Mission (why we started this)

The stock market feels like a casino where the roulette wheel is fixed. We need to trust numbers again and to invest patiently in great companies that grow and pay for our kids' tuition and our own retirement. That patient investment will help great companies grow and help those companies create good jobs. That is the way the stock market is supposed to work, and a few idealists think it could work that way again.

That scared a lot of people. The patient now walks around the hospital grounds and occasionally forces a healthy smile. But most close observers recognize that the patient is far from healthy and still indulges in cigarettes and double cheeseburgers. Radical transparency, shining a light on those toxic assets and murky financial pools, is the best long-term cure.

Transparency changes the rules of the capital markets business. The Internet makes transparency possible. But who will be the winners and losers in this new business era? What new business models will emerge? Who will individual investors trust to bring them back into the market?

There are lots of people working to create positive change in the capital markets. CapitalMarkets.com is where you will find these actvists expressing their thoughts:

• Accountants who think there must be a better way to represent the financial status of a company.
• Folks toiling patiently in standards committees.
• Geeks cooking up cool software to make it easier for the rest of us to use the mountains of available information.
• Regulators working to create a level playing field and a clear set of rules for the game.
• Investor Relations professionals who want to tell their company's story in a way that maximizes value for their employer while providing value for investors.
• XBRL preparers making sure this new form of reporting is done right.
• CFOs figuring out how to reduce administrative costs while giving investors the information they need.
• Investment Advisers and Financial Planners working to get that bit extra of investment performance for the folks saving for retirement or college fees.
• Independent Analysts, the people who toil away making sense of inputs from financial reports, market trends and market pricing to advise whether to buy, sell or hold.
• Individual investors who have not given up on the stock market, who need honest, clear, unbiased help to make their decisions.

How Does It Work?

We collect the thoughts of people active in changing the capital markets. We call these our Experts. As most of these people express these thoughts via Twitter we follow them there.

We are constantly on the hunt for new people to follow. Tell us here Recommend if there is somebody you think we should be following.

Really smart people still tweet some dreadful rubbish. We read through their tweets to find the ones that we think is good. In case you wondered "we" is a human and not a machine.

But maybe you don't care what our Editor likes. You want to know what our Experts (the people we follow) like. That is what we call Expert Picks. We find out what they like - we think you will like it as well.