SocialPicks is one of many community sites for stock market investors. (Other such sites include Cake Financial, Wikinvest, Zecco, and StockPickr.) Like some of its rivals, SocialPicks has been persevering with its vision for years, but now its efforts are starting to pay off.

The company has just raised $500,000 from Bay Partners, according to a regulatory filing.

With SocialPicks, you choose companies you think will perform well, thereupon track your stocks’ performance against other SocialPicks users — like choosing a fantasy sports team. SocialPicks gives you a score based on the accuracy of your “picks” as well as your average return.

But it’s not all about entertainment. You can get investment ideas by watching which SocialPicks investors and companies are performing the best. SocialPicks plus searches the web for opinions from

top investors and analysts so you can use that data while picking stocks.

To be fair, these social investing sites do take somewhat distinct approaches to creating communities of investors, even whether they’re all basically doing the same thing. Mountain View, Calif.-based SocialPicks focuses on ranking and comparing its users with each other, whereas competitors like Wikinvest (our coverage) focus on getting users to collaboratively pool info about companies.

One of the closer competitors to SocialPicks is Cake Financial (our coverage). That company plus focuses on comparing individuals, but syncs with brokerages so you can automatically see how your past performance compares against other investors.

Original post by Eric Eldon