Can You Trust Crowdsourced Financial Information?
Jinfo Blog

By Andrew Lucas

Abstract

Andrew Lucas investigates crowdsourcing of financial data and considers whether the wisdom of the crowd can beat the wisdom of Wall Street.

Item

Crowdsourcing drives many web services from Google's search algorithms to TripAdvisor's reviews and Wikipedia entries. 

Whilst we are happy to accept the wisdom of the crowd in many spheres of life and find comments from other travellers and diners a useful guide to hotels and restaurants, how confident are we about basing our financial decisions on their collective view?

Financial Information

Crowdsourcing is beginning to make its way into the financial services sector, as:

• A tool for market participants to interact with their customers
• An alternative source of capital raising through crowdfunding
• A source of content and data.

Crowdsourcing is a subject which FreePint has been exploring more generally through articles such as "Assessing the Credibility of Crowdsourced Content" by Libby Trudell and product reviews, for example Michael Levy's mini review of company information service Owler. 

We have now looked at the impact of crowdsourcing on the financial information market, in particular in the provision of financial data. Can free, crowdsourced information services such as Estimize and Mergerize provide an alternative to conventional services from the established vendors?

Find Out More

My Subscription Article "Crowdsourced Financial Information" looks at the issues of reliability and accuracy of crowdsourced services and considers whether the motivation of the contributors is likely to have an impact on the quality of the data. It also provides an overview of some of the key players in the crowdsourced financial content market, from contact data to company profiles and financial estimates.

Finally, can the "wisdom of crowds" predict more accurate outcomes of company earning and mergers & acquisitions than highly-paid Wall Street and City of London analysts?

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