This is one of those ideas that could be fabulous and could also be disastrous. The main idea behind VesTopia is that you sign up to the service and then you get to see, in real time, the moves in the personal accounts of a series of investment managers. The assumption being that they know what they’re doing and that you can thus follow that and make money on the markets.

The attraction to the investors themselves is that they get a cut of the fees being generated by the users of the service.

All very good but a few problems that I can see. The first is that as we know, almost no active investors, after fees, manage to beat the market. For almost all of us index trackers are the best investment.

The second is that of course this all depends on the quality of those investment managers: not playing in Wall Street waters I have no idea about the names involved.

I can think of any number of ways of making money out of this if I were one of the investment directors who didn’t care about my public reputation (pump and dump only being the most obvious) so even if it is a good idea, being able to see what the professionals are doing on their own accounts, everything depends upon the probity of those professionals.

I think I’d want to see much more about this to try and decide whether it’s a good idea or not.

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