hippofluff

funny answer: 99% of fund managers aren't on Stock Unlock

real answer: Are those actively or passively managed funds or both? And, fund managers are people to, and the public is lead to believe they are great/good at what they do but the truth of the matter is, they aren't. I actually don't see the value in funds, the reason Stock Unlock exists is that we as a society have been manipulated into believing investing is hard and we must use the products of big banks/big finance to manage it for us, that in my opinion is a lie.

I have hard opinions here so I'll stop there, I can go on more if you'd like to continue this thread. I love chatting about this

Hi! Thanks so much for taking a look at us/Daniel and sharing your thoughts. You're not too late on the comment, and yes we like solving big problems!

I totally respect your opinion here. The type of education we are providing is not hedge fund level trading algos/any deep monetary theory, it's pretty bare bones stuff like "how to understand/use price ratios such as p/fcf", or "what financial metrics should i look at for bank stocks"

If/when we get to deeper topic, and actually have money/aren't a scrappy bootstrapped startup, as the CEO I am 100% going to continue to make sure we are properly resourced/reviewed so that our content stays trusty worthy/helpful for our subscribers. If you try the app I'd love your feedback! Think, investopedia type stuff but with examples and actually inline in our app when you need it, not as a standalone piece of info you need to go to google for and then forget what you read the next day

this^ 100%

The companies and corporations that sell investment vehicles and services try to "make it cool/funny" to not understand money and that "rich people have their wealth managed for them", a bunch of bologne!

That being said, it's not simple, and people need to be serious about investing, it's very easy to get burned without the proper education/patience

Frankly, all I've learned here is that if I want a co-founder in 2022, I should find a YouTuber.

Honestly... fair, it was pretty story heavy. I also agree though, Youtubers have existing audiences and communities that you can solve problems around.

I am curious if you have an opinion on Daniel Pronks channel? It seems we value the same things, getting information in a way that isn't opinionated, but rather something like: "hey, here's what I think and here's why, here's where I could be wrong, what do you all think of this? Lets talk about different opinions in the comments, etc". I find Daniel Pronk is the best (just my opinion of course)

_virtual high five_

Stock Unlock has 20+ years of fundamental data for 22,000 US/CAD stocks, and as of today 122,000 global stocks. And the data is high quality, we churned through 3 different data providers building our beta to find this.

Finnhub is not a "cheap" competitor. The entire financial system for executing trades/brokerages has been deflating for decades (used to be $50 per trade online, then $7, now free... 30+ years ago you had to be rich pay a lot and phone in to a broker at an exchange) and that is also happening to the financial data that has been behind the walled gardens of companies like Bloomberg.

So things like fundamental data are definitely becoming way easier to get, and the huge statue (Bloomberg) as I see it will continue to get chipped away at, I am seeing it now, but I guess time will tell here. It's totally possible I'll be wrong, but the evidence I see it stacking up/we are building in it everyday

Thanks for this perspective, I agree that financial literacy is far bigger topic than what we cover in Stock Unlock. Further, we definitely don't cater to every person today, we have a lot of users who love us but I know that there's also people that we don't appeal to right now (and that's okay). Daniel Pronk's Youtube I believe is a good way to understand what crowd we are catering to today.

In my personal experience there is a need for a better way to learn to get into long term investing, my hope is that we will continue to expand into other areas of financial literacy as well, but right now we are focusing on getting one thing right.

So are you investment education or are you investment data?

Both! For example, think investopedia is great but it's not contextual education, aka it's not given to you at the right time. I was able to learn best by applying the numbers with education and actually exercising/using it. This is also why I believe that the static white text/endless pages of definitions isn't the type of education that ends up working in this case (people have short attention spans/it's boring/dry).

Responding to your other messages, I appreciate your honest concern around the gambling. I agree that when people trade/try to see patterns in charts, buy/sell within a year or two, that is gambling.

We may agree to disagree on this one, but long term stock investing, when you buy and hold great companies for 5, 10, 20 years, is what we are going for here. We believe that when you can identify a great company, and have patience/the right long term mindset to DCA into it over time, you can do well. You can do that with a small % of your capital, we are also adding suport for ETFs and I agree those are also great investment vehicles for people that don't have the time/care to truly analyze individual stocks/businesses.

Ah yes, the exchanges love to keep their data private/monetized... but they are a business too so I get it.

Lets definitely keep in touch, I'll check out your profile. I appreciate the support thanks!

ISINs... what a mess, ha! We don't touch those

You're speaking my language! I agree with everything you said. We are actually in talks with Refinitiv, they would allow us to re-sell their data on our website (bloomberg will not).

Here's my two cents here/my angle. I think that 95% of the data in bloomberg terminal isn't needed for the common investor. Further, companies like ours will not replace Bloomberg terminal, we don't plan to go for their customers, and we know we cannot compete with the ridiculous level of data they have. Honestly, full respect and hats off to them they have worked super hard to build that up and deserve their moat.

I do think there's a ton of room for more practical solution that works for the common person (not a financial professional) and that there will be more decentralization of financial data, maybe not all of it, but I see it happening now where companies like Finnhub and others are slowly building their own empires/chipping away at their own custom data and I think there will be competitors that creep up. I guess time will tell though!

It really is a fun snaky problem to solve, I love solving problems that people think are unsolvable, maybe I'm dumb (probably) but it makes the process all the more fun when you know you're swimming with sharks

We don't have any valuation models right now, we do plan to build a simple DCF model soon though!

Right now one of our most asked for features is to be able to graph/project future values (i.e. net income) and show potential future prices at various p/e ratios, etc.

Definitely not that deep! I would say those formulas/complex math are not things Stock Unlock believes are necessary for 99% of people to learn.

Surprisingly, most people don't understand price ratios, whats each line of a financial report means (i.e. operating cash flow vs investing cash flow). So you can maybe label it "investing 101", "Intelligent Investor" type stuff.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

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!

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!)

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!

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

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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 ^_^

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 :)

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!