[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Stock Unlock (YC W22) - Investment Educat...
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Launch HN: Stock Unlock (YC W22) - Investment Education for
Everyone
Hi there HN! My name is Jake Ruth, and together with Nick Puljic
and Daniel Pronk we are building Stock Unlock
(https://stockunlock.com/), a web app that provides investment
education and analysis tools. It's great to meet you all... and
speaking of "meeting", Nick and I only met Daniel in real life a
couple weeks ago even though we have been working on this for over
a year... but more to come on that later in the post :) As retail
investors we noticed that many retail products have some combo of
the following shortcomings: high paywalls, tricky to navigate web
design, oversimplification of investing principles, and misaligned
incentives that push users to trade more--instead of giving them
adequate education to manage a successful portfolio. They are very
non noob friendly. Further, I am personally very "triggered" by
the lack of financial education myself and friends were not given
growing up. I am fortunate to be a software engineer, but it really
hurts me to see a lot of close friends, and even family get bit by
the financial system since they are not educated by it. And it's
not our fault. Much of America and the world falls into this
bucket, which was exasperated by a deflationary financial brokerage
environment that led to trading apps which would allow anyone to
trade stocks in minutes from their pocket (for free!). Honestly,
that's great. Access to markets is important. However, many people
are following a similar story line, you get easy access to trading
for low costs/free, you probably started in the bull market from
the covid flash crash, made some money if you're lucky, but have
since fallen into the red/realized how clueless we all are for what
investing actually is. I remember so clearly a few years ago
looking at a Yahoo Finance page and feeling overwhelmed by price
ratios, reported financials, stock prices cross stocks, analysts,
different news articles from the same publishers saying the
opposite headlines... It honestly felt impossible to learn.
Especially since my family/close friends aren't into finance or
investing. Then one day, sitting on my bed in NYC hiding from
COVID in 2020, I stumbled upon Daniel's Youtube account. I do not
follow celebs, I don't know famous people, I don't twitter, but
there was something about Daniel and the investment education
content he put out that immediately had me captivated and drawn to
his account. He is well spoken and presents investing and financial
analysis in a way that I actually could understand, and it blew my
mind. I proceeded to feverishly ingest his Youtube content for
months. I began to notice a pattern in Daniel's videos, he would
sometimes use third party sites to show investment graphs, but he
would often open an excel sheet with 3-5 stocks in it (columns),
and then fill in rows for financial metrics. I will quote Daniel "I
spend about 5-8 hours a week making these spreadsheets, it takes a
lot of time but it's worth it". So I'm an engineer sitting here
watching this and I think... I could definitely write a program to
do this. And better yet, I could give it to Daniel as a thank you
for all the great work he puts into Youtube. So on a weekend I
whip up this program to automate his spreadsheet creation and give
it to Daniel... I mean I tried to, but Daniel didn't answer my
Youtube comment! GASP!!!! Ok... so, I found his instagram, but
still no luck. I was honestly pretty pissed, like this dude is so
smart how could he not recognize that I can save him 5-8 hours a
week if he used my program to automate his spreadsheet creation.
Well, another 2 months go by. Every week I iterated on the program
more, started ranting to my co-worker at the time Nick (we were at
Oscar Health together), and kept pinging Daniel shamelessly across
multiple social channels. FINALLY he answered me... we ended up
hopping on a zoom call, which itself went for 2-3 hours, a beer was
cracked... the rest is well, history! I was able to pretty easily
write a Python script to hit a financial data API (Alpha Vantage at
the time), and Daniel, Nick, and myself all saw a vision for us to
create a software platform that actually taught users how to
invest, without oversimplifying the process, and at a price that
didn't break the bank. The moment at which this turned from a side
project to a company, was when I shared my program with Daniel
Pronk's investing discord community and people basically freaked
out. "This is the best thing ever", "can you make it generate
_this_?", "how can I pay you for this"... I basically took the
classic "push back chair from desk" moment and knew it was time to
take this full time. Thankfully, Nick was also on board! We had a
founding team of 3, and at the time the project was called "Stonk
Reporter" (I'm still a bit salty we didn't keep this name). After a
long 4 month beta/pilot with around 200 users from Daniel's
discord, we launched Stock Unlock on December 11th 2021. Jake and
Nick met Daniel for the first time a couple weeks ago, until then
it was a fully remote co-founder relationship! Today we provide a
modern/easy-to-use web app which has data visualization tools for
financials, and contextual, inline education. Sites like
Investopedia are good for term lookup, but the education isn't
given at the time the investor needs it. Typically you get
confused, search the internet, and land there--we show it to you in
place. For users who already know the ropes, our graphing tools
allow users to compare 70+ financial metrics across as many stocks
as they want. These tools either don't exist or are part of
extremely pricey programs like Bloomberg Terminal (no retail
investor can afford that). We have existing investors using Stock
Unlock who say they save 80-90% of their time on company analysis
with our tools. Our current business model is that we give
everyone a 7 day free trial, no credit card/totally free to try the
site. We ask for email, but you can give a fake email if you want
and we don't verify it/anything like that. After the 7 day free
trial we are priced at $6.99 per month / $74.99 per year (USD,
prices will vary for Euro/Canada). We build the consumer web app
layer and get our financial data from another startup called
Finnhub. We are "serverless" using AWS for all our backend
infrastructure. We use Cognito for user auth, Api Gateway & Lambda
(Python) for the API, Dynamo & Postgres for data store,
S3/CloudFront/Route 53 for static hosting. The frontend is all
ReactJS with special help from Material UI for our designed
components/us not needing to write tons of CSS (yay), and recharts
for the lib to help draw pretty graphs. There are also a ton of fun
technical challenges that we solve, currency conversion/alignment
for the 122,000 global stocks we support has been hairy/filled with
edge cases, also data staleness for prices/market caps is another
area of complexity. Not to mention building around a 3rd party
HTTPS/JSON api and caching those endpoints/storing some data
internally is a fun juggle! Your feedback/your stories about any
of the above or this space in general would be amazing. I look
forward to interacting with everyone in the comments, we embrace
constructive feedback and feel fortunate knowing that you will hold
us to your highest standards. If you do decide to try our
application, please let us know your thoughts! We launched with a
pretty raw MVP and are adding features to the site weekly, with no
end in sight. Cheers!
