StockJungle.com Plans Web Surfers’ Fund
Culver City-based StockJungle.com Inc. plans to establish mutual funds aimed at online investors, including one that would let Internet users help pick its stock holdings.
StockJungle.com, which operates an Internet stock information site, has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell shares in four separate mutual funds.
Those include a Community Intelligence fund that would buy stocks recommended by visitors to StockJungle.com’s Web site and another that offers an expense-free investment in the blue-chip Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
Those novel approaches--if approved by the SEC--might help StockJungle.com stand out in the crowded mutual fund field.
“But man, it’s bizarre,” said Gerald Perritt, editor of the Mutual Letter in Largo, Fla., referring to the proposed Community Intelligence fund. “If you go into any chat room and stick around for a while and read the comments and the types of stocks they’re touting, a lot of these people don’t know what these companies even do.”
The company’s filing stresses that the StockJungle.com Community Intelligence fund would research the stocks that are recommended to it. It would invest in stocks with market capitalizations of at least $100 million that are identified by visitors to the company’s Web site and then screened by the investment advisors.
“The effectiveness of this fund’s investment strategy,” StockJungle.com said in the SEC filing, “is directly contingent upon widespread participation by visitors to the StockJungle.com Web site and their submission of detailed and reasoned analyses which identify bona fide potential investments.”
Established track records also have grown in importance as more mutual funds vie for investment dollars, said Charles Biderman, president of TrimTabs.com, which tracks stock market liquidity and mutual fund flows. That could be a drawback for StockJungle.com, he said, because its managers don’t come from the mutual fund field, according to SEC filings.
Michael Witz, president of the firm that acts as investment advisor to the StockJungle.com funds, last worked as a financial analyst at Financial Resources Group Inc., described as the investment-banking arm of Inc. magazine. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara, Witz also has experience in multimedia Web development, according to SEC records.
He will split portfolio management duties with Gordon Gustafson, who graduated from UCLA in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. Gustafson last worked as a production coordinator for a company called Red Planet.
