I received an email from Steve Carpenter yesterday. Typically when I receive emails from someone I don’t know, I’m enticed to “file” the message accordingly, however I opened this one, not knowing what to expect.

Steve is the founder and CEO of Cake Financial Corporation.

After reading his email, I found myself intrigued with his new service. Cake is a new online financial service that allows individuals to display their actual portfolio,and keep track of how the portfolio has done over a period of time. It also lets you share your portfolio and real-time trading information with trusted family and friends without ever revealing sensitive personal information like net worth, number of shares, or portfolio sizes.

The way it works is that you link up your brokerage account with Cake, and it keeps track of your performance, and allows you to compare your performance with that of your peers. You can see how others are trading, and even collaborate investment strategies online.

For each Cake member, you can see the overall performance of that persons portfolio over a range of 5 days to 5 years. You can also see what’s on that members watch list, see who’s in their Cake network, and even read their investing journal.

It’s basically a conglomerate of the ultimate financial blog sites. What’s great is that since it’s linked directly to your brokerage account, it lends credibility to your financial performance.

Cake’s number one priority is protecting personal and financial information. Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Doug Reed, has had some experience creating secure financial environments in the past, so he’s got some experience keeping the privacy hacks at bay.

I’ll keep researching Cake, and perhaps have Steven answer a few questions in Corner Office Interview.

Until then, here are some more links to Cake:

Cake Financial Home

Cake Financial Blog

The Cake Financial Players

Cake On Cramer

Brokers, Investing, Stock Research, Stock Thoughts

Two days ago I wrote a post on more exotic stocks to deepen your exposure in the market. More specifically, I wrote about the S&P Covered Call Fund (BEP: chart, Y!, ETFconnect).

Well, I’ve had more time to research the stock, so I’ll present what I’ve dug up. I may ask Winston to chime in here too, as he’s more in tune with more advanced aspects of the market than am I.

The first thing I’ve noticed is that the NAV has not been keeping up with the share price. In fact, it’s going downhill while the share price has been marching up, leaving it at a premium of about 19% to the NAV.

Now on to the dividend. They are paying out about $2 per share annually, which translates into about $34 million per year with just over 17 million shares in circulation. However, compare this to the $12 million (net) they took in in the first 6 months of ‘06, and you can see they are about $10 million in the hole each year. That won’t continue for long.

In other words, the dividend is attractive, but don’t expect it to stay where it is.

I have a feeling that the price appreciation is due to a large influx of individual investors staking claim based off of mentions on the likes of CNBC, TheStreet.com, and other talking heads shows that drive us commoners to a specific stock.

Much like CLM though, the train will find the end of the tracks sometime, and you better be prepared to jump!

Investing, Stock Research, Stock Thoughts

A couple days ago I revealed a way to get a free research report from Reuters.

I downloaded a research report on a company I’ve had some interest in for a while, and compared it to other public data I’ve found online from SEC filings, earnings reports, and other sources.

On the surface, the Reuters reports don’t reveal anything that isn’t already available online through SEC reports or press releases. However, the report is well organized with 12 pages of aggregated data from the last few years.

Normally, these reports come with a $20 price tag, which is pretty hefty considering all the information contained within is publicly accessible from other sources online.  However, if your time is valuable, Reuters provides a good summary of the company, however it offers no forward looking guidance on how the company will perform in the future.

The reports are easy to read and financial data is well orgainized.  The sidebar of the report defines common terms and financial calculations.  Bar charts show annual data for the last three years, and monthly data for the last six months.

Overall, the Reuters Research Reports are well organized and data is presented in an easy to read context.  The $20 price tag (per report) is a bit steep considering I’ve got multiple free sources that provide essentially the same information, but for those who are just starting out researching stocks, the research reports provides a good summary of fundamental data.

Other sources I use:
Yahoo! Finance
S&P Reports (free to TD Ameritrade users)
Edgar SEC Filings
Charts from StockCharts.com
MarketWatch.com Tools & Research
TheStreet.com

Investing, Stock Research