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Show HN: My cofounder and I created a social platform for investment ideas
- stuartjm5 5y agoMy co-founder and I came up with the idea for Utradea about a year ago when we realized that we loved discussing our investment/stock ideas and process. This expanded within our friend group, at least to people who were interested in the stock market. We thought it would be great to have a platform where we could have social interactions and combine it with core investment information/data. We didn’t like having to use multiple websites to connect all the pieces of information needed to make investment decisions. There are some sites out there that focus on providing investment information (Seeking Alpha), and other that focus more on the social interaction of investing (StockTwits). Utradea is a social platform for investment ideas and insights. It is built around the concept that people enjoy sharing and discussing investment ideas. We built the usual social media functions (comments, chat, like a post, etc.) and included important investment data, charts, and a portfolio to help you track your investments. Thanks for checking it out!
- rsp1984 5y agoCongrats, very well done! I look forward to trying this. Just curious: What framework are you using for the frontend? One feature request right away: Please offer a light mode. Dark mode is very tiresome for me to look at for longer periods of time.
- mhb_eng 5y agoFollowing up on the lightmode request. It's difficult to switch from income statement to cashflow or balance sheet because the menu is dark text on dark background. Additionally, you may want to add some spacing between % return and current price in the top leaders section to improve visuals for stocks with prices > $1,000.
- stuartjm5 5y agoGood catch, I will update menu background and at some spacing for the leader section. Thanks!
- stuartjm5 5y agoThanks for checking it out - we are using React. We made the design decision to go with Dark Mode off the bat. I see where you are coming from, we have had a few people mention that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- toss1 5y agoGreat idea and looks like very nice design at first glance -- I'll sign up and check out the customizations! Thanks!
- voisin 5y agoHow does it compare to SumZero?
- stuartjm5 5y agoSumZero is focused on Finance professionals. People who are working in the industry as their main job. WE are providing a platform for retail investors so we are targeting a different demographic.
- Hnrobert42 5y agoCool idea. I will continue to check in to see your progress. One note: the back arrow in the upper left is strange. Usually that’s where I find the menu. My browser already has plenty of ways to go back, so that element on your site seems confusing and unnecessary.
- stuartjm5 5y agoYeah that's a good point, we did want to make it easy for people to go back - might be a bit redundant. We are launching an app soon which will be better than mobile site browsing.
- CharlieMunger 5y agoWhat's wrong with Reddit? For example, the Hardcore Berkshire Hathaway subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/brkb/ https://old.reddit.com/r/brkb/ That's discussion and news, with dozens of value investor moderators and thousands of members. The guy who runs it is a legend (u/100_PERCENT_BRKB). Reddit has great investment communities.
- jdmoreira 5y agoHello Charlie, I'm a huge fan! (Yes, I know are not the real Charles) Could you recommend me other good subreddits for a graham / fisher / warren / charlie style of valuing securities and investment?
- 101008 5y agoWhat's the difference with eToro?
- aqme28 5y agoI just spent five minutes looking at eToro's landing page and I cannot figure out what that site does.
- high_byte 5y agosupposedly Facebook for stock market. more like Twitter imo.
- XCSme 5y agoNo, that's not the gist. The main idea is that you can mirror the trades done by someone, by doing copy-trading. It is a lot better for unexperienced traders to just follow someone that knows what he's doing and let them trade for them.
- XCSme 5y agoI use eToro and I like it. It allows you to automatically copy trades done by the others. So instead of trading $10k yourself, you automatically mirror the trades done by an experienced trader. The platform allows you to find and follow many top-performing traders (eg. that usually obtain 20%-50% trading profit during a year). So you just "follow" them and you can forget about it. Personally I'm at 50% profit by following only one guy for about 2 years.
- XCSme 5y agoAs a note, this is the guy that I follow, you can see his trading history: https://www.etoro.com/people/jeppekirkbonde/stats https://www.etoro.com/people/jeppekirkbonde/stats
- stuartjm5 5y agoThe biggest difference is that eToro is copy trading based and Utradea is investment idea based. We let users make their onw investing decision, you don't have to copy another persons trades as you would with eToro.
- sergiomattei 5y agoWow, what a beautiful platform with great UX. I'm a fan!
- zeeshanqureshi 5y agoCame to comments to say this. Love the UX. Good luck with the platform!
- shubik22 5y ago+1 Great looking UI, good luck!
- sidlls 5y agoI might post a similar comment, but it’d be very sarcastic. I took one look and closed the tab.
