Ask HN: Please review my startup

by gaika • 18 years ago

21 39 18 years ago

vaksel• 18 years ago

This looks pretty much like a knock off of google finance

As far as site wise -too much space on the bottom -newstrends are pretty useless for terms, since you get results like you have now "EPS" etc, I'd replace that with newstrends for actual companies.

blurry2• 18 years ago

Love the UI but feel a little ambiguous about the basic principle behind it. Would love to hear others' opinions about it though... I could be wrong on this one.

As I understand, you basically attempt to correlate stock movement with two major components: (1) market/sector movement, and (2) news.

The first one is easy. Market/sector goes up, stocks go up, market/sector goes down, stocks go down (in absence of major news, more on which below). I doubt you would have created the website to prove the obvious, so I'll leave this one alone.

The second one is where I see the major problem. The problem being that NEWS DO NOT MOVE STOCKS. You'd think they would. After all, good earnings report, stock goes up, bad earnings report, stock goes down, right? Except that's not what happens. Granted I have limited trading experience (selling/buying/sometimes shorting several times a month at the most) but I've seen enough to conclude that there is no meaningful correlation between news and stock movement.

I just tracked several stocks that I happen to follow where I have a reasonable idea as to why they've moved in the last year. Your chart only proved the above. News were well presented along the spikes/dips (again, the UI is awesome) but the clear presentation only served to show that no correlation exists. (To clarify, by news I mean anything and everything, e.g. earnings reports, analysts upgrades/downgrades, company announcements, actual news, etc; and by no correlation I mean good/bad news accompanied spikes/dips equally.)

Anyone care to argue with me? Prove me wrong!

gaika10• 18 years ago

Thanks! Agree that most of the news are fluff or something that is already expected by the market. But there are events that have profound effect on the stock and we try to identify them.

blurry2• 18 years ago

If you want to talk about events that have a profound effect on stocks, it would be tremendously useful to add trading volume high/lows to your charts. I don't mean trading volume in general but rather exceptional events, like a hedge fund or an institutional owner unloading a bunch of shares for example. You could compile a history of NYSE Arca trading spikes/dips as one source (http://datasvr.tradearca.com/arcadataserver/JArcaBook.php?Sy...) and there are probably several others.

Those are true movers and would add tons of credibility to your tool by showing what I'd expect to be a near 100% correlation.

Another not-so-crazy crazy idea would be to plug amazon's mechanical turk worker bees to track stock mentions on Jim Cramer's Mad Money and plot that into your charts. I am not suggesting this for the actual usefulness but rather as a gorilla SEO/marketing trick. I once consulted for a company that does online doll dress up games and it occurred to someone to create a Hannah Montana doll. That basically made them. Little girls search for Hanna Montana, see the Hanna Montana dress up game, and voila, they go from several thousand to 2MM+ registered active users (with paying parents) in several months. I really think Jimmy C could do the same for you.

ryporter• 18 years ago

I completely agree with your second point, and, FWIW, I suspect Nassim Taleb would as well. This site seems to promote the "narrative fallacy" that Taleb rails against in "The Black Swan."

I worry that it could end up with some very embarrassing results-- e.g., two separate news feeds report on the same event at different times, a positive effect is ascribed to one of the stories, and a negative effect is ascribed to the other.

Aries09• 18 years ago

this site is great as a tool i think you are wrong by calling it a google clone also with all that's happening now on wallst i get a chuckle checking it out

davidw2• 18 years ago

It looks pretty, and looks kind of interesting, but where's the 'there'? Like vaksel notes... it's pretty similar to Google Finance - what's the compelling reason to keep coming back to your site?

gaika10• 18 years ago

There are 2 main things right now: measuring market influence and filtering the news. We plan to let people submit their own explanations and add discussions soon.

davidw2• 18 years ago

Your "blog" (I hate that word:-) is empty, and yet it's linked from the site. Either put something in it, or get rid of the link.

mstefff2• 18 years ago

Doesn't Google Finance do this already?

I don't understand the use of the "index"...

