Patent ID: 7813986

Claim:
A method for aiding an investment decision on an item by an individual, comprising: (a) receiving, at a community sentiment generation device, a prediction on the item from a third party server, wherein the prediction is entered by a user of the third party server in a prediction interface integrated with a content page requested by the user; (b) calculating an individual component for the user, wherein the value of the individual component is based on whether the user predicted a specified outcome; (c) calculating a community sentiment score for the item wherein the community sentiment score is the summation of individual components calculated for the item divided by the total number of individuals making a prediction on the item; (d) transmitting information to a user of the community sentiment generation device, wherein the information includes the community sentiment score for the item, a listing of each prediction made for the item on an item display, and at least one brief informational tag for the item for display to the user; and (e) providing, using the community sentiment generation device, an informational message to the user, wherein step (e) includes: (i) identifying a business segment associated with a set of prior predictions made by the user, and (ii) customizing a content of the informational message based on the identified business segment, wherein the content of the informational message includes investment advice related to one or more financial assets in the business segment.