Author : hippofluff
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-03-11 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
| soniman wrote:
| What Yahoo! Finance did right was that if you had a watchlist of
| 100 stocks, all of the news from those 100 stocks would show up
| in one feed, instead of 100 separate feeds. It would also be good
| if I could screen by news source, so that spammers like Motley
| Fool could be screened out, which Yahoo! did not have. Yahoo also
| had mass importation of tickers via cut and paste, instead of
| one-by-one creation of watchlists. It would also be good to have
| % return of the stock from the day it was inserted in the feed.
| In terms of charts, it would be nice to have daily / weekly
| monthly charts in one glance, so I can see trends over different
| time frames. I don't care about screeners or charting that much
| because I have other places to screen stocks and do charting, I'm
| looking for a tool to follow the news and at the same time get a
| quick glance at the chart over different time frames.
| hippofluff wrote:
| Wow... TLDR reply here is: I am extremely grateful for all
| these feature requests (thank you!!!), we are recording all of
| these internally! We have been/and will continue to build Stock
| Unlock around feedback like this (from the community!)
|
| More context... All the features your described for our
| watchlist are great, the current watchlist feature we have
| right now is pretty "bare bones" and we are planning a lot of
| improvements to that in the coming months. (Sneak peek: We are
| also building a portfolio tracker too!)
|
| I also am on the same page as you with not needing to pay for a
| screener/things that are already free, we are doubling down on
| the tools in our platform that we just couldn't find a
| good/affordable solution for elsewhere (hence some of the
| prioritization of these features, it's a fun balance!).
|
| The features you're requesting around news is great. We will be
| looking for a good way to find/filter news. I totally agree
| that a lot of news outlet are... so terrible I just never ever
| want to see them.
|
| :)
| marban wrote:
| Take a look at https://biztoc.com
| glutamate wrote:
| MSCI World ETF.
|
| There, I saved you not only $75/yr but also countless hours of
| your time.
| hippofluff wrote:
| This is a great ETF! Stock Unlock is adding support for ETF's
| in the next couple weeks ^_^
|
| I would like to add, a lot of investors will have a majority of
| their holdings in indexes/ETFs/Mutual Funds, but that doesn't
| mean you can't take an allocation and put it into other assets,
| that some may consider more risky (i.e. an individual stock).
|
| If you ever get curious about looking at stocks/"opening the
| hood" I'd appreciate it if you thought of us, if not have a
| great day. Thanks!
| jfmatth wrote:
| Congrats on the website and good luck.
|
| I'm not sure I agree that there isn't Financial Education out
| there? I've used Schwab for 20+ years (yes old guy here) and now
| TDAmeritrade and I can tell you, they are all about education.
|
| Have fun building your idea
| hippofluff wrote:
| Hi! Thank you so much, super appreciate the "congrats", woo!
| _enqueue rockets_
|
| You are super right, there is 100% a lot of investment
| education out there. For my generation, no one I know
| (including myself) is going to go through static content/white
| pages with black text and just read that. Further when it's not
| contextual/inlined with the real financials it's hard to make
| that connection/memory commit.
|
| Building on that, an insight we had here is that education
| needs to be provided when you need it. And most investors have
| no idea when it's a good time to learn a p/e ratio for example.
|
| One thing we did in Stock Unlock, was put inlined education,
| everywhere, defining every term.
|
| Given your experience in this space it would be an honor
| (seriously) to get your honest thoughts about how we are doing
| it. Daniel Pronk has written 200+ pages of custom education
| content which is embedded through 100s of interactable widgets
| throughout the site.
|
| I hope you have a great day, the markets are pretty turbulent
| out there!
| shmatt wrote:
| This looks more like a re-skin of the FinViz Screener more than a
| new product. The only difference is you have to pay for Stock
| Unlock
| hippofluff wrote:
| I'd love to hear your thoughts after using our tool, Finviz is
| a stock screener, Stock Unlock does not have a Stock screener.
| I'd love to gain more insights on your thoughts here so we can
| understand how we appear "at a glance" from the consumer lense.
|
| Is there somewhere on our marketing material that makes it seem
| that we are a screener? If that's the case we would love to
| iterate/make it clear we aren't a stock screener.
|
| Thanks for this insight ^_^
| shmatt wrote:
| From your front page
|
| "Compare & visualize financial data"
|
| "Unleash the power of our Free Form Tool to compare stocks
| across 60+ financial metrics like reported financials,
| ratios, growth and more, in an easily digestible
| visualization"
|
| "Over 60 financial metrics to compare"
|
| "20+ years of historical data"
|
| "Easy to use interface"
|
| "See analyst price targets, rating changes over time, EPS &
| revenue estimates, and more"
|
| "Quickly view analysts most recent recommendations and how
| they have changed over time"
|
| "Gain insights into the future performance of companies"
|
| I can keep going, but these are all things I and people I
| know use FinViz for
|
| Why gain insights into future performance if you're not
| screening stocks for purchase? Your comment about not being a
| screener confuses me. It sounds more like. "Our product owner
| doesn't like the word screener"
|
| If your additional payment-worthy feature is explaining the
| technical terms. FinViz also explains them
| https://finviz.com/help/screener.ashx
| hippofluff wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense, we are going to work really hard
| internally to work on our branding/what our marketing site
| is saying. It seems that we aren't properly conveying what
| we are, and that's on us. I'm grateful for you taking the
| time to bring this to our attention.
|
| I'm all ears for any other feedback you have!
|
| > Why gain insights into future performance if you're not
| screening stocks for purchase? Your comment about not being
| a screener confuses me. It sounds more like. "Our product
| owner doesn't like the word screener"
|
| Most of the insights we have are analyzing past financials
| for things like "is this company profitable", "is this
| companies dividend payment > than their free cash flow" for
| example. I did look up the english definition for
| "screener" and it's a bit vague. I always viewed it
| strictly as an input tool, where users enter in criteria
| and then get "screened" search results which filter from a
| large DB/etc. I may be mistaken if that term applies to
| more than just things like finviz, but that's my experience
| with it. I've never seen someone use the term "screener"
| for a new feature like ours that doesn't conform to/behave
| like any other screeners I've used to date.
|
| English is hard lol, I prefer Python :p
| endisneigh wrote:
| No offense but I don't see the point of this. Take a random
| sample of your users using whatever tooling you build, vs me
| who's using a total market index. Let's wait 20 years and it's
| unlikely any of your users will beat me when adjusted for risk.
|
| Honestly people have become way too arrogant due to 2020 and 2019
| being a ridiculous bull market. Most of the time people picking
| individual stocks get obliterated.
| hippofluff wrote:
| Hi, thanks for sharing your perspective. While Stock Unlock is
| a great tool, I don't think it's meant for everyone. If you are
| a passive investor that is DCA'ing into an index, I don't think
| a tool like Stock Unlock would be for you.
|
| Further/mathematically you're correct, statistically you will
| beat people that try to beat the market.
|
| That being said, there's a lot of angles to this. For example,
| you can put x% of money into safe investments, but a lot of
| people do really nerd out on companies/understanding them (and
| will take smaller chunks of their money into more risky
| investments). For people like myself I can even use my capital
| to fund/invest in companies that are supporting causes I like
| (like green energy). We have found a lot of our users just
| enjoy learning, and it doesn't even mean they will invest.
|
| I'll end this by highlighting that a lot of apps today are
| incentivized/have revenue structures which are built upon user
| trade frequency. That's bad. At Stock Unlock, we are
| incentivized to teach our users & we make money from the
| subscription fee for the platform. We don't care/would never
| push people to buy, well anything. They can take our
| opinionless/open research and data visualization tools and do
| with that what they want.
|
| I'll end this by highlighting again, that your point makes
| sense and I fully respect/anticipate that we won't cater to
| everyone's needs today. Please keep us in mind if you ever get
| curious about how to analyze a single stock!
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| I wish you would just be honest and say you are trying to
| assist people in _gambling_.
|
| Investing is the world I have grown to absolutely hate. Like,
| you can't know how much I hate that word. Just like all the
| crypto "investing".
|
| It's all about people trying to get rich in something _they
| have zero control over_. And the only people who can even
| benefit from this gambling are people who already have enough
| capital for it to make any difference, so it just continues
| to help the already well off be even more well off, while the
| people without capital are left behind.
|
| The world would be infinitely better off without the services
| you are trying to provide.
| hippofluff wrote:
| > I wish you would just be honest and say you are trying to
| assist people in _gambling_
|
| I have to apologize if we are putting off a message (that
| I'm not aware of*) that we assist with gambling. Long term
| investing is not meant to be gambling, and that's the
| entire point of our platform, to educate people/having them
| think that stocks aren't just lottery tickets you buy when
| someone at the bar says "it's going to the moon"
|
| I understand this space in general has trust issues, I
| understand that a lot of people are burned/on their heels
| for this space, I get it, that's why we are here building
| this. On our side we never promise returns, or sell this as
| a tool that will make you rich, we advertise this as a way
| for people to gain fair access to market data with tools
| the pros use, embedded with education that makes it
| accessible for anyone to learn. We have no skin in the game
| for how people invest/trade but hope to influence less
| "gambly" decisions through our platform.
|
| > The world would be infinitely better off without the
| services you are trying to provide.
|
| I am getting a sense that you will be saying this blindly
| to any app you see that comes around, and I don't blame
| you, it's an unfair world out there with a lot of shady
| people trying to make a quick buck. If you look at
| companies core fundamentals, investing is not gambling.
| Investing is understanding a business and industry and
| forecasting when there's a margin of safety of that
| companies future growth, relative to it's current trading
| price and reported financials/leadership/company earnings
| communications/all that (it's not simple and takes time to
| learn! We make that process easier.). It's an entire world.
| If you ever change your mindset here to be more open minded
| that not everyone is out to get you, I'm sure Stock Unlock
| will show that we are different. If you have more
| constructive feedback I'd love to continue this
| conversation, if not I appreciate your time and comments
| here.
| 1in1010 wrote:
| Jake, you say you want to help the retail investor... Then why
| are you only pointing them into buying individual stocks?
|
| Most are better served with a more conservative ETF market index
| portfolio approach. Picking individual stocks can be part of
| one's portfolio at some point but it is a hard place to start.
| wnolens wrote:
| He can't decide for people what the best course of action is,
| only give them to tools if they wish to go down this rabbit
| hole.
|
| It's meant for the financially mostly-literate and curious, not
| your mom/dad. It's for everyone who watches Jim Cramer.
| recursive wrote:
| So this isn't meant to get people to the point of being
| mostly-literate? Like what even is a stock and how do they
| work?
| llampx wrote:
| Guess what ETFs consist of...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| That's the point. Most investors are served perfectly fine by
| an index fund and functional broker. That's it.
|
| Active trading and expensive funds are your enemy as an
| unsophisticated investor. VTI or ITOT and chill, and as long
| as you have income, discipline, and an emergency fund you'll
| do better than most.
|
| https://longnow.org/ideas/02018/02/09/warren-buffett-wins-
| mi...
|
| https://longbets.org/362/
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/01/08/46.
| ..
|
| https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/01/07/index-67f786d0f1.
| .. ("Never buy or sell an individual security; the person on
| the other side of the table knows more than you do about that
| stuff.")
| searchableguy wrote:
| For anyone looking for investment resource targeted towards
| Indian Market.
|
| https://indiainvestments.wiki is the best resource and free for
| anyone to contribute to.
|
| Most people don't need to research individual stocks as OP
| said.
|
| They should learn about XIRR, excel, risk and portfolio
| management (which will cover insurance, emergency fund, expense
| management), and different types of investment instruments.
|
| The wiki covers all of it and answers frequently asked
| questions related to Indian Market.
|
| Everyone push toward trading individual stocks because it's
| profitable for businesses. Brokerage earn more money through
| those trades whereas many AMC which manage direct funds lose
| money on transaction cost in initial years and only make up for
| it via other side income. It is the case in India.
| hippofluff wrote:
| Hi! I agree 100% that stocks are not the only investment
| vehicle, and you're right it's not meant for everyone to buy.
|
| Also, we are developing support for viewing ETFs as I type this
| (well, Nick is today). Which will be released in the next
| couple weeks.
|
| Our MVP here, is built around communities of people who want to
| learn more about stocks, as well as get better research tools
| than what they use currently. We do not have any intention of
| pushing people to buy anything, the "vibe" is moreso giving as
| much information and education as possible, which we
| believe/are seeing will lead to people making more confident
| informed decisions with their capital. Whether that's buying
| stocks, or something else, no skin off our back.
|
| This is a great topic :)
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Being "confident" and "informed" are not virtues when
| investing for middle/upper-middle class people. They simply
| need to put money in a good ETF or managed money-market fund
| with low fees, and contribute regularly. No "research" should
| be involved.
| hippofluff wrote:
| Hi! I really appreciate this perspective, you're not wrong,
| but I do think there's room for a lot of investment styles.
| I know a lot of middle/upper class people that enjoy
| analyzing stocks for long term holds in companies they
| believe in.
|
| I respect we won't cater to everyone, but the numbers/data
| we are seeing is showing a lot of our subs are middle
| aged/middle class people that are loving our tool. So some
| people will want it, some won't, that's my take.
|
| If you ever get curious, please think of us! Again, thanks
| for the insight :)
| gkop wrote:
| Curious for you to go a bit further here. I'd argue two links
| [0] [1] have all the info a regular person needs to make
| prudent investment decisions. Why do regular people need your
| research tools?
|
| More pointedly, and I ask this as someone completely
| unfamiliar with Daniel's content, but does Daniel claim to
| beat the market or that his audience could beat the market?
| If so, there's a moral hazard here, in the opinion of folks
| like myself that believe such advice is fairly dangerous.
|
| [0] http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/ifyoucan.pdf
|
| [1] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio
| altdataseller wrote:
| Because they need to make money, and to do that, they need
| less people to believe what you said. That's my cynical
| point of view
| hippofluff wrote:
| Hi! Sry for the lag on the reply here, I didn't have time
| to read those through fully but I skimmed both.
|
| I want to make one thing super clear, we don't make money
| off users trading, we are an investment/analysis tool and
| we make no claims/would never be a predatory entity that
| makes claims of x% returns/anything like that. We genuinely
| care about educating our users, and then letting them make
| their own decisions.
|
| As for the links you sent (thanks for that btw!) I would
| bucket this with a bulk of the education out there, that's
| existed for a while, but hasn't been solving the financial
| literacy issue. The reason we believe this is the case is
| that education you sent is boring/static white text. Most
| people in the younger generations just don't learn that
| way. Further that education isn't inlined/when you need it
| while looking at financials.
|
| A lot of our users/the founders find it much easier/more
| inviting/more fun & interactive to learn with the "clicky"
| ? modules we embed inline all over the site to define
| everything in small chunks. We are finding this is a way to
| learn where you actually remember things, but more
| importantly are engaged/having fun learning it. We have yet
| to see a tool besides ours to execute on this properly
| since it's very hard to create a consumer product that
| makes learning investing easy. Most importantly noobies
| feel comfortable in our tool, 99% of people who are brand
| new to investing get scared to death and never start when
| sent 20+ 10pt size font articles.
|
| Lastly, my point isn't to say those resources aren't great,
| they are. But statistically people will just not read that,
| and/or not internalize it since it's not being applied when
| they need it while researching numbers/S1 filings/SEC
| reports/etc
| wnolens wrote:
| I share the concern of others, so won't waste more space here.
|
| But I'll ask for results/case studies :) What are some trades
| you/others have made by using this tool which resulted in gains?
|
| Describing successful uses of the tool would go a long way in
| getting potential users at least excited and believing they could
| do the same.
| hippofluff wrote:
| Hi! This space has a lot of "trust issues" and I completely
| agree with the sentiment that this type of headline/web app has
| seemingly "crossed our path" before, and that this may just be
| another one...
|
| We launched on December 11th, we don't have numbers on "trades"
| since we don't suggest or push trading. Long term investing is
| more of the vibe, and the time frame is too short for anything
| meaningful to share there. Short term trading is hard/98% of
| people loose money after 2 years, we aren't about that.
|
| What I can say is this. Daniel Pronk, many other financial
| youtubers, myself, and our users have reported the following
| (not exact quotes, I'm paraphrasing): "Stock Unlock saves me
| 80-90% of my time it used to take me to analyze a company",
| "The insights feature really helps me get a quick first look at
| a stock when I start my analysis", "education mode is a game
| changes, finally a website I can use and learn how to invest"
|
| The last thought I'd leave here, financial youtubers have
| millions of followers, and many people are looking for a way to
| learn how to invest, and not have things abstracted/done for
| them (these tools just do not exist in brokerage sites today).
| This tool is basically a platformization pulling together all
| the knowledge basins from Youtube accounts/other tools priced
| way too high.
|
| (7 day free trial/no credit card/no pressure to purchase
| anything) Our price is also, the lowest out there, for the most
| value. There simply isn't another product out there with our
| feature set at our price point, not to mention education
| embedded everywhere makes up approachable to all investors, not
| just experienced ones.
|
| I feel that may be too long of a response... but here we are.
| Thanks for giving me the opportunity to make a case for that,
| I'd love to continue this thread :)
| faangiq wrote:
| Ah to be young and enthusiastic. FYI "retail investor" is a
| derogatory term you should probably avoid using.
| hippofluff wrote:
| Hi! I am unaware of this but would love to learn more, I
| hear/and use this term daily with a lot of different people and
| this is news to me.
|
| Any resources you can share for me to gain more knowledge
| around this? Also is there a term that is more acceptable we
| can use instead?
|
| Thanks!
| jn31415 wrote:
| Do you happen to be hiring customer service people?
| hippofluff wrote:
| Not at this time, we simply don't have enough CS volume for a
| team.
|
| That being said we are in a growth trajectory to need a team
| likely by years end. If you're still interested then I'd love
| to touch base! My email is predictably Jake {at} StockUnlock
| [dot] c0m (take that web crawlers!)
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| My initial thought when I see it is "for everyone" is "not for
| me" - who is it actually for? You have to have some initial
| target persona that needs this info today, right?
| hippofluff wrote:
| I see your point here, honestly it was incredibly challenging
| to pick only 4 words in our title so we may have missed the
| mark there.
|
| Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify: we are a
| product for anyone who is curious to learn more about
| investing, as well as for any existing investors who want to
| save time/money with our powerful tooling like the Free Form
| tool
|
| Many of my friends who are financially illiterate are loving
| the tool, as well as financial YouTubers and professionals who
| love the simplicity and ease of our data visualization features
| all over our site to easily spot trends/analyze companies they
| may want to invest in
|
| I'd love to clarify more if you have additional questions! The
| best way to see our value is to use the tool, which is honestly
| something we need to work on since it's not immediately obvious
| at a glance why we are a great platform
| tyrfing wrote:
| Without adding some sort of no-signup use or free tier, this
| looks dead on arrival. It's not clear what value add you're
| providing over existing options like Google Finance, Yahoo
| Finance, and a lot of smaller sites. As is, there's nothing
| compelling enough to make me want to take the high-friction step
| of signing up for a trial.
|
| I understand the motivation, a lot of existing options aren't
| particularly good in varying ways. I just don't see any real
| differentiation here.
| hippofluff wrote:
| Thank you so much for sharing these feedback and I appreciate
| the insight.
|
| I'm curious how much time you have spent on Yahoo Finance or
| Google Finance, almost everyone who uses those tools for over a
| day finds Stock Unlock and usually ends up subscribing since we
| are just worlds away from what they offer. We are totally free
| to try/you can even type in a fake email, so I'd be curious to
| hear more of your thoughts after you try out our tool.
|
| I am not here to brag about numbers, but our growth/number
| subscribers backs up our own angst/annoyances we had as
| founders that every single tool out there today whether it's
| free or paid cannot do simple things like: "Show me
| Google/Apple/MSFT revenue for last 20 years graphed together,
| okay now lets throw price to sales in there", you can do this
| on our platform in 60s in the free form tool.
|
| Further, for anyone that spends a lot of time
| investing/analyzing companies, YF and Google Finance just don't
| cut it. We are gaining subscribers daily that are leaving those
| platforms since they believe (and our telling us) how much
| value they are getting from our platform, at a price that is
| lower than anyone else (we care about our users free cash flow)
|
| I really don't mean to come out here and sell, but I believe if
| you used our tool you would see/feel that we are not the same
| as the sites you quoted.
|
| Again/to reiterate, your opinion is appreciated and thank you
| for taking the time to comment and share your thoughts :)
| shanehoban wrote:
| You might want to secure the tickers allowed to be queried at
| your endpoint for getFreeFormNoAuth.
|
| This should be done on the backend as currently you can just make
| open requests for any ticker currently to that endpoint, and it
| allows it [1].
|
| [1] https://x8ijjvlkb0.execute-api.us-
| east-2.amazonaws.com/prod/...
| hippofluff wrote:
| Hi! Thank you for informing us of this potential issue, I
| really appreciate the good intention behind making us aware of
| this.
|
| You may not agree, but here is the context on this: We
| purposefully do not restrict this, and actually do have the
| code that can restrict (if we want to turn it back on). Anyone
| can make a free account to Stock Unlock, and have unrestricted
| access to our whole site (and therefor the "API"). I personally
| do not mind if someone uses that URL as it's almost trivial to
| do the same thing with logged in cred/curl.
|
| There may be something I am missing here and if that's the case
| please call me out on it. Again, thanks! Also, welcome to our
| "API" lol ^_^
| shanehoban wrote:
| No problem, just looking out is all! Best of luck!
| hippofluff wrote:
| People like you are awesome, again, thank you! This did
| result in us wanting to double check we aren't entering a
| grey area with our data provider.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > I personally do not mind
|
| You personally might not mind, but I suspect the people who
| license you the ticker feeds might. ;-)
| hippofluff wrote:
| > You personally might not mind, but I suspect the people
| who license you the ticker feeds might. ;-)
|
| You're right... We will double check this with them.
| Appreciate the nice push here and thank you. It's
| definitely worth our due diligence to make sure this
| doesn't breach any "grey areas" for the restrictions we
| have to not re-sell their api directly.
| kylorhall wrote:
| My company pays a lot of figures for xignite and we
| cannot make this data publicly available without some
| restrictions (it would cost a lot more to do so).
|
| My purely non-legal take is we can distribute price and
| metadata for instruments relative to a user's portfolio
| or a defined demo set of data or charts to yours, etc,
| but not freely distribute price data without an
| attribution behind it. I _suppose_ a user could add
| literally all 300k instruments we support to get the
| price data and that would violate our agreements (similar
| stuff has happened before, just watch it), but we'd just
| have to deal with the user via our TOS.
|
| Good luck, unfortunately the next level of APIs for
| financial data and licensing fees can be annoying, from
| almost free to like 6 figures overnight. Some exchanges
| are much worse than others, like arbitrary pricing based
| on how large your company is...
| hippofluff wrote:
| Thank you for all these insights! We also went "through
| the ringer" finding good quality financial data, that
| would allow us to build a consumer web app around.
|
| I think it would be worth you time to look into Finnhub,
| you can tell them "Jake from Stock Unlock" referred you
| (if you haven't tried them already).
|
| I like to think of them as the "anti-Bloomberg", their
| data quality is great and their coverage is excellent.
|
| We also churned through meeting with a lot of the
| "legacy" data providers that have ridiculous/terrible
| contracts that make it complex/really annoying to build a
| consumer platform around.
|
| I'd love to chat more about this! Very few people have
| really had to dive deep on this, so it's neat meeting
| others that feel the pain.
|
| Lastly, the term I use is "data cartel". There is
| literally a financial data cartel, but I am convinced
| this is the decade that get's broken up, and
| entrepreneurs like us will have a lot more "innovation"
| room. Cheers!
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Don't take this the wrong way but I've had a quick glance at your
| website and I don't see what's different from your competitors.
|
| Looking at the homepage all I see is "yet another" .... yet
| another screening tool, yet another charting tool, yet another
| analyst expectations tool, yet another watchlist tool.
|
| And frankly, for a company that claims its all about "investment
| education for everyone", I don't know why you are selling stuff
| that does not work.
|
| Screening tools don't work. They don't work as a pure concept
| (i.e. there's no magic screen to make money / avoid loosing
| money). They don't work on the basis that you are mostly
| screening against lagging data (company reported financials). In
| the _right hands_ screening tools can _sometimes_ give you
| something resembling a "shortlist", but there's still a whole
| load of donkey work to be done after that to verify/validate.
|
| Technical analysis (reading tea leaves on charts) doesn't work
| either.
|
| Analyst expectations ? Give me a break. Most analysts are sell-
| side, not buy-side.
|
| Its like come on guys. If you're about "investment education for
| everyone" then you really need to do the Right Thing (TM) and
| explain to people there's no magic wand, there's no shortcut to
| hard work, and explain to people what they really should be
| doing, i.e. understanding what they are investing in (understand
| the company, understand the industry, understand the geo-
| political context), and explaining people how to evaluate their
| appetite for risk and how to invest within that risk profile.
| altdataseller wrote:
| They need to make money and they can't do so if people are
| putting their money into boring, index funds that outperform
| gambling on individual stocks.
| hippofluff wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment here that gambling on stocks is
| bad.
|
| Our goal is to provide education and analysis tools, since we
| believe investing is not gambling. Even though, many people
| today treat it like it is. We don't make money/aren't
| incentivized on our users making/executing trades (unlike a
| lot of other services today).
|
| I understand that our product isn't going to interest
| everyone, there's nothing wrong with only investing in index
| funds. That being said, a lot of people take 5-15% of their
| money and put it into riskier investments. Also, a lot of
| newer investors are investing in causes/things they believe
| in as a social/environmental cause. By being supplied with
| investing education and tooling that most people are deprived
| of/never shown, we hope that we can remove the word "gamble"
| from long term investing
| hippofluff wrote:
| Hi! Not taking this the wrong way at all, I appreciate you
| taking the time to share these valuable thoughts.
|
| "explain to people there's no magic wand, there's no shortcut
| to hard work, and explain to people what they really should be
| doing" - we could not agree more, I'd go further to say this is
| what we are building, so we are going to dive deep to make sure
| we are putting across the right message when users first hit
| the website. (Side note, I think you'd love Daniel Pronk's
| Youtube channel!)
|
| I agree about screeners, Stock Unlock doesn't have screeners. I
| am curious what other sites you have used that have what we do
| in the "free form" tool (maybe bloomberg terminal but they cost
| around 25k a year-ish)? Also a huge angle on this is the
| embedded education, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. The
| embedded education has been helping newer investors feel
| comfortable/learn terms/learn how to analyze financials on
| their own. We find many other sites have sub par design or they
| present things in a way that assumes the user is already an
| investing pro/or has a finance degree
|
| As for analyst data I actually agree, I had a light argument
| with founders about this but "lost" since many investors and
| most of our users expect this. But for me personally, I never
| listen to analysts. And low and behold... it's one of our most
| viewed pages after insights tab and free form tool.
|
| Again, thanks for being honest. I appreciate that
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Stock Unlock doesn't have screeners
|
| "Stock Unlock quickly analyzes any stock and highlights the
| positives and negatives we find" is basically the same thing
| just on a per-stock rather than screener basis ?
|
| The animation on your website is basically showing that,
| assigning red/green flags based on the usual screening
| suspects.
|
| Unless you are going to tell me that output is specifically
| adapted to each individual company and the industry where it
| operates. But I doubt that. Since to do that correctly
| requires the sort of manual work analysts do, you can't
| automate it.
| hippofluff wrote:
| > Unless you are going to tell me that output is
| specifically adapted to each individual company and the
| industry where it operates. But I doubt that.
|
| That's what we do! For example, if you look at a REIT stock
| like "bxp" that will have different insights than BAC which
| is a bank stock. Same for MSFT, which is not a REIT or a
| bank, and must have different financial metrics to care
| about.
|
| No automations, we are working HARD and coding in a bunch
| of static text/education/etc (200+ pages and counting of
| custom education content to date).
|
| Daniel Pronk is the content creator and creates the product
| specs for how we analyze different industries. We actually
| aren't doing anything too fancy here, you request a ticker,
| we pull it's financials, run analysis on them, then print
| that to the user. MOST importantly imo, we have detailed
| explanation for everything/never push our users, but rather
| guide/teach our users how to analyze and interpret these
| things for themselves so they can make their own decisions.
|
| If you have time to crawl through the tool/click around I'd
| be curious to see what you think. Again, I am not taking
| this as offense, I'm grateful you're giving raw feedback.
| It helps us improve!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if you look at a REIT stock like "bxp" that will have
| different insights than BAC which is a bank stock. Same
| for MSFT, which is not a REIT or a bank, and must have
| different financial metrics to care about_
|
| Do you show non-GAAP measures for its divisions? That
| would be neat.
|
| From the front page, this looks like an interesting, if
| somewhat undifferentiated, analysis tool. (See most
| brokers' free stock screening/filtering tools, for
| example, IB's or Fidelity's.) The UI appears well built.
| As a trainer for would-be brokers, it's fine. Where it
| loses its education _bona fides_ is in its stock-analysis
| orientation. That paradigm contains an implicit bias
| towards stock picking. (Versus, _e.g._ , a portfolio-
| analysis paradigm.)
|
| The fundamentals approach is laudable. But it's surface
| level. If you can't construct financial statements from
| scratch, memorising a bunch of accounting ratios doesn't
| drive first-principles understanding. If you can't model
| a capital structure, you're scratching at surface level
| stats mined to bits by the pros when _e.g._ a bond
| issuance is announced.
|
| All that said, your company could make money if it tapped
| into the take-a-screenshot-and-tweet market. It won't
| help people understand. But many traders don't care about
| that. That's a valid target market.
| hippofluff wrote:
| > Do you show non-GAAP measures for its divisions? That
| would be neat.
|
| We do show this, this can be found on insights tab,
| financials tab (shows GAAP financials, 20+ years),
| graphed in free form tool, and seen in the "quick view
| table" for stats next to a stock graph on a stock landing
| page
|
| I totally agree, we do look a bit similar from our
| marketing page, these comments are insightful and it will
| lead us to find different branding to better put across
| what we are. So thanks again for that!
|
| You are also right, financial analysis is just one piece
| of the puzzle, there are a lot more things to look at
| when deciding to make an investment.
|
| > All that said, your company could make money if it
| tapped into the take-a-screenshot-and-tweet market. It
| won't help people understand. But many traders don't care
| about that. That's a valid target market.
|
| We will be working hard here to prove that isn't our
| brand, but I don't blame you for getting that vibe based
| on how our marketing site looks. Our site is the only
| website, with embedded/contextual education inlined
| everywhere, we defined everything, and many new investors
| have told us personally how helpful our site has been to
| help them getting started. Our companies
| mission/incentives are for our users to learn how to
| invest the right way. We don't make money from user trade
| frequency, it's from our subscriptions.
|
| I don't mean to sell at all, I get super passionate about
| this stuff and this is a very engaging thread. (Hopefully
| it's not coming across that way, but if it is I can
| handle you telling me that and I'll learn quick!)
| FredPret wrote:
| > Screening tools don't work
|
| There are some very successful investors who might disagree
| with that assessment somewhat, to put it mildly
| endisneigh wrote:
| Who? And how much of their success was due to screening
| tools?
| FredPret wrote:
| Well any of the ones that have made a profit, for starters.
|
| Even indexes like the S&P 500 are nothing but prefiltered
| lists of stocks. S&P's criteria include size and industry.
| Buffet is famous for filtering out stocks by his own
| criteria, mainly focusing on the balance sheet.
|
| Nothing is certain, but a good filter increases the
| likelihood of profit, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > Well any of the ones that have made a profit, for
| starters.
|
| Citation? I've made profit without ever looking at a
| screening tool or doing technical analysis.
|
| > Nothing is certain, but a good filter increases the
| likelihood of profit, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.
|
| Citation?
|
| Analysts do tons of technical analysis and fail to beat
| SPY. Buffet himself even made a Long Bet with someone to
| this point. I'm surprised you'd use him as an example...
| FredPret wrote:
| I just mentioned the S&P500 as an example of a filter.
| S&P500 is what SPY consists of.
|
| Also, filter != technical analysis. Filters can work on
| any indicator. I use them on fundamentals, as do Buffet,
| Munger, Graham, Dodd.
| endisneigh wrote:
| OK, enjoy your billions with your filters.
| FredPret wrote:
| You can disagree without being a dick about it
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > There are some very successful investors who might disagree
| with that assessment somewhat, to put it mildly
|
| Like who ?
|
| The first thing any "successful investor" will tell you is
| that there is no magic answer to investing.
|
| If you accept there is no magic answer, then by definition
| screening does not work.
|
| As I said. In the RIGHT HANDS, screening will give you
| something that MIGHT be a "shortlist". But that output WILL
| NOT be actionable, there will be a bunch of time consuming
| hard manual work to do after that in order to
| validate/verify/research further. Post-validation you will
| find most of what the screener outputted was indeed not
| actionable and _IF_ you are lucky there might be one or two
| names on the list that are.
|
| You can't just make some magic selections in a screener and
| expect it to spit out the next ten-bagger. It just doesn't
| work like that.
| FredPret wrote:
| Setting up a bit of a strawman here.
|
| I did not say screening tools do _all the work_. I said
| that they _work_. Onviously one uses screening tools as a
| starting point. But they are step one in every sane
| approach to analysis.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > I said that they work.
|
| But they don't.
|
| Companies massage their financials. This, by definition,
| throws off your screeners (false positives / false
| negatives).
|
| Other times companies don't screen well, they might be
| technically "weak" if your definition is based upon
| screening, but they are actually perfectly viable and
| actionable investments.
|
| I see both, a lot.
| raidicy wrote:
| >(understand the company, understand the industry, understand
| the geo-political context), and explaining people how to
| evaluate their appetite for risk and how to invest within that
| risk profile.
|
| Can you recommend any books/media for this specifically? I've
| often wanted this type of material but haven't been able to
| distinguish pop-economic feel-good/self-help books from high
| value ones.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I agree with you almost completely, except where you have
| gripes about "lagging data."
|
| Every finance professional reads 10-K and 10-Qs, so I have no
| idea where you're coming from with this complaint. Where else
| are you getting finance information? CNBC? Teslarati?
|
| The technical analysis and analyst ratings crap needs to go,
| for sure. I'm tired of seeing that bs. They're immediate
| signals someone's peddling amateur hour.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Please put a TLDR at the top of this post. There is currently one
| sentence that refers to "financial education" but no further
| details on what that entails until you read a long story about
| how you met. I skimmed the post but still don't know what market
| you're in or how you're differentiated. Most HNers will care more
| about your product/vision than the story of how you met.
| hippofluff wrote:
| You're right, there likely was an opportunity for a TLDR there.
|
| I will post one for you here for your convenience:
|
| TLDR; Stock Unlock is a web app providing investment education
| and analysis tools, which is built by a group of stock nerds
| with an interesting company origin story. We are on a mission
| to show everyone that investing isn't meant to be hard, the
| tooling today is just inaccessible/hard to use. By focusing on
| education and building tools which save our communities time,
| Stock Unlock is looking to be the online place for everyone to
| learn to invest/manage their own capital.
|
| I hope that's not too sale-y? I am much better at writing code
| than english, I promise :p
|
| If this is still unclear please let me know and I'd love to
| give more insights.
| gnicholas wrote:
| This helps, but it's still pretty high-level. Investment
| education could mean a lot of things, and it's not quite
| clear how people interact with the product.
|
| Also, I have somewhat of a shady knee-jerk reaction when I
| hear about any stock-analysis-tools-to-help-you-make-money. I
| always think "if this is such a great system, why don't you
| keep it a secret and use it yourself with your own money or
| money you've raised?" If getting a few dollars a week from a
| bunch of people is more lucrative than using the tool
| internally, how valuable can the tool be?
|
| Just my 2C/!
| hippofluff wrote:
| Our investment education right now is 100s of interactive
| "?" widgets all over the site that are built from 200+
| pages of definitions written by Daniel Pronk. Things like
| definitions, how to calculate, how investors use this, etc
| (I hope that further clarifies, you're right that
| "investment education" is vague)
|
| And I see your points and it's definitely a trustless space
| we are in which is why we are built off the ground from
| discord communities/not people leaving finance jobs in
| suits. We will work on our branding, we never promise
| people will make money, only that we provide resources to
| help people better analyze and understand stocks. Sure,
| that should result in better money management, but as a co-
| founder I'd never promise returns/tell someone this will
| get you rich
|
| Your 2cents is worth a dollar to me. Appreciate all this!
| dang wrote:
| I would normally agree but when editing this text I found it so
| exuberant that I just decided to leave it as is.
| theonewolf wrote:
| Have you considered other forms of financial literacy?
|
| For example, many people don't use credit cards properly.
|
| Many people don't take advantage of lower interest loans.
|
| Many people don't understand the importance of certain forms of
| permanent / life / disability insurance.
|
| These are all things I hope my kids get to learn _before leaving
| high school_!
|
| Your tool feels like it could really expand financial literacy
| across the board, not just for investments.
| hippofluff wrote:
| I love the way you think! 100% we are considering all of this.
|
| Right now we are a team of 3 and we haven't had time to expand
| our business into those other niche's. But you best believe we
| have our eyes set on all the above! There is such a big need to
| have easier/more fun ways to get the public more aware about
| these things.
|
| I'd love to hear more thoughts if you have any :)
| tboxer wrote:
| This is great! It was hard to really see the value at first, but
| once I watched one of Daniel's video and saw how he used it I was
| able to see the advantages.
| hippofluff wrote:
| This insight is 100!!! And thank you very much _blushes_
|
| I cannot agree more, one our biggest issues right now is it
| take a person a good amount of time (relative to a "typical"
| site) so really see the value we offer/what we are aiming to
| do.
|
| Daniel will be thrilled to hear that and thank you so much for
| taking a dive on Stock Unlock! We have been having so much fun
| building this, if you have any thoughts/feature
| suggestions/things like that, that come to mind, please let me
| know ^_^
| bayan1234 wrote:
| This looks really cool! I really like the free form chart
| builder. I work at Simply Wall St and we also make financial data
| easy to use and understand. We've realised that a bigger portion
| of our effort should be spent on educating individual investors
| so it looks like we've come to the same conclusion as both of
| you.
|
| If anyone is keen to checkout Simply Wall St
| (https://www.simplywall.st), we have a 7-day free trial and a
| free plan for ongoing light usage.
| jonnylynchy wrote:
| I don't care what you officially call this thing. I'm calling it
| "Stonk Reporter".
| hippofluff wrote:
| I love you
| 300bps wrote:
| I've worked in technology at very large investment banks for
| quite a while. I've seen the pattern of new software engineers
| coming in, learning a little bit about finance and suddenly
| they're day trading equities and equity options. They get lucky
| or not, but always give it back and more.
|
| Investment banks have literally rooms of people who spend 10
| hours per day 6 days per week specializing in whatever security
| you're thinking of buying or selling. Literally - there are
| people that have a full time job specializing in out-of-the-money
| AAPL options with a 6+ month expiration. They also spend millions
| of dollars per year on proprietary data and software engineers to
| weaponize that data.
|
| If you're a full time software engineer spending 10 hours per
| week researching and trading while relying on free/low-cost data,
| _you cannot compete long term with professional traders_. It is
| that simple.
| hippofluff wrote:
| Hi! We would have so much fun having a coffee/beer together
| over this/I would love to learn more about your experience.
|
| To say it simply, I agree! Like completely, my own opinion here
| (building on yours) is that it's really unwise/not smart for
| anyone, whether they are an engineer or not, to day trade/trade
| options/trade on short timelines.
|
| Stock Unlock is built around long term investing, and being
| able to more quickly learn how to understand a company. We
| don't push/have anything that would influence someone to
| trade/invest, our tools are very catered to a long term
| investor and facilitating their investment education journey
| and analysis. For example, we have no options anything in our
| site, no day trading charts. However we do have very in depth
| data visualization tools around historical financials/ways to
| compare companies financials/and ways to dive further into a
| companies executive team/all the other things you'd want to
| look at when considering a long term hold.
|
| Shameless plug, I am very "bullish" on also teaching the
| investing mindset, basically platformitizing great minds like
| Warren Buffet and Peter Lynch so people know what to expect
| when buying a stock in terms of price
| fluctuations/unpredictability of prices short term.
|
| If you're up for it I'd love to continue this thread, thanks
| for the thoughts!
| 300bps wrote:
| _our tools are very catered to a long term investor_
|
| That's awesome! I'll have to check out your app. I am a big
| advocate for a three-fund low-cost index approach(1) but I
| acknowledge that there can be specific circumstances per
| investor.
|
| _basically platformitizing great minds like Warren Buffet
| and Peter Lynch_
|
| May I also humbly suggest researching John Bogle, the founder
| of Vanguard? There is a very active investment community on
| https://www.bogleheads.org/forum
|
| --
|
| (1) Vanguard S&P 500 Index Fund, Vanguard Total International
| Stock Index Fund and Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund.
| Those three funds give a diversified exposure to the entire
| market. Using Vanguard (or Fidelity) is a great way to lower
| costs as is using a simple three-fund portfolio. The thing to
| avoid is the approach that many high-fee money managers use
| to put someone into 12-15 funds that have high loads and then
| rebalance monthly while they're marking up the buys and
| marking down the sells. I had a coworker one time realize
| that he was paying high five figures in fees per year to a
| certain unnamed popular money manager through their hidden
| fees.
| hippofluff wrote:
| I was unaware how active Bogleheads is, that seems like a
| great forum thank you for sharing that.
|
| If you try Stock Unlock I'd love to hear your thoughts ^_^
|
| Wow 5 figures in fees... Not cool! On thing that personally
| kicked off this journey for me was the thought that I
| didn't have to have someone manage my money for me and that
| it brings great peace of mind and calmness when someone has
| fully understanding of how their money is invested. It just
| takes some time/care to learn the basics just like any
| subject
|
| Cheers friend!
| jmportilla wrote:
| Who is your 3rd party data provider for the stock fundamental
| data?
| hippofluff wrote:
| Thanks for this question, we current use Finnhub
| (https://finnhub.io/). We are also in talks with other data
| providers since as we scale we see ourselves connecting to
| multiple, but it's just Finnhub for now.
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