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Ask HN: HN for Finance?

• hqudsi 4y ago
  Wall Street Oasis is probably the closest thing https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum
• mtmail 4y ago
  On "Ask HN: Hacker News, but for Finance?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557943) https://www.valueinvestorsclub.com/ https://www.valueinvestorsclub.com/ , https://bogleheads.org/forum/index.php https://bogleheads.org/forum/index.php , https://www.elitetrader.com/et/ https://www.elitetrader.com/et/ were suggested.
  • douge1 4y ago
    Nice! Thank you.
    • gibletstocks 4y ago
      curating the right follows on Twitter (FinTwit) is the closest thing you will find. You could follow people like @CliffordAsness (a well known and outspoken quant) and just choose some of his follows. The toughest part is disentangling the good accounts from the promoters. valueinvestorsclub.com is great. If you get Bloomberg, there are industry/interest specific anonymous chats that are useful as well.
  • drexlspivey 4y ago
    There’s also a r/bogleheads subreddit which cracks me up because there is literally nothing to talk about. Just the same three questions ad nauseum. For the uninitiated bogleheads are followers of the passive investment philosophy of John Bogle (founder of Vanguard) which in short is: 1. Set a standing order from your paycheck to your broker every month 2. Set an automatic buy of a total market ETF and a bond ETF on your broker 3. rebalance once or twice a year
    • blowski 4y ago
      > Just the same three questions ad nauseum A lot of Reddit seems like that.
      • basch 4y ago
        It is unfortunate that the design encourages new posts on existing topics, compared to forums where bumping brings a state topic to fresh. Maybe the answer is for each link or topic or submission to have multiple comment pages, and make it significantly more likely for people to find themselves back in old conversations. The way reddit locks discussion after a time frame makes this all but impossible though.
        • blowski 4y ago
          It's also karma-farming. Go find a popular post and re-post it for easy internet points.
    • shred45 4y ago
      I'm not sure about the subreddit, but from my reading of the forum, there is still quite a lot of work / discussion to be done related to implementing said strategy in a tax efficient manner, directly purchasing bonds rather than using the ETFs, usage of TIPS, alternative asset classes like real estate, and portfolio allocation given age, etc. I've learned that maintaining even the simplest "strategy" can be a lot of work.
    • jacobrussell 4y ago
      The portfolio reviews are fun though
• dom96 4y ago
  Many good subreddits. r/FIRE and if you're in the UK: r/UKPersonalFinance and r/FIREUK. There is likely similar for US and other countries but I'm less familiar with those.
  • OJFord 4y ago
    UKPF is more like SO for finance than HN - occasional interesting stuff, fair amount of arcane situations you're not interested in, and a lot of broadly identical basic questions time and time again. But without flags/marking duplicate/voting to close.
    • ycombinete 4y ago
      What is SO?
      • autophagian 4y ago
        Stack Overflow.
• favflam 4y ago
  https://nuclearphynance.com/ https://nuclearphynance.com/ - 20+/- yr old forum on quant finance.
• 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  i would like to add, is there a HN for Law? primarily legal tech, OSS ideology, developments, ?
  • anonu 4y ago
    You're probably looking for HN
• jshaqaw 4y ago
  Value Investor Club is not what it once was in part due to the decimation of value investing over the last decade along with a general decline in norms of professional conduct but it’s still the best resource. Membership is limited but you can read older stuff at a lag and it’s a great educational resource for new investors.
  • gibletstocks 4y ago
    If you want to see the decimation of value investing styles in one picture its this: https://twitter.com/Greenbackd/status/1623010694928138240?s=20&t=m546zf2SX1D8o_BXLIt9Vg https://twitter.com/Greenbackd/status/1623010694928138240?s=... Value spreads are at an all time wide (measure by a valuation ratio eg P/E or EV/EBIT of expensive vs. cheap parts of a wide group of stocks), and to get to that point value strategies have had to underperform for a long time. If you believe in mean reversion you would believe that value strategies are going to outperform and the quality of writeup on Value Investors Club will improve as well.
• jowdones 4y ago
  A "HN for Finance" has about the same appeal to it's regular crowd as "HN for Fruitarians". The "Fruitarians" already have their tight communities. Everyone who wanted to be in such a community is there already, not dumbly questioning on HN.
  • yomly 4y ago
    I'm sure there are people who straddle both
    • MonkeyClub 4y ago
      There was a time when HN wasn’t for “dumbly questioning”, a golden era some might say.
• Meleagris 4y ago
  I find the rational reminder community is a great place to participate in conversations about personal finance, asset management etc. https://community.rationalreminder.ca/login https://community.rationalreminder.ca/login It started as a landing pad for listeners of the rational reminder podcast.
