get to claim Social Security once, so in terms of when to claim Social Security, there’s a good chance, we’re going to mess up royally.

And similarly when it comes to investing, yeah, we’re going to get the chance to see a lot more bull and bear markets than we would opportunities to buy homes.  Nonetheless, the chance to mess up is enormous in part because people have to cope with all this noise.

4 ways to accelerate your investment experience

  1. Nothing beats experience like experience: you just have to be in it to win it.  That means ensuring your take adequate precautions to maintain your ability to stay invested.  The research shows it’s not about age, it’s about experience and time in the market.
  2. Log your experiences: Keep a trading diary.  Better yet, blog about what you’re doing, sharing your activities with others on Seeking Alpha or on  StockTwits. You’ll get feedback from others — helping to expedite your learning and climbing the learning curve.
  3. Plug into the tradestream: Use the Internet, the blogosphere, and twitter to identify top performers interested in sharing their knowledge.  If you’re interested in making sure results are what they claim to be, follow top performers on Covestor who have agreed to have their performance audited.
  4. Listen/watch the best investing podcasts: I’ve compiled a list of what I think are the best investing podcasts on iTunes.  But there are many more great ones.  I interview a lot of these experts on Tradestreaming Radio, too.  StockTwits TV in general and Abnormal Returns TV (from Abnormal Returns) are also great for access to true experts in their domains.

I’m sending my kid to high school.  Like James Altucher, I don’t know if I’ll send him to college.  There is so much information readily available to investors, you can get a degree in hard knocks if your’re diligent and interested.

You just have to plug into the Tradestream.

New study uncovers the ‘new’ influentials in financial blogosphere

Interesting new study (see below) from Mindful Money.  Investors are certainly turning to non-traditional sources of information as inputs into their investment decisions.  But this appears to be the first time that the interconnections within the financial blogosphere have been studied.  The social media train — and specifically, actionableinvestable content — continues to chug ahead.

There are few surprises in the top rated/linked-to investment and economic blogs and websites.  Many of them are read by hundreds of thousands of investors daily.  What’s interesting here is to see how these blogs act as sources of information and credibility for the rest of us trying our hands at providing just a modicum of thoughtful investment ideas online.