Facebook and the Financial Analyst

Investing has evolved into a highly social activity, as evidenced by the countless chatrooms, blogs, and message boards populating the Internet. With the Facebook Platform API now available we would expect to see a rash of applications for investment analysis and portfolio management. By incorporating Amazon S3 or Rackspace for data storage, a scalable, robust, and fully virtual analytical capability is possible. To date, however, the majority of viable finance-related applications populating Facebook are payments-related: Send Money, justgiving, ChipIn, LendingClub, PayMe. Perhaps this is because the platform has only recently become available, or that Facebook is still very much a SOCIAL network, and as such would not provide a legitimate environment for an analytical application. The prototypical Facebook user is keeping track of people, that is, looking for fun, friendship and relationships - not p/e ratios and risk-adjusted returns (though the FSX - Fantasy Stock Exchange - claims 18113 daily active users.)

But the network-form has already been embraced by analysts in various disciplines as an efficient way to share and analyze information. Even the CIA has developed a social network for intra-agency intelligence sharing. We believe Facebook is an attractive environment for the deployment of financial modeling applications and would provide financial analysts - risk modelers, financial engineers, investment analysts, and portfolio managers - with a highly effective means of sharing data and ideas. The need for the cross-pollination of ideas is of paramount importance not only in the intelligence community, but in financial services as well.