- stuartjm5 5y agoThanks for letting us know! We want you to enjoy using the platform and the feel/experience is critical.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoWay better than https://halfbakery.com https://halfbakery.com Congrats!
- SilurianWenlock 5y agowho did your UI design and how did they do it? looks sexy
- werber 5y agoThis is the first thing I've seen on here in a while that looks original. I don't fully get it, but it makes me want to learn more.
- aqme28 5y agoYour email verification is broken. It sends you a broken URL.
- stuartjm5 5y agoThank you - updated the link
- faldore 5y agook but you are missing the killer app. 1) I wanna share my trades 2) I wanna do it automatically across multiple brokerages. think Tastyworks + Plaid + Facebook. for tracking all my trades across all my brokerages. and social-media'izing it. (ie I and other people can make comments on my trades) I can follow traders I like and get notified when they make a trade. etc etc.
- aqme28 5y agoSome of the marketing implies that I could be "rewarded" by picking stocks well. What are the rewards? How does that work?
- uptown 5y agoOh, well, knowledge is my reward, sir.
- stonlyb 5y agoAre you thinking of eventually merging social + trade execution like https://public.com/ https://public.com/ ?
- stuartjm5 5y agoYes, right now we are leaning towards broker integration so users could stay with their existing brokerages. We want to make it easy for users to find an investment idea, validate it, then place a trade without leaving Utradea
- MattGaiser 5y agoHow does this differ from AlphaSwap or the recently defunct Vetr?
- stuartjm5 5y agoGood question, AlphaSwap is operates on a reward based system for investment ideas/content that factors in both community consensus voting and performance of the idea. We are more focused on the social engagement aspect of bringing investors together.
- tschellenbach 5y agoStocktwits/eToro are both quite popular.
- stevewodil 5y agoIf a signal to noise ratio could be negative Stocktwits would be negative. The content on there is absolute bottom of the barrel garbage from Robinhood traders. This platform has a lot of cool new ideas and I hope it works
- stuartjm5 5y agoAgree with the point about stocktwits - not the best place for investment quality investment content or discussions. Let me know if you have any suggestions on things you'd like to see.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- slimeylimey 5y agoI'm curious about the idea of a social investment platform, if someone gained a significant following on a platform like this could they end up being charged with market manipulation? I can imagine someone with a significant following on a platform like this could potentially be able to have some small sway on parts of the market.
- high_byte 5y agoon eToro, the top investors have hundreds of thousands to low millions under management. I think the top investor has 5m or 10m under management which is the maximum allowed, I assume by some regulation. meanwhile, billionaires drop billion dollar trades left and right.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ab_testing 5y agoWSB lite ?
- stuartjm5 5y agoLol, maybe from a year ago before it was overrun by bots. There used to be some quality investment ideas on the sub
- jsomau 5y agoThis new wave of social investment platforms is really exciting. Stocktwits is just noise. I'm still shocked Twitter hasn't capitalized on cashtags by at least showing market data. I've recently been a big fan of Commonstock: https://commonstock.com/ https://commonstock.com/ it actually allows you to link your broker through Plaid and shows a leaderboard based on actual % gain on positions. That said, I like you bringing more competition to the scene!
- DavidMcDoughnut 5y agoThanks for the shoutout! (I'm David the Commonstock founder). We're sprinting to finish some things to improve content algos and sorting before we grow so it's very cool to see you and @joadha call out the value of that and to stay disciplined focusing on quality over quantity. It's actually the exact reason I started building it as a side project in 2016: I wanted a community for signal instead of noise. The original pitch deck said, verbatim: "stocktwits/reddit/twitter but without all the noise/garbage". Anyways, Thanks for the kind words! (I'm all for more competition too, btw)
- joadha 5y agoTwitter is crawling with scammers and pump-n-dumpers. It's impossible to use it for investment talk. You spend all your time blocking people, and ticker hashtags are abused by people selling their discord channel or other crap. Also, if you express negative emotion toward a stock, its investors go out of their way to dox you or harass you. I had to set my account to "protected" because of this. Twitter missed out on a huge opportunity. They should have listened to investors who user their platform.
- holler 5y agoInteresting insight! Do you use Stocktwits? I see a lot of the same issues you describe with people abusing the cashtag & spamming their discord channels. Working on a new discussion site and I'd like to attract a community of people interested in stock/RE/investment etc.
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- joadha 5y agoPlease stop with the icon menu bars. It is 2021, and people are still doing this. Why. Just stop. Arrrgh. Anyway, I absolutely love this idea! I signed up and am poking around now. I think I already like this more than Benzinga, Stocktwits, SeekingAlpha, you-name-it.
