Hi! Not taking this the wrong way at all, I appreciate you taking the time to share these valuable thoughts.
"explain to people there's no magic wand, there's no shortcut to hard work, and explain to people what they really should be doing" - we could not agree more, I'd go further to say this is what we are building, so we are going to dive deep to make sure we are putting across the right message when users first hit the website. (Side note, I think you'd love Daniel Pronk's Youtube channel!)
I agree about screeners, Stock Unlock doesn't have screeners. I am curious what other sites you have used that have what we do in the "free form" tool (maybe bloomberg terminal but they cost around 25k a year-ish)? Also a huge angle on this is the embedded education, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. The embedded education has been helping newer investors feel comfortable/learn terms/learn how to analyze financials on their own. We find many other sites have sub par design or they present things in a way that assumes the user is already an investing pro/or has a finance degree
As for analyst data I actually agree, I had a light argument with founders about this but "lost" since many investors and most of our users expect this. But for me personally, I never listen to analysts. And low and behold... it's one of our most viewed pages after insights tab and free form tool.
"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.
> Unless you are going to tell me that output is specifically adapted to each individual company and the industry where it operates. But I doubt that.
That's what we do! For example, if you look at a REIT stock like "bxp" that will have different insights than BAC which is a bank stock. Same for MSFT, which is not a REIT or a bank, and must have different financial metrics to care about.
No automations, we are working HARD and coding in a bunch of static text/education/etc (200+ pages and counting of custom education content to date).
Daniel Pronk is the content creator and creates the product specs for how we analyze different industries. We actually aren't doing anything too fancy here, you request a ticker, we pull it's financials, run analysis on them, then print that to the user. MOST importantly imo, we have detailed explanation for everything/never push our users, but rather guide/teach our users how to analyze and interpret these things for themselves so they can make their own decisions.
If you have time to crawl through the tool/click around I'd be curious to see what you think. Again, I am not taking this as offense, I'm grateful you're giving raw feedback. It helps us improve!
> if you look at a REIT stock like "bxp" that will have different insights than BAC which is a bank stock. Same for MSFT, which is not a REIT or a bank, and must have different financial metrics to care about
Do you show non-GAAP measures for its divisions? That would be neat.
From the front page, this looks like an interesting, if somewhat undifferentiated, analysis tool. (See most brokers’ free stock screening/filtering tools, for example, IB’s or Fidelity’s.) The UI appears well built. As a trainer for would-be brokers, it’s fine. Where it loses its education bona fides is in its stock-analysis orientation. That paradigm contains an implicit bias towards stock picking. (Versus, e.g., a portfolio-analysis paradigm.)
The fundamentals approach is laudable. But it’s surface level. If you can’t construct financial statements from scratch, memorising a bunch of accounting ratios doesn’t drive first-principles understanding. If you can’t model a capital structure, you’re scratching at surface level stats mined to bits by the pros when e.g. a bond issuance is announced.
All that said, your company could make money if it tapped into the take-a-screenshot-and-tweet market. It won’t help people understand. But many traders don’t care about that. That’s a valid target market.
> Do you show non-GAAP measures for its divisions? That would be neat.
We do show this, this can be found on insights tab, financials tab (shows GAAP financials, 20+ years), graphed in free form tool, and seen in the "quick view table" for stats next to a stock graph on a stock landing page
I totally agree, we do look a bit similar from our marketing page, these comments are insightful and it will lead us to find different branding to better put across what we are. So thanks again for that!
You are also right, financial analysis is just one piece of the puzzle, there are a lot more things to look at when deciding to make an investment.
> All that said, your company could make money if it tapped into the take-a-screenshot-and-tweet market. It won’t help people understand. But many traders don’t care about that. That’s a valid target market.
We will be working hard here to prove that isn't our brand, but I don't blame you for getting that vibe based on how our marketing site looks. Our site is the only website, with embedded/contextual education inlined everywhere, we defined everything, and many new investors have told us personally how helpful our site has been to help them getting started. Our companies mission/incentives are for our users to learn how to invest the right way. We don't make money from user trade frequency, it's from our subscriptions.
I don't mean to sell at all, I get super passionate about this stuff and this is a very engaging thread. (Hopefully it's not coming across that way, but if it is I can handle you telling me that and I'll learn quick!)
"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