From Mebane Faber:
6 Million Dollar Fintech Opportunities
Over two years ago I did a post called “Five Million Dollar Investing Ideas”, though you could now replace “Investing” with “Fintech”. I update the status of all of the ideas at the bottom of the post, and it is great to see many companies tackling the opportunities there. Lots of innovation going on in our space, even if some of the ideas and valuations are getting a little into Sillytown.HT: the CFA Institute blog
Two of the five ideas are still not being addressed so I will include them again as 1/2 below as well.
1. Liquid Alts Newsletter – Most investors, retail and pro alike, have a hard time making heads or tails of all of the new funds coming to market. There are about 10,000 mutual funds (though the number peaked in the early 2000s) and about 2,000 ETFs. How in the world is an investor supposed to stay abreast of all that is going on, what is reasonable and what is crap (a lot)? I would love to see a paid product that each month tackled a topic (say managed futures funds), new launches, and maintained a portfolio or two that targeted this space.
Sam Lee was closest here at ETFInvestor at Morningstar, but he is now setting up his own RIA (believe me, I tried to hired him) so I hope they pick a great replacement. Brian Haskin does a good job at Daily Alts, I just wish I could talk him into doing a premium product.
2. Private Research Boutique Newsletter – Most of my ideas in this post fall into the category of “I would pay someone to do this since no one is doing it”. There are a few sites that are targeting the notoriously low information private company space, but none comprehensively and most importantly, none ACTIONABLY.
I would love to see an in-depth letter each month with alerts that focused on making invest/pass recs for these angel or secondary private investments. A value added research shop would be huge here. Is the Tim Ferriss syndicate a good idea? What about that recent EquityZen offering? You could cobble together a team of six former motivated VC/consultant/MBAs and let them loose. Some companies sort of tackling the space, but more from an information/database standpoint, are Triton Research, Disruption, DataFox, CB Insights, and Mattermark.
5. HedgeFundLetters: Someone please come take over my old site and run with it. It is shameful that there is no place to go and read all the great letters of Soros, Robertson, etc....MORE
