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Experiment HN: Crowdsourcing Tech Stock Predictions
- puredemo 16y agoMake sure to tell me how I did in six months. ;p
- zackattack 16y agoI'll post a follow-up, but I'm not going to release people's individual predictions publicly in case I inadvertently embarrass anyone. I'm probably going to contact the winners individually to alert them of their insight and luck. But yeah, I'll post a detailed analysis in 6 months' time. If people then want to contact me directly to get their data then they will be able to.
- slashcom 16y agoYou should post aggregate values in a few days as well. I hope you're also storing timestamps with the submissions. Just guessing, but I'd bet any predictions made on 04/30 will correlate much better than those made today.
- zackattack 16y agoOne of the hard lessons I've learned is to try to put timestamps in every table unless absolutely not necessary. :) Edit: I'll post aggregate values to my blog in a few days' time. zacharyburt.com. I'll cc the link to @zburt on Twitter.
- xentronium 16y agoYeah, I second that and provide any prediction I make to the public domain!
- joshu 16y agoThe stock market is already a crowdsourcing platform. As is the options market.
- zackattack 16y agoThe interesting thing here is to see whether a community of opinionated elite nerds can do a better job of predicting the future direction than the general public / analysis / whoever. Speaking of which, have you logged your predictions yet?
- joshu 16y agoYes. By buying positions.
- zackattack 16y agoDo you have any incentive to share what positions you took?
- joshu 16y agoI already did. The trades were reported to the exhange (as all trades are) in order to contribute to price discovery, and the direction of the trade contributed to the pricing pressure (either above or below). Do you see now?
- zackattack 16y agoNo, I don't. My interpretation of the situation (which is probably incorrect) is that I'm asking you to share some wisdom and insight, and you're responding with snide remarks about the nature of stock exchanges.
- leelin 16y agoTrue, but the aggregation function is a bit complex. I'm curious where we'd wind up with something more transparent or democratic. Sadly, we aren't able to make any beta-neutral or relative value bets!
- joshu 16y ago
- keyle 16y agoIt's more an experiment on chaos theory and dart throwing than "Predictions". I recommend you look at the fundamentals and aggregate the EPS forecasts in relation to the ROE to get a better idea as to where they should be in a year's time. On top of that you need to factor your economy and China's.
- zackattack 16y agoYou seem to know what you're talking about. I hope you submit a prediction. I doubt you will, though.
- keyle 16y agoYou're right I won't. It's like trying to predict the next lotto numbers. Fear and greed fuel the market in the short term, so even if you got close 2 days before the deadline, a scare in the market would throw off all your predictions out the window. All you can really predict is what you believe a stock will be worth (intrinsic value) assuming the EPS forecast is fairly correct, the economy behaves ok and that china doesn't cock up. edit: I do appreciate anybody taking time to run an experiment though! That's why I voted up your post.
- drcode 16y agoJust to be fair to everyone entering things into this form: After you're done, you don't get to see any aggregated predictions, only a "thank you" message (which I found disappointing)
- zackattack 16y agoFair enough. I would appreciate it if nobody shares their predictions in this thread, either. I know this isn't at all rigorous, but I'd still like to try.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- kevinburke 16y agoDoes everyone get an equal vote?
- trotsky 16y agoSELECT username, MAX(one_year) AS price_target FROM guesses GROUP BY ticker; A cunning strategy to discover Mary Meeker's HN account name.
- strooltz 16y agoare you planning on removing blank entries (those set at 0.00). i, for one, only filled out predictions who i actively follow in the market to keep "uneducated" data from entering your prediction. maybe a good strategy would be to remove the lower and upper ends of the curve as well...
- zackattack 16y agothanks, yes, i am planning on tossing out obviously bad data.
- nandemo 16y agoHowever, 0.00 might be a valid guess. If I think Acme is going bankrupt soon, then 0.00 is a good approximation for its future stock price.
- jbooth 16y agoThese are mature stocks, which are basically a random walk, unless you have some insider info. What'd be really interesting would be if you got a couple thousand speculative plays on there, and allowed people to only submit on the industries they knew something about. Although that'd probably just lead to people only submitting their pet stock as "going to the moon!" Nice job in any case though.
- c1utch 16y agoEvery statement you made is wrong. 1. Every stock is a random walk. 2. Insider info for smaller companies is much more valuable then larger companies. 3. Speculative plays would make this even more boring, because then everyone makes wild guesses at the future value of a company they have never heard of. Nice job in any case though.
- jbooth 16y agoEvery statement you made was a complete misunderstanding of my statement. Including the sarcasm, I was being genuine in my praise. Briefly, the random walk factor is less of an issue for speculative stocks because they either make it as a business, or don't. That's not a random walk. And I really don't understand why you're so miffed.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ary 16y agoWasn't there just a story linked here the other day about the advice given to the newly minted (back at the IPO) Google millionaires? As I recall it said; Don't try to beat the market. Don't try to beat the market. Don't try to beat the market.
- larrykubin 16y agoSome other popular sites with similar ideas are caps.fool.com and YC funded socialpicks.com.
- aantix 16y agoThe biggest issue with this design is that there's no incentive to put in effort for better predictions. Take it to the next level; design this for Mechanical Turk (https://github.com/aantix/turkee https://github.com/aantix/turkee), and make this offer; for each prediction received, get a nickel. If you're on the right side with your prediction, receive an extra nickel. If you're within 0.5%, receive an additional nickel. Not enough people utilize the "bonus" feature of Mechanical Turk as financial incentive to increase the quality of data they receive. You don't have to pay everyone the same. Reward better input.
- zackattack 16y agothe point is to see if the HN crowd is good at predicting, not random people...
- Groxx 16y agoSomehow I don't think MSFT is $0.00. Logged, with wild randomness. I don't pretend to understand chaos theory nor astrology.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]