Forbes unveils real-time billionaires list

Forbes announced Monday a new digital tool that provides real-time updates on the net worth and ranking for each individual featured on the Forbes world’s billionaires list.

Bloomberg News, which competes with Forbes in covering billionaires, launched The Bloomberg Billionaires Index in January 2013 that includes the top 100 billionaires worldwide and features transparent data visualization tools that let you easily slice and dice the data. That followed the April 2012 launch by Forbes of a feature called the Real-Time Billionaire Tracker, which follows the ups and downs of some of the 50 richest people in the world.

The new Forbes tool follows more than 1,600 billionaires around the world.  The value of individuals’ public holdings will be updated every 5 minutes when respective markets are open.  Billionaires who only have holdings in private companies will have their net worth updated once a day.

“The world’s wealthiest continue to have an impact on huge swaths of the global economy,” said Luisa Kroll, wealth editor at Forbes, in a statement.  “By being able to track their movements on a daily basis, not once a year, readers will have a much better sense of where these billionaires’ influence is being felt and how their fortunes are ebbing and flowing along with the markets.”

For the launch of the new wealth tracking platform, Forbes will update the net worth of the more than 1,600 individuals who qualified for the Forbes world’s billionaires list this year.  Forbes will continue to add to that group as new billionaires are discovered.