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.

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 :)

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

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

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.

I had a view similar to yours regarding ETF and average investors until 3 months ago. For many reasons, I decided to become more active on social media in order to increase financial literacy. I was shocked by the amount of marketing the 'middle class' are exposed to. Competition is intense, and giving good financial advice is actually an uphill battle. I consider this environment to be toxic for the average individual.

Is this app perfect? probably not. However, I view this type of initiative as an improvment!

So to repeat what another person said: wouldn't the most accurate advice be to ignore all the marketing and use ETFs?

If people are inundated with marketing telling them to be active investors, telling them to be a more informed active investor is not the solution.

Your point is right, but I'm afraid that the underlying advice is not applicable. First of all few people are truly in control of their attention span, and we are all exposed to marketing wether we like it or not. You might as well ask a dog to ignore the smell of food.

*If people are inundated with marketing telling them to be active investors, telling them to be a more informed active investor is not the solution*

The problem with some popular financial apps is that the marketing is 'built in as a feature'. My banking app allows me to create a 'saving account', which sounds like a good think to do right? However if I click, I will have ''investing options'' to choose, which are all financial product sold by the institution. These types of 'financial dark patterns' are all over the industry. In Canada, I consider those to be built in by law, and are not likely to change any time soon.

Managing investor bias is not something you can achieve with a mathematical argument; it requires patience, trial and error. People who are bombarded with marketing about stock trading will avoid ETF and trade stocks. I think that a lot of them would benefit a learning environment which was not created by financial institution to sell them products in the first place. You could then introduce a feature, where the apps suggest some ETF information if the portfolio is hyper concentrated in a few stock, etc.

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 :)

So are you investment education or are you investment data?

The former pushes people toward a certain investment style, and currently that investment style is one that loses them money (as you seem to know).

It seems that you're trying to democratize something like Bloomberg. In the hands of an individual retail investor, it's essentially a tool for gambling. I don't think there's anything immoral about that, but the veneer of "making the world better" in your posts really rubs me the wrong way.

If your goal is to educate people for the betterment of society, tell them not to look at stock market data, not to pay attention to people like Kramer, and to put their money into ETFs.

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.

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.

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.”)

For example you could have invested in SPY, or QQQ, or IWM at the bottom of the bear market in 2008, and walked away with vastly different returns on Dec 31, 2021. Those are all indexes. Even from 2020 onwards, if you had picked XLE you would have had different returns till date than if you invested in XLU or some green energy ETF, or even 2020's darling, ARKK.

Just saying invest in an ETF doesn't mean anything. They are baskets of stocks, and as the macro environment changes, some ETFs will perform better than others. In effect, even an all-encompassing ETF (VTI?) will only perform well in a bull market. Just because we've been in a decades-long bull market doesn't mean stocks will keep going up forever.

Is the answer stock picking? Absolutely not. However, ETFs are not the "practically risk-free return" they are sometimes billed as.

These are well worn passive capital market investment principles, with copious amounts of supporting data. As an individual, it is very difficult to do better than long duration broad equities basket exposure with a low expense ratio.

It is much harder to beat the market, especially in a bear market.

The core tenet of investing is that you make a bet that other people see as risky. We have enormous amounts of research that active investing at an individual level can no longer beat the market in the face of widespread insider trading at the investor level, HFT, etc.

You need asymmetrical information to beat the market, and individuals just can't get it.

This is the crux of the Warren Buffet vs Hedge Fund bet, and why it failed. Buffet quite possibly realized that a new bull market was about to begin, and the market would beat a hedge fund. When the bull market ends though, let's see if hedge funds don't start beating the market with their long-short-cash strategy.

I am nowhere near hedge fund territory, but do have some qualms about whether this bull market will just grow to the sky or have a big reset sometime quite soon, quite possibly reaching 6000 on the S&P before that.

Also, I find the efficient market hypothesis quite bullshit, so there's that.

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

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.

:)

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.

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!

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

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(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.

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!

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.

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 :)

OP is expecting to get money from stock pickers and day traders, which is a much more lucrative market than the average "person who doesn't understand retail banking products".

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.

