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Moneyoga.com is the site for disciplined investments. It’s a very new startup (just a week old), they have an ambitious plan of going through the maze of data that the Indian stock markets provide - Prices, volumes, earnings, etc. - and bring them to you in an understandable and in an actionable format. It also provides a social networking platform for investors. I got a chance to talk to Mr. Deepak Shenoy one of the Founder of Moneyoga.com, about the business model. Please listen to the pod cast for the entire interview.

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Here are some key points that I discussed with Mr. Deepak Shenoy

Q: What is moneyoga.com? What is the concept behind it?

Moneyoga is a website for disciplined investors. The idea is that we want to promote the stock market investing with a more disciplined approach specifically for Indian stock markets. To give you a background our stock markets in India have a tremendous amount of retail investor activity. Up to 30% of the market is controlled by the retail investors. Most investors that tend to participate in the market usually do so on tips or recommendations which really don’t have too much of a background. We are introducing the concept of giving more weightage to disciplined and analysis than to go by tips or insider information and take a more of quantitative approach for the markets. So what we are going to do on our website is crunch large amount of data and find specific patterns that could provide investors on what to invest and what to get out off.

Q: Do you just provide information or do you provide an online trading feature as well in your site?

We won’t be providing online trading feature as of right now.

Q: Does the site provide a platform for social networking among the Investor community?

One of the things we want to do is leverage community for actions. The entire website is designed around having community that can do something. For instance, we will have virtual investing games where people could participate without involving any money in it. One could see on what other people are investing in and what stocks are in the top list with most other investors on the site. We are also coming up a recommendation market place. Lot of people in India, because of the number of the retail participants, provide recommendations to other people. We will basically provide some of these features in our website. We will provide platform for the community to start recommending their own strategies

Q: An investor will have their own strategy on what stocks they are picking on and how they are selecting the same. Do you think an Investor would be comfortable to share their strategy in a community based setup where everyone could see their strategy? Sometimes an Investor does not want to reveal their strategy. So do you think that the participants of your platform will be sharing the strategy with others?

Well, we will provide a feature where in which investor could keep certain things private to themselves. For example portfolio details we don’t want people to believe that the platform will let anybody to look at their portfolio. That will be a private thing. Our Portfolio Manager will have features where you could have one public portfolio and could maintain multiple private portfolios. It’s not necessary to have a public portfolio. However you could have one public portfolio to show how good an investor you are.

Q: Right now to get details about a particular stock, I use Google Finance. It gives me all historical details and related news about the Stock. So what is the additional benefit that you provide in moneyoga.com?

Google Finance does a very good job for US stocks but not for Indian Stocks. Lot of information specific to Indian stocks is not available in a consolidated manner in most of the web sites. Apart from that lot of analytical features and the technical charting features are not available. If you have a stock that’s spiking up in price and volume all of a sudden, it’s usually an indicator that something is happening. Google Finance will not provide you this level of information, like something happening here. It could be the stock you won. It could be like people are selling it crazy. When we provide information about a stock we also provide this kind of information.

Q: Do you claim your platform as the first to provide this quantitative approach to the stock market analysis? Do you have any competitors in India right now?

There are competitions in various segments. In the social network front it’s MoneyControl.com. From the technical analysis front, there are lots of people who provide recommendation and analysis as services and typically charge certain figure per month. Some of them have their own website. Again it’s a fragmented market there is no real organized player in the market right now.

Q: Could you please disclose your revenue model Mr. Shenoy?

Eventually we are going to be part ad and part subscription fee based revenue model. We are currently going to offer a lot of content for free. Large part of out longer term revenue estimates are coming in from subscription fees, where we will be able to offer lot of our information, data and strategy platform for a fee to retail investors. We will be getting involved at offline broker levels, people who don’t have access to the internet but trade from cyber cafes or brokerage shops (which put 5 or 6 broker terminals and people trade on those broker terminals directly). Out longer term goal is to get involved with brokerage shops to provide our services to the retail investor.

Q: Have you received any funding? If yes could you please give us more details about the same?

Honestly we got no funding at this point. We are about a week old as a startup and we have been talking to investors. But at this point we would like to get our prototype up and running. We will be looking for funding within the next 12 months.

Q: What’s your go-live date?

October 1st 2007. We will have our first version on October 1st 2007 and then we will scale from there.

Overall I believe Moneyoga.com will provide great insights to investors especially to the retail investors. Retail investors could get benefited by data, the wisdom of the network and the social platform provided by Moneyoga.com. Watch out for this startup.