Investors Chronicle will be announcing the winners soon – congratulations to those who won (you know who you are!). We hope everyone had fun playing the game and using Vidivici.

Your free account with Vidivici remains active and you can sign in to the full service and continue playing in our overall leagues.

We’d love to hear more about your experience playing the game, so please take 30 seconds to let us know what you think!

Thanks for playing!

Connect your brokerage account with Vidivici and get tailored portfolio suggestions free of charge.

We thought we’d start off the new year in style by announcing what we believe is a world first: with two clicks you can now connect your online brokerage account with Vidivici’s social investing service and immediately get tailored suggestions that improve your expected returns.

* As ever, our suggestions are driven by the forward-looking views of our community which includes financial professionals.  Our artificial intelligence engine analyses the available data to work out the range of likely outcomes for your portfolio, and searches continually for opportunities to improve your expected returns while keeping your risks under control.  This is an entirely automated, statistical process and Vidivici does not have views of its own or provide financial advice.

Vidivici’s real-money service is currently in beta and works with top online brokers Interactive Investor and SharePrice.  With their help, and your consent, we safely and securely synchronise your portfolio, which makes using our integrated service a snap.  Best of all, if you sign up for a real money account with Vidivici now, you’ll get access to the service completely free of charge – there’s no tie-in or commitment whatsoever.

If you’re already an Interactive Investor or SharePrice customer you can simply connect your account with two clicks and start using Vidivici to manage your portfolio. If you’re new to Interactive Investor or SharePrice all you need to do is create an account (it takes a few minutes) then sign in to Vidivici.

Happy 2013 from all of us at Vidivici!

We’ve just this weekend gone live with some significant simplifications and improvements to our service, which we think you’re going to like.

First off is a new, simpler and clearer way to navigate. It’s easier to show you than explain – just take a look below.  You can now see where you are and it’s easier to get straight to what you want.

To make changes to your fantasy portfolio, just go to Fantasy > Make changes.  There’s also a “Real” section – that’s for real investments support, which is coming soon.

Next up is the portfolio section.  There’s a lot going on here, and we’ve heard from some of you that it can get confusing at times.  So we’ve consolidated all of your portfolio performance information into a more streamlined “Analysis” section, and separated out the risk target slider so it’s clearer what’s going on.  And with the new navigation it’s much easier to get straight to what you want.

Lastly we’ve had some great feedback about the “Market Map” from our Beta users so it’s now taking centre stage as part of your searches on Vidivici. It’s a great place to start if you’re unsure of what stocks to buy or want to see a bird’s eye view of what’s available. You can now click through to see the company pages in full, where you can see the views of other users and set your own.  We’ve more enhancements to the Market Map on the way so watch this space.

Please do take a look and as always we’re keen to hear your feedback on our feedback forum.

Remember that big announcement we mentioned in our last post? Well here it is. We’ve just today launched a brand new fantasy investment game, in partnership with Investors Chronicle, and available as a Facebook app. It’s the culmination of a huge push on our product development over the past couple of months and some major enhancements we’ve brought to the core platform.

It’s completely free to enter and you can win cash prizes - if you want to enter just go here.

If you’re already a Vidivici beta user, as of today you have access to the full functionality of the game (barring Investors Chronicle’s share tips) on vidivici.com. If you reserved your place but don’t yet have access, you can expect your account to be activated within the next couple of days.

Footnote: If you’re a Vidivici beta user and would like to enter the Investors Chronicle game for a chance to win prizes, you can do this but the email address your Facebook account is registered with must be different to the one you used to registered on vidivici.com.

Download the press release

It’s been a crazily busy couple of months here at Vidivici.  We’ve a big announcement to make soon, but in the mean time we’ve today released another major upgrade to vidivici.com.

Perhaps the most significant thing is the introduction of risk-based fantasy portfolio leagues.  Real investing is a long-term game with much at stake, so we wanted to find a way to reflect that in our ongoing fantasy portfolio competition.  Our solution (which I have to say I think is pretty ingenious!) is to measure the risk you take over time, then automatically allocate a risk league – rated from “cautious” to “gung-ho” – based on that.

The screenshot below gives you a flavour of it.

There’s also a much-enhanced portfolio summary, an improved profile page where you can see other player’s portfolios and projections, and a new feature “viewpoints” which lets you see your expected returns from your own viewpoint or from the community’s.

If you have access to the beta already, please give it a go and let us know what you think.  If not – not long to wait now!