The logo and interface looks a little '5 years ago'..

mstefff2• 18 years ago

Also, it isn't always the news that moves the stock. These features could be very misleading.

gaika10• 18 years ago

We are adding other things, like what mutual funds and insiders are buying and selling. News and market are just a start.

steveplace2• 18 years ago

A couple notes:

- It might be a good idea to note stock:market divergences on your chart

- Don't know where your parsing your news, but you might want to incorporate a filter for SEC filings and PR releases along with a way to eliminate the fluff/SEO (Motley Fool comes to mind)

It seems (as blurry pointed out) that you are assuming that news leads/lags a stock. There's also a whiff of efficient market theory in there, and at the expense of pissing off half of HN, the markets aren't efficient.

Other than that, I find a hard time finding the difference between what you have and other tools I use.

gaika10• 18 years ago

Stock/market divergence is marked on the chart with a green dot, might have to make it more prominent.

What do you use to filter out the news?

steveplace2• 18 years ago

I usually ignore the news during the trading day, and I use stocktwits.com for a pretty good feed.

I'm not saying your site won't work: you can carve out a pretty good niche in finance-world.

tptacek• 18 years ago

Are there other things you can chart and correlate news stories to, besides the stock market?

Can you put in the extra effort to chart indicators, like VIX and TED and Case-Schiller? CSCO and MSFT stock charts might be tapped out, but this might become useful if it acts as a portal to lesser-known stats.

cabalamat• 18 years ago

Here are my observations for the page http://whomovedmystock.com/GOOG

1. it looks pretty

2. when I move the bar at the bottom of the chart, the applet keeps reloading. This is annoying. Is it intentional or a bug?

3. the bit at the top left where it shows a pie chart of Google's "Market index allocation" -- how is this calculated?

4. On the chart, it's not obvious to me what the blue line "market index" means

gaika10• 18 years ago

Only when you zoom in or out the new events are either loaded or filtered out. When you just move the bar it should not reload. If it does it is a bug.

Market index is the best weighted average of the market/sectors/industries that matches daily price movement of the stock that we can find.

huhtenberg• 18 years ago

> 1. it looks pretty

No, it doesn't. It looks flashy.

The UI appears to have been inspired by the Bratz website or similar. Playful tone is just plain inappropriate given the subject matter and it will drive people away. This is the most evident problem with the project at the moment.

sahaj• 18 years ago

reading the title, i thought, oh cool, this will tell me which investment firm(s) are buying/selling a particular stock.

as others have pointed out, this doesn't provide anything more than what google finance already does.

gaika10• 18 years ago

We have that information, it will show up soon.

volida• 18 years ago

the graph doesn't look very professional/serious because of the curves in the change of the direction.

blakeweb• 18 years ago

It took several minutes of playing with a chart and exploring the contents of the page before I had that 'aha' moment when I realized what your site is trying to do. (example: whomovedmystock.com/goog)

From the questions in the comments here on HN, it seems clear that everyone else is in the same boat, not really getting why this is any different from google finance.

You need to experiment with better visual ways of communicating that the blue 'market index' curve in the graph is something you invented, defined by the pie chart to the right.

It also wouldn't hurt if there was some unobtrusive way for you to emphasize why that's important. You're trying to isolate market movements out of stock movements, so that you can correlate news with times when the stock diverges from what would be expected based on the market and the industry/sector it's in. To me, that's great, but neither your intention to do that nor the effect of everything you've done to try to illustrate that is quite coming across.

gaika10• 18 years ago

Agree that is the main weakness right now, do you have any hints how this can be expressed better?

tomsaffell• 18 years ago

Maybe try not calling it 'market index'. This is a familiar (sounding) term to most people, so they will assume they know what it means, and wont look for an alternative definition.

Since it is an original metric that you have created, why not give it an original name? Even better if you can link that name to your company name, think 'Zestimate' from Zillow - easy to say, obviously a 'new term' so something that I need to learn, and feels like it belongs to the company, due to the 'Z'

All that said, I'm still not quite sure what real world problem this site solves..