- latenightcoding 5y agoaren't icon menu bars a somewhat recent trend (last decade), I remember text menu bars were more popular back in the day and then boostrap came along.
- lgas 5y agoAs phrased your suggestion to stop using icon menu bars is unhelpful. What should we be using instead and why?
- heyheyhey 5y agoI prefer the icon menu bars with text underneath the icons. iOS Apps use this a lot: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/bars/tab-bars/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
- lgas 5y agoFWIW the icons do have text labels and even descriptions when you hover over them.
- GloriousKoji 5y agoI'm hovering with my finger on my phone and I don't see text labels. /s
- rabuse 5y agoHow is this sarcastic? I hate when info like that isn't accessible on mobile devices.
- tqi 5y agoWhat is the plan to police/moderate the content to prevent scams? I think something like this works great when you know the people or at least believe that they have positive intent, but is hard to do right at scale (as WSB has experienced over the last few months).
- the-dude 5y agoWho is saying anything went wrong at WSB?
- tqi 5y agoAnnecdotally, I've seen a few posts complaining about the quality of the posts in the sub as new users have flooded in. But I haven't been paying attention long enough to know how true it is.
- hemloc_io 5y agoVery true unfortunately. Previously most of the people who were on WSB at least knew what they were talking about and all the dumb jokes were known to be jokes. Made a lot of fun stories, because the people who did exceptionally dumb stuff got sucked into the hype of people who knew what they were doing winning/losing big. When $GME happened the sub got flooded with people who thought that buying $GME was a social movement and caused the quality of everything to go down a ton. It's gotten better over time and massive user growth has happened before, but not on this scale. Honestly the place is totally different from where it was even six months ago, which is unfortunate as the culture was really something.
- GloriousKoji 5y agoIgnoring all the criticism regarding retail traders from outlets, there's a whole history of it being abused by mods for personal gain as well as the literal bots. Not too long ago one of the mods created a fake account and posted fake Tesla gains in attempt to manipulate the market as well as monetize the sub for a scam company. More recently some mods tried to monetize the whole sub with movie deals and other media venues. The reddit administrators ended up nuking a lot of mods include one who was doing actual moderation and was good for the community of the sub. (The one mod was later reinstated by Reddit) Separate from all the mod issues is the large amount of astroturfing that went on. All too often tons of newly created accounts were posting trying to create hype around some stocks (suspiciously Chinese owned companies).
- marketgod 5y agoWhat really needs to exist as ideas don't matter and execution does. Let me sign in, hook my brokerage, then just track me versus the rest. If you like what I am doing, let you follow me for a percentage of profits I want, and the system auto executes the trades I am making in your for you.
- jchin 5y agoReminds me of eToro's "copy trading." https://www.etoro.com/en-us/copytrader/ https://www.etoro.com/en-us/copytrader/
- stuartjm5 5y agoThat is definitely one way to approach it. eToro (copy trading) already exists and commonstock is similar - you can see someone portfolio and % holdings but not their $ amount. We are focused on investment ideas, social engagement, and building a community.
- marketgod 5y agoHow do you know the person's ideas are useful is my issue. With Reddit you have all sorts of comments, and you have no idea if this person is posting random ideas, or if they are actually good at what they do. The issue is who is going to engage here is my concern. StockTwits has it by stock which works and creates a conversation. Here the main page has daily stories, so the conversation has to occur right away. Equating posts (news) with a change in price is not an investment idea. Most of the time, the news is counter to the way the stock moves in the short term. I think you need to find a way to differentiate yourself. The UI is nice and all the info available is great however I think you need a something to provide to your end user with respect to engagement/community, but news stories die so fast it's hard to create a conversation around that.
- fsn4dN69ey 5y agoHow does this compare to Iris? I've seen that pushed more heavily within the finance/wannabe finance community. Otherwise, great product! Love the design! Should consider partnering with the bigger instagram accounts - litquidity, trustfundterry, etc to push it further and get some more adoption.
- stuartjm5 5y agoI'd say the biggest difference is the content. We are aiming to provide people with quality investment content (more detailed/informative write ups) whereas Iris seems to be more similar to StockTwits or twitter. Agreed, in the process of chatting to a few finance "influencers"
- greggman3 5y agoPlease take this in the spirit of constructive feedback. The tiny thin fonts are super hard to read for my non perfect vision.
- stuartjm5 5y agoI appreciate the feedback - that is a valid point to consider and we will look at adjusting the font weight.
