KINFO review | The social investing app
Moneywise.com / Moneywise.com
4.0
4.0
Cost5
Customer service3
Ease of use4.5
Tools & resources4
Synchronization3.8
Accessibility4.5
KINFO is a social media platform for investors that lets them compare their portfolio performance to those of peers, friends and even financial bloggers. You can also receive news alerts when something happens that could affect one of your holdings. The service is free to use and connects with your brokerage accounts. Unfortunately, your brokerage must be on KINFO's list of accepted brokers to fully use the service.
Have you ever looked at your investing portfolio and wondered how it stacked up against those of your peers … or even your favorite financial bloggers? Now KINFO has got an app for that!
“KINFO” may sound like a cabinet for sale at IKEA, but except for the fact that it was also founded in Sweden, it has nothing to do with flat-pack furniture. Instead, this social investing platform allows you to share non-sensitive data to compare their investment performance with those of others in the community, helping you refine and improve your investing strategy.
Designed for long-term investors, KINFO offers analysis and insights into your portfolio in addition to social features. This free service is not an investment brokerage of its own. Instead, it connects to your existing broker account to help you boost your investing chops.
KINFO features
What Is KINFO?
KINFO is an investment analysis app that helps you better understand the stocks, funds and even hedge fund investments in your portfolio. You can use it to compare your financial situation with those of your peers. However, KINFO is focused solely on your investment performance, rather than your expenses, credit score, etc.
Using KINFO, you can compare your investments to those of other community members, professional investors and even bloggers and improve your investing knowledge while refining your investment strategy for long-term success.
KINFO is not a broker, so you can't buy or sell investments through a KINFO account. Instead, you connect KINFO to your existing brokerage account to analyze and learn more. KINFO works with a limited number of brokerages.
Here's a list of some of the brokerages currently supported by KINFO:
- Ally Invest
- DriveWealth
- E*TRADE
- Fidelity
- InteractiveBrokers
- Robinhood
- TD Ameritrade
- Tradier
- TradeStation
- Vanguard
KINFO uses third-party aggregator TradeIt to connect to brokerage accounts and securely download your account data without storing your login information. KINFO is secure and offers easy connections to available institutions, similar to many popular budgeting apps. KINFO's link to your brokerage account is read-only, which means it cannot ever enter or execute trades on your behalf.
How KINFO Works
In some ways, KINFO looks and works like a social network. Like Facebook and Twitter, KINFO lets you create a public profile with your picture, location and a brief profile summary. You can post to your “wall” and share anything you'd like, although sharing about investments makes the most sense.
You can follow other users — perhaps a favorite blogger or a friend who uses the platform — and other users can discover and follow you.
One interesting feature that differentiates KINFO from other investment tools is the look into hedge funds. While most individual investors are best off avoiding the hedge fund world, you can look into hedge fund results and analysis in KINFO.
KINFO also offers a dedicated page where you can view recent insider trading activity. Many investors believe that insider activity is a good indicator of a stock's likely performance, as those with deep company knowledge are most likely to buy if the stock is going up and to sell if it is going down, although that is not always the case.
A similar view lets users see recent analysis ratings on stocks. A brief review shows analyst ratings from a variety of major investment analysis and fund management companies over a massive range of stocks.
The Members tab brings in the strong social features to review what other members are doing in their portfolios. I saw some familiar bloggers on the list, along with other members who are simply excited about investments and want to improve their portfolios.
When you link to your account, you can set up notifications for new activity related to your investments from any of the above sources. For mobile users, that news shows up quickly in your pocket.
KINFO Accounts
KINFO allows you to create multiple “portfolios” in each user account. You can set up one portfolio for each investment account or use one portfolio for all of your investments. The way you set up your portfolios is completely up to your preferences.
One cool use of that portfolio setup is to link multiple brokerage accounts under one portfolio for a holistic view into your investments and an all-encompassing analysis of your portfolio.
To emphasize again, KINFO accounts are NOT brokerage accounts. KINFO is more like a social networking site with an emphasis on investing. To get the full value of KINFO, you must connect to an existing brokerage account at the brokerage of your choice, although KINFO currently supports only the list of brokerage firms given above.
KINFO Fees
KINFO is free! That's right — there's no cost to join or use the web-based or mobile app. With no cost to sign up, there is a lot to gain and little to lose from trying out KINFO.
Summary
KINFO is a social investing network that lets you quickly analyze your investments and compare them with those of other KINFO users. With data access to information on hedge funds, stocks, insider trades, analyst ratings and other members, you can quickly learn a lot using KINFO.
It is free to use, so if it supports your brokerage account there is nothing to lose from giving it a try. Who knows? Maybe you will discover a new, profitable investment strategy that will turn your portfolio into an investment powerhouse. You'll never know unless you give it a try.
Eric Rosenberg is a finance, travel and technology writer in Ventura, California. He is a former bank manager and corporate finance and accounting professional who left his day job in 2016 to take his online side hustle full time.
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