This is nothing but stock market info porn. All you are doing is using web design to convince me to take seriously your opinions on whether GS or TWTR is going up or down. It's the web 2.0 version of an analyst in a nice suit. It looks cool, but no reason to believe there is real substance.
The fact of the matter is that if I'm actually going to be speculating on individual stocks (which I do, but mostly as a quant), I need a lot more info than this.
I don't want to be entirely negative, so I'm going to suggest a tool which I think might actually be handy, and could use with some nice presentation. Ask the user a little about themselves, and then suggest stocks/ETFs they can put money in to hedge their risks. E.g., if a person works in tech, suggest to them a portfolio that is disproportionately less tech heavy - that way, if their industry tanks, their retirement won't necessarily do the same. If a person expects lots of medical care later in life, suggest them a portfolio heavy on medical stocks so that if their expenses go up, their investment does too.
We're trying to serve the less educated investor so we take basic fundamental analysis and automate it while making the insights more accessible to someone who is less financially literate.
It's interesting that you bring up personalization too because we're headed in that direction with customizing reports and creating recommendations based on factors like risk profile, age, and retirement plans.
We'd love to chat if you have time. You can shoot me an email at jay@capp.io
To put it simply, whether some guy thinks you have a product or not, you definitely do. Its not just stock market info porn, or a fancy web design over google finance, rather its as important as a new 'indicator', i.e. it does(could) have the right substance.
That said, I do quite like the idea of an algorithm that hedges risk, but for the average person's retirement fund wouldn't that be best done with a proper fully diversified portfolio minus a few stocks whose performance is heavily correlated with your earning potential? If so wouldn't that be best as actual funds marketed at employees in particular industries rather than a software stock-selection tool.
I disagree, I think this tool could have value in the stock screening process, where you look at 100s of stocks quickly to winnow it down to a few promising candidates. After that step, I agree with you a more traditional stock analysis data interface is better.
If medical costs and the value of medical stocks are correlated, then one can hedge that underlying medical short by going long medical stocks. I don't actually know if that correlation holds. I should have been clearer that I was guessing it might.
I actually don't know the right sort of hedging for medicine - would be great to have some help with that.
The problem I have is, you may have built a better mouse trap here, but for the last 20 years the retail investor -- your customer -- has been the mouse. And few people in your industry acknowledge that.
The stock market has a built-in upward bias of 3-5 percent. It represents the premium over the risk free rate that entices people to invest in equity instead of debt (bonds, treasuries). So retail investors don't "lose" money but they have underperformed the market to a extent that is IMO criminal. Literally.
All of the education, services and tools (like yours) are teaching investing all wrong. Price targets? Made up numbers by analysts? What were the price targets on Netflix before it fell 100 handles (and then clawed half of it back)? The day before the drop CNBC said $600/share. How about GTAT? Jim Cramer loved that stock.
There are some people doing it right, though. Check out TastyTrade.com. These guys have made a massive investment in teaching the retail investor techniques for investing that don't rely on the magic of technical analysis or analyst prophecy. And even more awesome -- they built a trading platform that is free to use and provides tooling to support their principles, which are basically: do many small, high probability trades to give yourself many independent occurrences to smooth statistical variance, and let duration work for you. The platform is Dough.com
I'm obviously not affiliated, just a fan. And I don't mean to take away anything from what you've built. But I think we're just doing it wrong and i want to see that changed.
Your solution for retail investors who are getting burned in high beta tech stocks is to go put on a bunch of complicated options positions? That seems like kind of crazy advice. Maybe just buy some SPY and go do something more interesting than stare at options prices all day.
It's not your fault if you're scared of options (or scared for the masses). It's because retail investing has been taught and presented totally backwards for 20 years. Options have the same risk as the underlying. They are only more dangerous because they give you leverage. So you trade 1 lots or 2 lots. Your capital at risk in my apple spread example is an order of magnitude less than buying even 10 shares of Apple stock at the then price of 5000+
The retail investor understands rankings and price targets and no load mutual funds and other things we've said are I,portamt. I can teach you vertical spreads in a few hours and that is all you need to use options in your investment strategy.
In a vertical spread I can tell you with certainty that your probability of profit is equal to the max loss divided by the width of the strikes. Max loss is the width of the strikes less the credit you received when you sold the spread. So if you sell the 190-189 put spread on the spy bc you think it will go up, and you receive .35 for the trade, your Max loss is .65 so your probability of success is .65/1=65%. Whether or not that's a good risk to take depends but it's better than buying Netflix because some guy on tv invents a price target.
I'd love to hear more about your thoughts. Think you could shoot me an email at chintan@capp.io?
You read an analyst report from Goldman saying "we like apple going into the fall, you should buy apple." This is back when Apple is $500-600 a share. That's just the worst advice. You know what would be a lot better for a small investor? If you're bullish on Apple, go buy the at-the-money call spread. It will cost you a fraction of the share price and let you capture $5, 10, 20+ in upside if Apple moves up (depending on how much you want to pay for the spread). Anyway, this is obviously a subject I'm passionate about :)
Congrats again, guys. Enjoy the spike today, HN front page is still the 52 week high on all of our traffic charts!
- Adding caching static assets/images/etc (Not sure how this is done on Heroku but fairly straight forward with Nginx or Apache). Currently, your assets are taking a full 6 seconds to serve.
- Possibly serving your static homepage etc from one server/Heroku instance and your functional app from another so you don't put the stress of traffic on a homepage on the app server as well.
Edit: Adding this link to be a bit more helpful. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-caching-ruby-rail...
For market sentiment you are just showing tweets. How about if you just show if market sentiment is +ve or -ve?
I think you are taking only fundamental analysis into account to suggest buy or sell otherwise you would not suggest GPRO as a buy.
Yes, definitely, right now it is just opinions but we do want to analyze for actual sentiment (bullish vs bearish).
Sorry, I can't resist.)