"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

"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.

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!

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.

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!)

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.

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

All investing is betting. Day-trading and forex "investing" are certainly gambling, and there is a lot of addiction among day-traders.

Stock-picking is more controversial in terms of whether to call it gambling, but if we know that nearly 100% of individual investors won't beat the market in the long-run, then it seems a lot like a casino, where the house always wins.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Also, filter != technical analysis. Filters can work on any indicator. I use them on fundamentals, as do Buffet, Munger, Graham, Dodd.

However, I'm not really sure that this is the kind of knowledge that you talked about. I mean it certainly doesn't hurt to know of this, but I don't really think this is what is meant when we talk about American's financial illiteracy levels.

There are countless reddit posts where people don't know that tax refunds (except in the case of certain refundable credits) simply repay them for taxes they already paid in but did not owe that year. People who don't know what the difference between the minimum payment and the payment needed to avoid interest is. People who routinely use overdrafts as a form of credit. People who use high-fee prepaid cards to "avoid overdrafts" instead of simply not making them.

And as smt88 said, there's just not much profit in that. There are perfectly good websites, blog posts, and videos out there that cover this already, and it can't really be coupled with data for monetization the way stocks can. Frankly, while it absolutely should be taught to kids, there's a point at which if you're an adult and you can't sit down for five minutes to read an article about how your credit card works, its no one's fault but yours. I agree that optimizing for readability is great, but I don't know that "no one will read black text on a white page." That describes a book, after all.

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.

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.

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 :)

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 ^_^

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/...

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 ^_^

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.

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…

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!

I can't speak to exact numbers, but I believe we were quoted like 6 figures/year for JSE and I think we pay like 4 figures/year now…? Exchanges can and do charge whatever they want…so when you need realtime data explicitly, even if you skip the data brokers, you'll just have to pay. You legally cannot use data for profit from some exchanges (if I recall, JSE is one). Some exchanges seem to have a majority of their revenue coming from data licensing.

Oh, then don't get me started on ISINs and all the failed "open source" attempts to not use ISINs and how some ISINs can be used without licensing while others require it.

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My company is mostly AU/NZ (mostly because of tax, but quickly growing), so most of these data services didn't even support us until the past few years. We use a combo of like 10 data brokers to piece together coverage and we're still missing huge datasets (unfortunately Finnhub doesn't seem to cover any of them, but will look).

Luckily I focus on the Frontend/UX of our product and avoid this drama, but do feel free to reach out (contact via profile; I'm easy to find).

Good luck! I do like the idea of education, will follow. Even though I've worked in this industry for 5 years, I still find new stuff on the retail investor side of things. We'd love to educate more in our product, but we just partner with people instead..

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

It won't happen. Full stop.

Just the same as the marketing lies perpetuated by Bloomberg terminal competitors that they are the next "Bloomberg-killer". They are not (I've tried some of them, they don't come close, infact they are so far away its a joke).

The fact of the matter is financial data is HARD.

To ensure consistent quality takes a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money. Data will have errors, some of them will be easy to spot (e.g. missing values) but others will be tricker to spot for the untrained eye.

Some financial data requires manual inputs which can't be automated (e.g. fixing bad OCRs, or inputting data that is only available in paper form).

The other fact of the matter is BREADTH.

Any Tom, Dick or Harry can have a good chance at getting you currency data, or BASIC data on US stocks, that sort of data is common as muck.

But only the Bloombergs or Refinitivs of this world can give you TRUE global coverage. Only the Bloombergs or Refinitivs of this world can give you more advanced GLOBAL data such as swaps, swaptions, CDS. Only the Bloombergs or Refinitivs of this world can give you true IN-DEPTH and GLOBAL fundamental data for any company on the planet. Only the Bloombergs or Refinitivs of this world can give you many decades of GLOBAL historical data.

You would need billions to properly compete against Bloomberg or Refinitiv. And that's only the startup costs of getting you to the point where they are today.

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

You'd be surprised.

For example, good old fundamental data.

The cheap competitors won't give you full coverage.