  • imakwana 4y ago
    +1000 This forum increased my financial literacy by an order of magnitude.
  • auxym 4y ago
    Agreed. The podcast is great, and the community is the highest quality discussion of personal finance I've seen anywhere on the internet.
  • elil17 4y ago
    Even though they don't really discuss links like HN does, I think this is the right answer. Frankly I wish the quality of discussion on HN was as high as it is on RR.
• credit_guy 4y ago
  Unlikely. Here's a Hacker News lookalike [1] for Machine Learning. You'll see that the latest post was 11 days ago, and the one before that 29 days ago and the one before 54. Most topics have one or zero comments. And ML is a much more popular topic than finance. The great thing about HN is that it does not restrict the topics. People can bring up anything they find interesting. As soon as you want to limit the discussion to some specific thing, the audience drops by a few orders of magnitude. So, I guess it's up to you to collect a number of different blogs and newsletter and follow them. It almost goes without saying that you should subscribe to Matt Levine's newsletter [2]. Also, you can't go wrong by checking the blog of "Fed Guy" [3]. [1] https://datatau.net/ https://datatau.net/ [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe... [3] https://fedguy.com/ https://fedguy.com/
  • pfd1986 4y ago
    It looks like datatau just needs more users :) signed up
  • douge1 4y ago
    For sure, I agree, HN is a great spot for bringing up any topic, that's what I love about it, but was thinking maybe there's something like this for Finance since it's such a deep space. I haven't heard of these, and I'll check them out. Thanks!
  • crosen99 4y ago
    > Here's a Hacker News lookalike [1] for Machine Learning. You'll see that the latest post was 11 days ago, and the one before that 29 days ago and the one before 54. It looks like the main feed of DataTau (https://datatau.net/ https://datatau.net/) may not be promoting posts from the "new" feed (https://datatau.net/new https://datatau.net/new) aggressively enough. There are a few dozen new posts in just the last few days. I understand the dilemma with promoting posts before they have activity, but maybe the algorithm needs to be tweaked.
    • swexbe 4y ago
• welder 4y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ /s
• traceroute66 4y ago
  Just the usual reminder that people should not be taking financial advice from random people on the internet. If somebody is telling you that you should do something without knowing anything about your personal financial circumstances or appetite for risk, then they should be ignored. It is equally unlikely that you will be willing to sufficiently disclose your financial circumstances to unknown individuals in order to receive any sort of worthwhile advice. The above advice applies across the spectrum, whether it's the usual crowd blindly saying "buy a passive ETF and forget about it" or pump & dumpers saying "buy XYZ shares because its the next ten bagger".
  • yomly 4y ago
    >Just the usual reminder that people should not be taking financial advice from random people on the internet. There are lots of people on the internet putting out super valuable insight and/or trying to educate the unsophisticated masses. Putting out a blanket statement perpetuates this myth that finance is only for professionals, just like coding. The culture of open source has led to high-trust collaboration in the software community. While anything involving money attracts grifters and scammers, that doesn't mean that there aren't honest and open people out there giving away gifts. Much like you shouldn't just blindly execute random code on your machine from an untrusted individual on your computer, you shouldn't just blindly open a position on something without thinking hard about the decision for yourself.
  • douge1 4y ago
    Oh, for sure, and I should have caveat'd this, but I'm not looking for that reason, it's more just "interesting stuff about finance", like the other day someone posted [1] and I that was the catalyst in my mind. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34688915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34688915
• yomly 4y ago
  Twitter. Look for people that aren't trying to bamboozle you with wishywashy arguments or anyone who tries to make things sound too simple or are sales-y. Best is to follow people who are speaking in precise technical details where you're not the audience. A bit like software engineers talking to each other: speaking in precise technical terms, assuming a reasonable amount of background knowledge. AKA professionals Then do your own work to clue yourself up on the nomenclature and basics
• jstx1 4y ago
  No, "HN for {}" isn't a thing in general, I don't why people keep asking these questions.
  • douge1 4y ago
    HN is dope, but wanted to know if there's more "finance-ish" kinds of boards out there, that have such a huge following like HN.
• college_physics 4y ago
  The reason there is no HN for finance is that people, in general, don't hack finance. They are just consumers of a tightly setup up and controlled legal, political and technical infrastructure. Oh, sure there are "sophisticated" day traders, but those are just fodder for the Wall Street casino. The closest to really hacking finance was (the horror, the horror) the cryptofinance lot, but this has degenerated quickly into a rob-thy-neighbor ponzi scheme.