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

The world doesn't need another stock market charlatan, even one with flash graphics.

browser411• 18 years ago

You may want to check out wikinvest.com. They also annotate stock charts but are taking a crowd-sourcing approach to it (they are a wiki after all).

comatose_kid• 18 years ago

Can you explain how/why this would help my returns? I trade options from time to time, and don't really understand the value this service would bring, since it focuses on things the market has already priced in.

gaika10• 18 years ago

Right now it is mostly educational. It can also save you a lot of time if you track many stocks as it will highlight only important news / events.

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

Looks good, although I'm no investor (put a bonus in for two weeks way back: The stress wasn't worth it). Obviously, the site will only be as good as how current the news is: People need this information practically in real time. And you'll have to find those angles that people can't get by viewing the "News" tab on Google Finance.

On another note, I'd like to see a site called whomovedmysocks.com

owkaye2• 18 years ago

If you're married you can probably guess who moved your socks since it's almost always the same person ... :)

sutro2• 18 years ago

Great work. I really like everything you've done here. Though it will be difficult to improve upon what you already have, I do have three very minor suggestions for you:

1. Change your domain name from whomovedmystock.com to whomovedmycheese.com.

2. Change your product from a website to a childishly simple business book.

3. Stop coding and start lecturing and conducting business seminars.

Other than those few small tweaks, I'd say you're on the right track. Keep up the good work!

sutro2• 18 years ago

Oh, and if the whomovedmycheese.com idea has already been done, I would consider addressing the pent-up demand for web-based constipation advice with whatmovedmybowels.com.

paraschopra• 18 years ago

Clearly your news index lags the market price of the stock.. I wonder what use can that be?

danteembermage• 18 years ago

I think what you've got here has a lot of potential; let me echo some things and maybe make some other suggestions.

First, I think it is a great idea decomposing stock variance. Really, I do want to know what moved my stock. However, it's not really clear what your chart is telling me. I see market and I see the stock price and I see that they are different but I don't know why they are different. What I'd imagined was suppose you start with the return on the value weighted Wilshire 5000 possibly adjusted by empirical beta. Presumably there will be some residual price movement, some of that is coming from sector changes. It would make sense to see the sector effect as a different color tacked on to the market effect. Then you add news effects and then the leftover would be unknown or some such. Perhaps on news days you assume all the residual movement is due to news and then carry forward that price difference through the non-news periods.

As you've got it I assumed your chart was just comparing the stock return with the return on the S&P until I read the comments here. You're news history and the associated price change is awesome, in academic finance there is a long tradition of doing event studies (e.g. what is the effect on a stock price to an announcement of a seasoned equity offering?). If I understand what you're doing you've essentially done an event study of every possible event for all stocks throughout time. That's pretty cool. In fact, if you used academic standard methods calculating your expected returns you might even have a dataset that research universities would be interested in buying from you.

One possible thing traders might like that you might be able to pull off. Suppose I'm worried a stock is going to get hit with an "identify theft" leak. If you put a little text processing on your news titles you could determine the average effect that kind of announcement will have on the average and maybe for a stock in particular. So lets imagine "identity theft" has an average negative return of six percent. Then I check identity theft with American Standard and I get 0.1 percent because the negative identity theft returns are linked with banking and retail sector returns and not really with the market.

I'm a little worried that your design is too cutesy. I would expect websites that do lots of statistics to have more hard corners. I understand you want the site to look accessible but you want it to appear intelligent and accessible. There's got to be a compromise in between somewhere.

owkaye2• 18 years ago

The first thing I noticed is the bad grammar. It never impresses me to see a website that fails to get the spelling and grammar correct. As you're using it here, the word "identify" should be "identifies":

>>> For every stock we create an index that measures market and sector influence and identify the news that make the difference. <<<

But I think you're trying to say too much in that sentence anyways. A simpler and better statement that's easier to understand and probably has greater impact might be this:

>>> We measure market influences for every stock in America, and we identify the news that makes a difference. <<<

If you use this new wording you can pay me $1000 ... :)

Aside from this change, I like the grab-and-pull interface that works like google maps, but I'm not into investing so I don't know if real investors will find any value here.

thorax• 18 years ago

Might also be good to track the value of the USD against other currencies in the world in relation to stock moves, too.

gaika10• 18 years ago

Right now it is part of the overall market exposure, but yes, some companies might be more sensitive to it than others.

Ask HN: Please review my startup

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