“The iPhone has made a fortune for Apple, and turned a handful of app developers into instant millionaires, but a new app aims to help average investors be more like Warren Buffett.
Available for download starting next week for $1.99 a month, iBillionaire promises to let investors follow moves of a roster of 10 billionaire investors, such as Buffett, Carl Icahn and hedge fund poobah’s like John Paulson, David Einhorn, and Bill Ackman. The app will compare a user’s portfolio to—at least in a small way—see what the billionaires are doing and offer advice accordingly.
“When you get these 10 people together, there is a lot of insight,” says iBillionaire co-founder Raul Moreno. “They think alike.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission requires large investors to disclose their holdings once a quarter in so-called 13-F filings—the raw data used by the iBillionaire. The app then shows the holdings of each billionaire and charts how well the portfolios perform against the S&P 500.
When users can then plug in their own holdings, the app offers suggestions based on what the billionaires are doing.
iBillionaire is the product of a pair of serial entrepreneurs. Moreno, 29, previously co-founded Kinetik, an app recommendation service. His partner Alejandro Estrada, 44, is a co-founder of Dineromail, a Latin American version of PayPal, acquired last year by South African media company Naspers Ltd. NPSNY +0.57% .
Among the most popular stocks among billionaires are Apple AAPL -0.15% and GoogleGOOG -0.18% , each owned by four billionaires. Perhaps a bigger surprise: Delphi Automotive DLPH -0.67% , an auto parts maker that emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, is held by five. And its stock is up 37% over the past year.
See: MarketWatch’s hedge-fund tracker
Investing like a billionaire isn’t necessarily as easy as winning at Angry Birds, however. These financial superstars get insight, sway over management decisions and trading opportunities not available to those playing along from home.
Just one example: Einhorn, one of the five billionaires that owns Delphi, was involved well before the company’s initial public offering, the first time small investors would have had the opportunity to buy….”
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