Covey with Brooker Belcourt | E249

Helping emerging portfolio managers get noticed.

Today on the show we have Brooker Belcourt, founder of Covey. It is an online platform for new inspiring portfolio managers to earn credibility by sharing their best ideas online in order to establish a track record and hopefully establish a career input for the management.


Episode Highlights

  • 00.54: It's really hard to find the next great investment analysts and we at Covey solve this problem, says Brooker.

  • 1.20: Covey seeks to solve the problem of finding investment analysts by creating a community to find and reward the best investment analysts so that we can all copy them and generate higher returns.

  • 3.07: People use Covey as a way to get into investing or to learn more about it or to play with virtual cash before playing with real cash and they use it to earn rewards.

  • 4.19: Covey tracks 50 matrix in real time and you have a shareable portfolio that's like probably the most robust mock portfolio software online right now. 

  • 5.42: Brooker says that they started to realize that all these ideas that are being contributed to their platform are crazy valuable and there are a lot they can do with this huge database of community investing ideas.

  • 7.09: Brooker explains that they post all trades to an immutable ledger so that the client won't have to hire auditors to come and verify their fidelity account or their e-trade account, which is actually really expensive.

  • 10.03: Brooker has observed that the great managers, great analysts tend to stay great and it has been described in academic research as the phenomenon called performance persistence.

  • 11.00: The apps that Brooker is creating are giving access of alpha generated by community to more people so they can experience this outside of investing in the best channels. 

  • 11.27: There are a ton of barriers to entry to becoming a great investment analyst. If you went to some big investment bank, you could probably become an investment analyst. But otherwise, if you're great, you may not be discovered, says Brooker.

  • 13.47: Brooker have received a lot of interest from the hedge funds to buy their analyst data and what we have to do though is structure the right deal that benefits the community of people who contributed that data.

  • 15.08: Brooker says that they had to think with their community how do they actually identify who is an amazing investment analyst and they came up with five or six metrics and looked across things like total return of course.

  • 16.51: We have all the regulatory debt that we are stuck with, and we have to pay attention to all that stuff because it's not really that important and it doesn't serve anyone, says Brooker.

  • 18.57: Doing something that is totally new for you and getting VCs on board was probably the highest hurdle for us, says Brooker.

  • 19.12: It has been really hard to convince people that this method could work where it has never been really tried in this way before, says Brooker. 

3 Key Points

  1. Brooker explains why community database information is valuable to others than to the people who are looking in Covey's ideas.

  2. In 2023, we are going to be launching the Covey copy trading style product that allows you to invest in the top analyst list, says Brooker

  3. Brooker explains how that entire reward mechanism allocates rewards to the different analysts. Is it just based solely on short term performance over a period of time or are there other metrics taken to consideration?


Tweetable Quotes

  • "It always struck me as odd that where this data rich world is investing and yet we have no way of like sorting through the masses to find the best." – Brooker

  • "We are going to build more infrastructure to make it easier for people to follow and get the benefits of following the best people and little branches of investing.' – Brooker

  • "If we built a fund around the top analyst and their ideas, we could allow anyone to invest in that front and then we can compensate some of the undiscovered investment analysts who otherwise wouldn't have been able to manage money." - Brooker

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech