Test your stock-picking skills with instant feedback. Most common word from my users: "addicting".

http://www.inspectd.com

by ssanders82 • 18 years ago

53 49 18 years ago

ssanders826• 18 years ago

I just launched on Saturday and have already had more than 10,000 trades "executed". Your comments are much appreciated. (Note: if you think reading stock charts is a bunch of crackpot hooey, feel free to flame.)

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

I do think that reading stock charts is a bunch of hooey, but I will withhold from flaming. If you could expand this site to allow people an easy web 2.0 method of back-testing alternative trading strategies (or even just portfolios), it would make me happy.

Flemlord• 18 years ago

Try TradeStation.com.

bayleo• 18 years ago

Where are EPS and Beta? I'd love to see them added to the app.

snorkel• 18 years ago

Very cool. It's sort of Hot or Not for stocks. I would suggest showing just a small summary and graph of previous trade below the current total so you can get rid of the New Trade button and have the Buy/Skip/Sell buttons and chart for the next stock imediately available on the result page. That way users can just click Buy/Sell/Skip to move from page to page.

mdemare• 18 years ago

Reading stock charts is a bunch of crackpot hooey. I'm nr. 2 on your site with my highly sophisticated "always buy" strategy.

However, it might be an excellent tool to help technical analysts (gamblers) discover their own lack of skill.

I like your execution - it is indeed addictive.

hugh2• 18 years ago

I'm no expert, but it seems to me that reading stock charts is just a particularly unsophisticated form of statistical arbitrage, and that it _might_ work provided that nobody else in the world is doing it.

Real statistical arbitrage firms, as I understand it, work by looking at the historical variation in thousands of asset prices at once, putting them into an enormous covariance matrix, and using dozens of very smart mathematicians and millions of CPU hours to figure out which assets are likely to be currently underpriced.

That's how folks like Renaissance Technologies got rich. Unfortunately, as soon as the secret got out, other folks started doing it as well, and pretty soon the mispricing of assets got smaller and smaller, so they're in an arms race to find more and more sophisticated algorithms.

So I guess the point is that if mispriced assets are that hard to find when you have a hundred PhDs and a supercomputer, you're not likely to do very well just by looking at whether a squiggly line is currently above or below its recent average. All the easy money has already been vacuumed up.

omnipath• 18 years ago

Stock charts, by itself without a history of what is being traded, is a bunch of hooey. Data without context is worthless.

Even though 2 different charts look the same, the reasons may be different. One could be because a company is doing so well that they are constantly running out of stock (Nintendo) versus another company who's just had their 4th lead paint recall (Toy's R Us).

Readmore• 18 years ago

That is really cool. Keep up the good work, maybe add an API so I can test stock picking programs against your data ;)

ssanders826• 18 years ago

In the works; probably not free :(

sohail• 18 years ago

Why would you say :(? It is a great idea and people would and should pay for it. Fuck free.

henning3• 18 years ago

It'd be easier to just download CSV files of daily historical data from Yahoo Finance, or shell out $10-50/month and get quality realtime feeds.

llimllib2• 18 years ago

wooo enough for the leaderboard in a few minutes.

Anyway, create an API and a bot competition! Don't give the link, and use a timer and required open source to discourage cheating (still can't eliminate it, ah well.)

EDIT: Oh man! your score isn't saved if you make an account. I would be in second place.

TrevorJ• 18 years ago

Is there a way to tell what the company you are trading is? Or is not knowing the point? I would never trade stock based solely on charts.

ojbyrne• 18 years ago

The fact that someone named "RightClickCheater" is at the top of your leaderboard (and way out in front) raises some concerns.

joshwa2• 18 years ago

That'd be right clicking to snatch the chart URL, which contains the stock symbol and date parameters. Peeking into the future would certainly help one's rate of return a bit :)

ssanders826• 18 years ago

Yes, I thought of this but didn't think someone would go to the trouble to look at the stock and date, then look up the price N-days after that, then go back and trade it. Apparently I was wrong! I could solve this by dynamically creating an image w/ PHP and trimming the stock & date, but my poor shared CPU wouldn't like that...

emmett• 18 years ago

I'm currently at the top of your leaderboard after issuing nothing but buy orders for about 5 minutes. I didn't even read the charts.

This confirms my opinion that chart reading is nonsense.

astine3• 18 years ago

Actually, considering that on average, the stack market has grown over the years, this seems like a good strategy. It's why mutual funds and the like exist: individual enterprises come and go, but the economy is constantly growing. If you you invest widely across the economy, you should see fairly consistent growth (with a few spikes and dips which cancel each other out.)

llimllib2• 18 years ago

Right, but the default stock order only lasts 20 days. Surely the small delta up trend of the market doesn't affect a 20 day order in any significant way?

joshwa2• 18 years ago

...or we've stumbled on a really good investment strategy:

1. buy a random stock

2. hold for 20 days

3. profit!

currently #2 on leaderboard before I got bored.

I wonder what the capital gains impact would be...

I suppose it's rather like investing in an index fund, with a bit more volatility :)

henning3• 18 years ago

Often times mechanical trading strategies discussed in papers that use fancy math and algorithms don't consistently beat buy and hold.

webwright• 18 years ago

Efficient Market Hypothesis FTW.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_market_hypothesis

hugh2• 18 years ago

Drat. I tried the same trick, and I'm down to my last $10,000.

henning3• 18 years ago

"I realized technical analysis didn't work when I turned the charts upside down and didn't get a different answer." - Warren Buffett

still a cool little app.

astine3• 18 years ago

I like the concept. While short term stock exchange is usually a risky waste of money, this does help illustrate certain principles.

The number of people suggesting that 'always buy' works shows us something: that the economy on average has grown over the past century. Reason being of course that, when one person succeeds, he provides means for another person to succeed. Thus growth begets growth, especially capital growth. Investing broadly in the stock market is almost always sure to bring modest gains over the long term.

jotto• 18 years ago

i think matthias wandel's came first:

http://chartgame.com/

Alex3917• 18 years ago

I found another way to "cheat." Change the length of time to 40 days, and then click the buy button five or six times before the buy/sell/skip buttons change to the "new trade" button.

maximilian• 18 years ago

My only criticism is that its hard to tell where the stock was after the time-window is grown after I click buy/sell. If i click back, then I can see, but otherwise its kinda hard. If you could put a little vertical red line over the image where I bought/sold the stock, it'd help figure out what happened. I know you're just pulling a picture from yahoo finance, but since the time-window change is always the same, the red line should always be over the same spot.

brentr• 18 years ago

The concept is interesting. I, however, am not a fan of technical analysis. It's been drilled into my head that technical analysis is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If everyone looking at a chart determines that the exit price should be $20 (let's assume the stock has shown a resistance level at that price) many people would try to exit around $20. The assumption would then be that if everyone does indeed believe that $20 is a ceiling, then everyone would sell at $20 thus creating the ceiling.

I believe sound fundamental analysis is the optimal method of analysis, but even that method has been called into question over the course of the last eight months as many investors are learning that much of what is on the books is either someone's best guess or flat out fraudulent at best.

brianr• 18 years ago

This is really cool!

The main problem right now is that since the market is long-biased and there's no concept of time in the rankings, it's easy to get to the top by always clicking "Buy". It would be cool if you could make the rankings actually reflect a confidence score of how well a user is beating the market.

I'm not very strong on the statistics, but here's a possibility: for each trade, calculate the user's excess return against the market, represented by an index fund: (user's return % - market return %), and multiply that by the number of days. Then assign a confidence score using a t-test, maybe: t = (excess return * days) / (sample variance / sqrt(number of days)), and look up the confidence level based on the t-value. Finally, rank users according to their confidence level.

Something else--since this is technical analysis, it would be cool if you could include some other indicators on the chart, e.g. RSI, more than one moving average, bollinger bands, etc. That could give you some cool metrics--you could track how well each combination of indicators improves picks, by user and in aggregate.

Olgaar3• 18 years ago

$40M and now my eyeballs hurt... but my average return is just .02%.

Olgaar3• 18 years ago

Well $131M now. I find it's all about effective use of the 'skip' button.

Olgaar3• 18 years ago

The page doesn't factor in Splits. Entry Price: 52.00 (Mar. 8, 2000), Exit Price: 48.88 (Apr. 5, 2000) Comes out to a 6% loss, but there was a SPLIT on the 21st! I should be up nearly 100%.

ssanders826• 18 years ago

Splits are factored in. The chart is showing adjusted prices so there's not a huge gap after a split.

tel• 18 years ago

What is that picture of?

And why?

fauxstor• 18 years ago

Yeah, it takes a real genius to figure this one out. Just buy anything it asks you about. Period. After about 40 trades, you'll have several million.

nazgulnarsil2• 18 years ago

All this technique proves is that I'm extremely unlucky.

dkokelley• 18 years ago

Question, are the charts simply random charts from random companies recently trading?

Where are they coming from? I see AOL is providing them, but how are they selected for use in the site? This might explain the amount of users who seem to be succeeding by clicking only the "buy" button.

Is there an algorithm that makes sure the gains and losses are evenly distributed in the charts (less realistic), or are the charts completely random (mimicking the experience a real stock trader would be presented with the charts)?

nazgulnarsil2• 18 years ago

I'm curious as to what other people think of long valuation waves? http://www.zealllc.com/c2005/Zeal080505B.gif

sps• 18 years ago

Seems like this might be a good Facebook app

ssanders826• 18 years ago

Man I love the interweb. Pre-YC: 10,000 trades executed. 24 hours later: 75,000. Maybe PG wishes he had that phone call back. Just kidding :)

icey• 18 years ago

Hmm. Are you storing our passwords as plain-text? It's always disappointing to see my password emailed to me after I've registered on a site. I picked it out, I know what it is, but now I have to wonder how it lives in your database since you don't seem to care about security at all.

Test your stock-picking skills with instant feedback. Most common word from my users: "addicting".

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