Aside from making me a loser, it also makes me a potential target market at the very low end.

I never used to have any money to invest in anything but my own company, but now that the purse strings can free up a little, I am totally excited about buying shares in OTHER peoples companies (What will they come up with next?!?)

The pricing put me off completely, and I know it’s for ’serious investors’ but I know people who have a lot of money invested (which I assume makes them fairly serious) and have no analysis tools and the look and feel of the website gave the impression it was an easy in for people in that boat to stop using newspapers and start doing ti properly.

But the pricing cuts out everyone but uber serious investors who wont make ANY sacrifices in their analysis tools.

So I will keep not knowing what is happening with my investments.

‘Finally - there is something about Sharesight being a custodial system. National bank are about to start changing a staggering 1% of portfolio value for “Custody fees”. That’s a significant amount, and if Sharesight can bring people over then it is game over.’

I think the business of becoming a custodian is far more involved than you imply and really is a game of global scale. The range of services provided for that 1% by NBNZ involves performance & tax reporting, access to international markets trading (for equities, exchange listed options, don’t think they have any derivative functions), dealing with the nightmare that is managed funds, clearing services, managing corporate actions, fx. All these are complex systems requiring development and exposure to risk if you get the final product wrong, or the system isn’t as good as described to clients.

This business already has many competitors, NBNZ, Etrade Australia, I think State Street are in NZ. Most brokers offer a custody service. Also the fact is these companies need to be large to be viable. FNZ, the company powering the platform for NBNZ really only became worthwhile when extending the software to the UK market.

I think Sharesight if they have aspirations to do this, are in a market with definite opportunity - the custody services provided by big banks are lamentably poor and performance and fees from managed funds disembowel any return. But then, sophisticated and savvy retail investors can just sign up to CMC Markets giving them live information and access to exchange-traded derivatives. Less sophisticated investors may use the basic financial information but may be less involved volume-wise to make the business feasible. Also like any banking system surely there is quite a level of inertia to overcome to get customers to buy.

Alternatively Sharesight may wish to become a client of a custodian to tack on these services and take a margin. Might not be a bad outcome. But what it really comes down to is surely attention and getting people using the site. Being the meat in the sandwich of client expectations and dealing with registrars/fund managers can be less than fun.

I’ve been to see the Sharesight crew and was very impressed with the service. I had just been in the US and had a chance to catch up with Anton Commissaris at Mint and see systems like CakeFinancial.com both of which gave me ideas around creating financial platforms to meet all our needs.

Like Stuart, my main issue would be cost but as Scott says its actually quite cheap. We are so used to using internet platforms for free that we often balk at paying upfront fees for something new.

I like the idea of an online broker attached. I’m probably in the 5-10 stocks bracket and could stomach $50 a year for the service but it may appeal more the the bigger user.

Still its a great platform with lots of room for development.

We appreciate your comments re pricing and you have sparked an interesting debate on this (from our point of view anyway). We would love to hear some more feedback on this from other people as well. We are committed to coming up with a pricing model that investors are comfortable with. We have had a wide range of opinions on pricing ranging from your comments above through to people telling us that we have priced it too cheap! It’s worth noting that to get the same information that Sharesight provides prepared for you by a professional full service broker will almost certainly cost you significantly more than a Sharesight sub! But having said that we do appreciate where you’re coming from, and we would love more feedback on this.

Finally in response to a couple specific points that you raised:
-We will be offering an annual payment option on all plans, with a 10% discount for annual payment.
-We hope to expand the site to include other international exchanges, however this will likely be a least a year away.

Cheers,
Scott Ryburn - Sharesight