The best way to track investment ideas, ever?

I'm fortunate enough to be able to work full time managing investments both for myself as well as friends and family members. The only drawback is that I have more and more information to manage every day, and lately I tend to feel buried at times.

Specifically, I am always looking at new stocks. When I do find interesting companies, they are rarely at a price that I find attractive enough. So I try to keep an eye on them, hoping they'll soon get cheap enough to buy. But over time my list of ideas to watch grows longer and longer and more difficult to track. Inevitably some will get forgotten, and every so often I will have a "doh" moment when I notice one that has doubled or tripled, after hitting lows that would have enabled me to buy it.

I try to organise. I have file cabinets full of research, automated excel spreadsheets, a stock alert system at my broker, online portfolios at Yahoo, and even a personal database to help me manage and track all these ideas. But sometimes it feels like it's more work to managed this disparate group of systems than they save me in time, and I'm still missing out on opportunities.

Finally I've decided to help build a solution. Some very smart friends and I are now building an integrated software system to manage investment research. It will track every stock you've ever looked at and automatically alert you when any are trading at attractive prices. It will store all of your research electronically, with complete security, and make it accessible from anywhere in the world. It will be simple to use, won't require any work to manage, and will even make it easier to share ideas with others. I can't say much more about it right now, other than it will start testing in early 2007.

Does this sound like it would be useful to you? We are looking to get some feedback from real world investors on how well it works for them. If you are serious about investing, whether doing it part-time or full time, you can help.

We are asking a small group of users to try out the service when it's launched, for free, and with no strings attached other than a promise to provide feedback. If this interests you, please send your e-mail address and name to stocknotesinfo@gmail.com. We promise your e-mail address won't be used for any purpose other than to notify you when the software is ready. Note that the evaluation will be limited to a small number of people, so please contact us soon if you think you might be interested.

And if you don't have time to provide us with an evaluation, but would like to hear more about the service when it's officially launched, you can also drop a line at the same address and we'll put you on the launch notification list. I'm really excited about this service. I'm hoping it will save me, and hopefully you, a great deal of time and in the process improve our investment results. As we get closer to launch I'll post updates on our progress and more detail about the service.