You might’ve noticed we’ve been rolling out some pretty major enhancements to vidivici.com over the past few weeks.

There’s a new fantasy investment game, a whizzy-slidey portfolio editor (you don’t need to think in terms of “trades” any more), cleaner look, revamped navigation, … if you haven’t seen already, take a look now.

We’ll be inviting users to take part in a quick product survey within the next couple of weeks, meanwhile if you’ve any feedback or questions, please feel free to submit it to our feedback forum.

P.S. due to the fantastic response we’ve had to our beta programme we’re now near capacity and are admitting new users to the beta by invitation only. Don’t worry though – if you registered early you still have full access.

We think this is pretty cool – it’s a live, crowdsourced view of the future of the stock market that we’ve just put together (with more than a little help from all our users on vidivici.com and shareprice.co.uk!).

Please take a look and tell us and others what you think!

Huge thanks to the many of you who’ve joined the platform and have been sharing your views since we launched just a few weeks ago. We already have more than 8,000 views in the system and growing fast. This means we’re able to start extracting some useful insights as to what’s likely to happen to your portfolio in future, and to show you this, we’ve just added some exciting new functionality.

When you sign in to Vidivici you’re now greeted with a graph showing your portfolio’s projected expected return and risk, based (as always) on your views and the views of the community.  You can see not only your expected portfolio value over the next year or so, but also the range of likely outcomes, with lines showing the worst and best cases (the lines correspond to what could happen 1 year in 10 on average).

The graph also shows the past value of your portfolio over time, so if you want to enter your past transactions (go to “Post a transaction” to do this) you can instantly see not only how your portfolio’s performed over time, but how’s it’s expected to perform in the future too.

When we show you a set of ideas, you can see the same graph, but this time with an overlay showing you the likely impact of the suggested trades on your future portfolio value.  This means you can see straightaway whether it’s worth making the trades.

And now, when you want to follow a set of suggestions, you can quickly commit them to your portfolio in Vidivici with just a couple of clicks.

Please give it a try and let us know what you think!

I’ve been asked many times by friends and relatives “who can use Vidivici?”.
I was initially surprised by the question, but I’ve since come to understand that for many people the subject of ‘investments’ remains pretty much impenetrable, and best left to the experts.

It’s our goal at Vidivici to shift this perception. Vidivici is for everyone. Our users range from casual investors with no special prior knowledge of finance, through to day traders and even market professionals.

We’ve designed the product to be as simple as possible to use, to help cut through the huge amount of information (and misinformation) out there and show you only the things that really matter, in plain English and without unnecessary jargon. Most financial tools are designed for people who know about finance, and are full of flashing lights and numbers – we’re deliberately avoiding that kind of thing.  Instead we just try to get to the point and show you what you should do, and why.

One great way to get started with managing your own investments is to create a virtual portfolio in Vidivici.  It takes seconds to get started and is completely free of charge (we won’t ask you for a bank account or a credit card details or anything like that).

Within seconds of creating your account, you’ll receive a set of trade suggestions from us, with the reasons for each trade and a summary of their likely future impact on your investment portfolio.  We assume a typical ‘conservative’ risk profile, which you can easily adjust if you need to.  If you like the suggestions, you can then ‘virtually’ execute the trades, and use Vidivici to track how your investments perform over time.

If you want to get more involved, and have some views of your own on the market, then you can start expressing these and we’ll take them into account in the suggestions we provide.  We’re able to tailor our suggestions around as many views as you care to provide; or you can leave it completely open – it’s totally up to you.

So to be clear:

• Vidivici is for everyone and it’s free
• We don’t ask for any payment details when you open your account
• You don’t need to have any savings or views of your own to start using Vidivici

Please follow us for updates and tips about how to get the most from the product. If you have any questions, please visit our Feedback forum where I and the rest of the team are active and ready to help.

Santiago Angulo-Lopez

Hot on the heels of our launch with Interactive Investor on shareprice.co.uk (see previous post), we’re now live on vidivici.com!

The platform underneath vidivici.com is the same as the one underneath our service on shareprice.co.uk. This means that if you’re a shareprice.co.uk user and have opted in to use our service, you’ve already got an account on vidivici.com and your portfolio is automatically synchronized, just as it is on shareprice.co.uk.

If you’re not a shareprice.co.uk user, you can upload your portfolio using our new “Post Transaction” form, and we’ll start looking for trade ideas based on that. We give you a starting cash balance of £3,000, so if you’re a beginner and don’t have a portfolio yet, you can experiment with building a portfolio from scratch.