Albert Wenger
Video has proven to be a very powerful way of connecting with people online. I think no site demonstrates this more than Kickstarter. For instance, Allison Weiss raising money to make a new record (one of the very early projects), shows just how compelling a video can be.
Covestor exists in the much more staid world of investments. But it too has at its heart a people driven approach. Each model that you can follow on Covestor is managed by a person. A person who is investing their own money using this model. And while Covestor provides a ton of information on the performance of each model, so far only textual background and one image was available on the people behind the models.
Take the Alpha Trapper model as an example. There is a lot of performance information available on it but only a tiny bit of background on its manager who is a Stanford Graduate and works as a software engineer. Covestor has just started to produce some videos though on model managers and here is the one Brendan Ruchert-Dixon. It provides much more of a sense of Brendan as a person.
Now you can have a long argument about whether or not someone should care about the person behind a model on Covestor. I for one am thrilled to be able to learn more because it gives me another dimension by which to evaluate a model. The initial videos are all produced by Covestor, but I hope that this will become a standard feature of the profile pages. For now, here are two more video profiles: Robert Zingale and Eric Linser.
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