  • chadash 4y ago
    I believe that this is quite untrue. Finance is full of clever innovations that are mostly meant to make money for their creators. Because the monetary rewards are so high, it attracts some very talented people. As just one example, you can securitize the revenues from golf courses. You can say, hey, i own six courses bringing in an average of $100m a year. I'm gonna take that $600m cash flow and sell it in an asset-backed security in order to raise money to finance the acquisition of more golf courses. Then I'm gonna tranche up those securities, because I found that I'll make more money selling 50% super safe and 50% risky than selling it as 100% middle-of-the-road risky. This example isn't really a hack anymore... it's almost the norm. But someone had to have the initial insight and then figure out if this was legal.
    • college_physics 4y ago
      Securitization is a good example of a finance hack but I have to mention that it is half a century old innovation. Ofcourse, C/C++ is also about that age and people still talk about it on HN (mostly to proclaim its dead, but very frequently about some amazing and impactful projects based on it that still go strong) But this brings to a second peculiarity of the financial world of today that makes it less fitting for an open discussion forum of (aspiring) fin-techies like HN. Its very proprietary, secretive and dominated by a few megaplayers (pick any subdomain: banking, asset management, trading platforms, credit ratings, credit scoring etc. there is some oligopoly milking it and they are not about to open it up to random DIY hackers) One area that was quite intriguing for a while and maybe conducive to a more decentralized discourse (but predictably hasn't gone anywhere) is peer-to-peer lending. p.s. my parent comment is downvoted even if it is about the only one in this thread that doesn't pitch some stonks forum or another. Alas, the milking machine is well oiled...
• xekul 4y ago
  For Canadian equities, especially mining stocks, ceo.ca seems to have a lot of knowledgeable participants. Otherwise, maybe a Bloomberg terminal, though it's out of reach for most people. The high price to entry is a feature, not a bug.
• rr808 4y ago
  https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum has pretty good forums, not exactly posting and commenting links.
• oliv__ 4y ago
  Not HN like but a finance community I can think of would be StockTwits: https://stocktwits.com/ https://stocktwits.com/
• zhte415 4y ago
  Not a forum but for signal and conversation - EconTwitter.net, which is a Mastodon. Subscribe to various REPEC bots, of which there are a few for various flavours of finance http://nep.repec.org/ http://nep.repec.org/
• ldayley 4y ago
  There used to be a exact clone of HN for finance called Quant.ly but this is now some trading tool and i can’t even find evidence of it in the wayback machine on internet archive. Time for a new one, perhaps?
  • capableweb 4y ago
    A submission from 2011 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2841045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2841045) seems to give you some sort of proof, people talking about "Gotta love the HN format" and "http://quant.ly/newest http://quant.ly/newest says the latest 3 posts" so seems to have been something like HN at least. In the submission there was a mention of "HN for business" as well (http://forlue.com http://forlue.com), but that links to some ad-infested abomination now.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• barrenko 4y ago
  HN is HN for Finance if you make a decent amount of effort.
• john_cogs 4y ago
  For people who work in financial services, the Bloomberg terminal is the home for financial news, information, and communication. The messaging experience is essentially DMs and email to others in the Bloomberg ecosystem rather than a forum-like experience.
• rayiner 4y ago
  For the industry backchannel side of HN, such as sharing compensation numbers or layoff news, there’s Wall Street Oasis.
• ferCats99 4y ago
  there's a couple of telegram channels like BIZfeed but that one is mainly crypto
• KaiserPro 4y ago
  I know this is going to be considered OT, but I recommend subscribing to the FT. failing that, getting an RSS feed of a wires service that got a good finance section (Reuters or Bloomberg.)
• MichaelMoser123 4y ago
  maybe ask your favorite language model for advice. They say it's the answer to all questions, sort of like 42. My point is here: https://youtu.be/_8yVOC4ciXc?t=696 https://youtu.be/_8yVOC4ciXc?t=696 - they explain that gpt3 (almost) learned how to add and multiply, but they don't know how. To me that's the thing. (the insight comes at 12:29, 15:23) in a sense that is kind of an admission that we don't know what the heck what is going on. That's kind of stronger than the claim to "strong AI". Being able to define a system as being as a "Strong Ai" assumes that we would still know hat is actually going on. An understanding of what is going on would imply a claim of understanding of what is happening, that in turn implies a claim of being in charge of show. (Maybe that's a cyperpunk way of looking at the whole frigging show ;-)
• shagmin 4y ago
  Not as much content as HN, but I go here once in a while https://econbrowser.com/ https://econbrowser.com/
• lefstathiou 4y ago
  Many moons ago there used to be an HN for finance that was a clone of HN but with a green theme. I believe it was called Mogul something. All the articles had some connection to finance and I never saw investment advice, just analysis. It abruptly stopped one day. I’d use a version of HN focused on finance (we’ve considered building one at our company). Update: it was called newmogul.
