My10000dollars (31.07)

Chart.ly - A Viable Solution For Investors?

April 30, 2009 – Comments (0) | RELATED TICKERS: SPX , XLF , QQQQ

A new site, Chart.ly, recently launched with the help of Stocktwits and Tim Sykes, which provides the users with a powerful and affordable (well..it's free, at least for now) solution for investors.  The site offers a free chart uploading service with a solid integration with Stocktwits.com, allowing the users to upload their own stock charts and easily attach their comments in a tweet.

It's simple, it's neat, and it's fun.  Since the recent launch in April, the site is already attacting over 2000 visits a day, 6000 page views a day, ranking in the top 40,000 by Alexa.  That's pretty damn good.  I uploaded a few charts myself, added my own twitter comments, upload, BAM you now have hundreds, potentially thousands of people looking at your own stock charts.  One of the charts I uploaded a few days ago now has over 300 views alone.  Established sites like Mashables.com and The Big Picture are already talking about it.  Pretty cool.

Now comes the big question -  How credible is it?

Both the beauty and the beast of this site must be the fact that everyone and anyone can upload and view the chart.  While it is extremely beneficial and useful for the readers to digest the charts submitted by many credible experts, the viewers are still inevitably exposed to the danger of following the charts analyzed and submitted by inexperienced traders.  There's nothing that's out there currently that will help the readers determine the credentials of the users submitting the charts.  I could simply go in there, pick the most elegantly colored chart, and genuinly take something out of the chart and make an investing decision.  Now that's dangerous.

I would personally love to see some features added that will help readers of chart.ly filter through the users to understand exactly how "credible" these charts are.  Sure everyone should always make an investing decision based various information gathered, but you can't avoid the emotional factors influencing the readers who may look at a chart and say "wow I totally agree!" simply because it "sounds" right.

Take a look at this chart submitted by one of the users What do you say?

I want to hear your thoughts as well.  You can rate the site yourself