- paulpauper 5y agoIF this were ycombinator and someone pitched me this startup, I would pass, sorry. This market for social investing is saturated and I dont see anying special about the site. It also does not look like there is anyting there. There is nothign that jumps out at me that would compell me to register or stay. It's not a good idea, sorry.
- esaym 5y ago>This market for social investing is saturated And what are some examples?
- gfiorav 5y agoIf you ignore things like $GME (which will eventually be regulated like the rest), traders keep their strategy a secret. Interested in knowing how this will pan out
- jacobsenscott 5y agoBuy index fund, wait, profit. Not a secret and beats active traders every time.
- tjs8rj 5y agoNo it doesn’t. The appeal of index funds is that they are perfectly average. Sure, beating the index every year is a challenge, but who cares about that? The game is making money turn into more money, not trying to get 1% more than the S&P for everyone except fund managers. Beating the index by a massive amount once pays for all the times you underperform it. Not to mention: hedge funds have beat the market very consistently for decades (before fees), starting a new job is often a higher roi, real estate has a higher sharpe ratio over the last 100 years, private equity has a higher return before fees for decades, venture capital has beat the market consistently, starting a business frequently has a higher or even much higher roi, all these especially in absolute terms (nobody rich before 50 got that way from index fund returns). To say “the index beats the active traders”, or that active traders lose everytime, or that it’s impossible to beat the market is just 1. Not relevant because it’s a vanity metric on its face, 2. Not strictly correct. It’s just said by people who want to convince themselves that the dominant strategy in investing also happens to be the easiest one for them. Index funds are about average returns - and thats ok! That’s probably best for any investor not looking to put in serious time or effort, but it’s certainly not the best strategy for maximizing returns (in fact, there are literally infinite strategies that have consistently beat the market on average for the entire duration of the exchange that don’t have foresight or overfit). The index itself is arbitrary: rank order the public equities by revenue, then select the top 500 and weight them by market cap. For the total market: you still chop off the companies that aren’t public arbitrarily, you still weight by market cap (why not volume? Why not weighted trade volume which correlated better with prices?). As a parting note on this rant: the efficient market hypothesis is about determining fair value is an open system with minimal barriers and motivated rational players playing by the same rules with instantaneous info propagation. Do we all play by the same rules? Do we all have the same barriers? Are we all rational players? Is info propagated instantly? Are these values true enough? The market is efficient - except when it isn’t. Plenty of people succeed in business when the efficient market should have meant there was no opportunity for them, plenty get rich on trades when the efficient market says that trade shouldn’t exist. It’s paradoxical that the market can be perfectly efficient and those could be true, because even tiny risk-free profits should be consistently and equally arbitraged out of existence immediately. That just doesn’t describe our world.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoIt's a neat idea. Less TA and more fundamentals than TradingView.
- stuartjm5 5y agoThanks for the feedback - we love TradingView for charts and technical but it can sometimes be overwhelming, especially for newer investors.
- ethn 5y agoI think you can develop this into something cool. However I think the current idea is a bit too similar to eToro and especially close to what Seeking Alpha is. The UX is also very, very, overwhelming.
- stuartjm5 5y agoThanks checking it out and the feedback. I would say eToro is more focused on copy trading as opposed to investment ideas/content and letting the user decide on what they are going to invest in. It is a bit similar to SeekingAlpha but we are focused on providing a better user experience and more focused on the community/social aspect. Regarding UX, would love to know if there is anything specific that you find overwhelming? This is important for me to understand and address.
- nostrapollo 5y agoLove the idea, and great effort put in! My initial impression is the same, overwhelming UX. There's a lot of information and there with very little visual hierarchy, it's hard to decide where to look first. I find https://refactoringui.com/ https://refactoringui.com/ has some digest-able design stuff for us developers. I'm not affiliated with them, but I've been the same boat with product design. For me the key was understanding what roles spacing, color, and font-weight play in building a hierarchy. Edit: spelling.
- stuartjm5 5y agoThanks for letting me know. It is our first time creating something like this so the feedback and suggestions are super helpful.
- cjpb 5y agoLooks nice Probably a good idea add `cursor: pointer` to your .feed-card class for the desktop folks. A lot of wasted/unused screen real estate on my 1080 desktop as well.
- stuartjm5 5y agoThanks for the feedback. Yeah we are trying to balance relevant information vs information overload I've found that on a lot of finance related sites there is too much info on one page.
- aiur 5y agoIt’s a great idea. It’s basically sum zero for retail.
- tnr23 5y agoThe more this kind of platforms become relevant, the less they work to gain an edge at investing.
- wanderein 5y agoThis is a great idea!