For example, little (but important) details based on adjustments detailed in financial footnotes. That won't be there on the cheap sources, but it will be on Bloomberg/Refinitiv and not only that but they will let you click through to the actual precise location in the source content so you can trace where they got the number from.

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

I have lightly researched David Pronk you provides you with the actual financial content, and he himself claims on his website he is not a financial advisor. While I don't mean to discredit him in any way and don't want to imply his advice is bad (it seams reasonable enough for someone like me who doesn't know too much about finance), I am still wondering why you didn't also hire a professional to audit what Daniel has written? There are various certificates within the finance industry and it would increase my trust in our offering if I knew that a professional with at least some experience and/or certificats has vetted it.

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

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.

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 :)

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

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!

There, I saved you not only $75/yr but also countless hours of your time.

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!

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 ^_^

"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

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

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!

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

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

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!)

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.

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.

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 2¢!

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!

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.

IMO building tools for individual stock picking is not the way to go. If you truly want to financially educate, I'd start with a MOOC explaining different perspectives. The reason for different perspectives is that I am also not a fan of the ETF only crowd. I guess some of them don't know what happened to Japan, who's to say that such a thing won't happen to the US? Hence, different perspectives are needed. Also, I feel that Benjamin [1] is showing a doing a good job in telling me in a funny way on what not to do.

You have a YouTuber as a co-founder, from an mission-driven perspective (financial education) I'd consider stratifying your crowd to beginners and non-beginners. Non-beginners should be redirected to the YouTube channel (assuming your YouTube co-founder gives solid advice, which we'll see).

YouTubers that I believe that give solid advice:

- Patrick Boyle (amazing mindset, overarching view of markets that's it, no investing advice but I feel inspired to think like him)

- Benjamin (on what not to do)

- The Plain Bagel (rock solid ETF type of person, but also a market perspective like Patrick Boyle)

- Ben Felix (kinda like the Plain Bagel)

- Bogleheads is a good thing to Google :)

- New Money (he's in between this list and the next list. His own opinions are meh, the investors he follows such as Peter Lynch and the lessons he summarizes are awesome)

YouTubers that make seem to make sense but I'd advice to stay away from:

- Meet Kevin

- Stoic Finance (kinda like Patrick Boyle, except Boyle is way better IMO)

- Real Vision Finance

Note: these YouTubers clearly have their heart and mind in the right place. I simply don't think they give solid advice, but they aren't scamming and also they don't give junk advice. The issue is that their advice is very very tricky and needs to be seen through a lense of an experienced investor.

Bad:

- Andrei Jikh (fun content but the good advice that he gives are better stated by the channels that are actually good)

Utterly horrible:

- Anyone teaching technical analysis without hard data and strong evidence, not just "yea but Wyckoff". No, if you can't at least show as much evidence as the book The Intelligent Investor, then you have no business in teaching TA (and this is a very mild criterion, too mild maybe). Also while giving that evidence, it needs to be contrasted to actual quantitative methods (a less mild criterion).

- Anyone telling you to buy crypto

- Anyone not at least attempting to show a full picture but immediately telling their story while heavily emphasizing you should use their system

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkcnYVAVZQOB-nXHechtXDg/vid...

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)

In the coming months I'll have an opinion about him. I haven't watched enough of his videos. It's tough to distinguish "stay away from" versus "good", since both categories seem to be well intentioned.

In fact, I'd even go so far that it's better to say anything is trash and keep:

Bogleheads

Ben Felix

Plain Bagel

Patrick Boyle

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.

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!

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.

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.

That's giving me the biggest eyeroll ever. You can throw all the academic wording out there you want. I've been through all that, I know precisely what you mean. And it's nearly all bs.

>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"

Fair enough. However, yes, it is gambling. You don't control anything about the company you are 'investing' in. You can do all the research you want, you can think you know whatever. But you have no control over idiosyncratic events.

Also, why are you even suggesting people 'invest'? Just so they can "make more money" by putting money into something they can never fully understand or have control over?

I probably wasn't clear the first time around- and that was kind of intentional. Yes I am completely against the world of "investing" because it's just people trying to make money. That's literally it. So let's call it what it is- gambling- and stop pretending like investing is a "good thing".