• siva7 4y ago
  Well, the thing about HN is that it's usually not replicable. So whenever people ask for "HN but for X" it's easy to forget that there is no other HN with the characteristics like this community (and i'm not sure i'll ever witness)
• majikaja 4y ago
  Trading is mostly a zero-sum game so people are going to be selective about sharing useful ideas. For investment the horizons are so long it's hard to know which people are worth paying attention to. Maybe some people try to influence sentiment on reddit but in general most successful financial professionals don't spend their time posting on message boards. Anyway, I don't think it's realistic to become good at trading/investment while working in a different profession. Be prepared to drop everything and focus on it full time (after a few years of preliminary study) if you're really serious. The learning curve is a lot worse than tech, and it's not just because there are no tutorials to learn from. The level of competition is completely different.
• sreeramvenkat 4y ago
  I think its not HN but it's the openness and inclination to help that makes HN very unique.
• sdn90 4y ago
  Not a professional but I think I follow markets pretty closely for a retail trader. Twitter / FinTwit is the best Level of discussion is not always great but I find its way better than anywhere else. Twitter Spaces usually have great discussions since people are less likely to troll vs tweets. One thing I've found though is if the person is getting too cocky and going on victory laps, it's pretty much always a good time to counter trade them. You'll be able to find some great Substack's, Podcasts, Youtube channels from Twitter as well if you're following the right people. Some that I follow - @fedguy12 - macro - @JulianMI2 - macro - @biancoresearch - macro - @acrossthespread - Japan macro - @anasalhajji - energy - Pretty much any central bank, government official - Fund managers. Many of them aren't too active and just crosspost links to videos. Cliff Asness is one that is active though Podcasts: - Forward Guidance - Odd Lots Reddit I find is usually not much better than SeekingAlpha, Zero Hedge, etc. even on the more "serious" subreddits. Most of the posters are John Bogle acolytes or post the Warren Buffet quote on buying index funds. A lot of the threads don't have much besides "you should buy a broad based index fund with a lump sum [link to Vanguard whitepaper] [link to backtest starting from year 2000-2010]". HN is still way better than Reddit on the rare finance/economics post. Every finance thread you'll get a few people who have unique insights/opinions but I think the majority is still a lot of retail market participants who just regurgitate the Reddit stuff.
• riskneutral 4y ago
  Litquidity
• manifoldgeo 4y ago
  I wish there were such a website, but I haven't seen one. That's unfortunate, because I often feel the need to skip the comments sections on HN for economics-related posts. There are many armchair economists here, mostly with a pure software dev outlook on the topic. People who've never taken a single class about finance confidently chime in with some of the worst takes I've ever heard. They seem to think that because they're good at programming, they must therefore be masters of all studies, since STEM majors are often harder to get accepted into. This is a logical fallacy, and it's pretty tiring.
  • majikaja 4y ago
    The CS-leaning finance professionals are often bad too. The best use of CS knowledge is knowing how to avoid the quant trading herd.
• douge1 4y ago
  As an update to this, what about more institutional websites like [1] [1] https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/ https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/
• PedroBatista 4y ago
  There isn't one and I think it can't exist given the two vastly different fields. The ethos of your average tech/nerd produces things like HN, and as much as there's a lot of bad things with it ( and there are many ), the uber nerds, the aggressive new genius kids invent their own revolutionary tech just to be pointed out by the old "been there done that" guy, the "I just build this over the weekend", the business guy under heavy tech bro camouflage waiting for his moment, the holy OSS priests and I could go on and on.. All these people AND context ( aka huge influx of cheap/free money ) make HN what it is. Finance has their own figures, groups, context and ethos and it isn't anything like HN. Yes, there is a lot of money talk here because.. business. But if you spend 5min around finance people the conversations are very different ( not alien, bu t different ) and of course tech people with money want to get more money so they talk with finance people and a little SV secret that everybody knows is that in the last decade most "tech" companies exist because the finance and MBA guys came to SV to write checks and earn their money. But the 2 worlds are different and you cannot replicate what one has. Tech is big, but it's really small compared to finance and if we complain about the deluge of pretenders when some new hot tech goes mainstream, in finance it's 1000% worse ( one example: Crypto )
• ydnaclementine 4y ago
  https://www.bogleheads.org/ https://www.bogleheads.org/ if you want more of a classic web forum
  • imakwana 4y ago
    +1 Bogleheads forum is excellent.
• sgent 4y ago
  For personal finance https://forum.whitecoatinvestor.com/ https://forum.whitecoatinvestor.com/ is probably the best for higher net worth / income individuals (they have a large forum). https://www.bogleheads.org/ https://www.bogleheads.org/ is also excellent. For finance itself r/finance has some good posts on occasion, and there is an insurance professional forum which can be useful for those products, but not one all encompassing board.
• KfactorSam 4y ago
  Wall Street Oasis: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com https://www.wallstreetoasis.com