4 ms·

Show HN: PennyWhale – Use natural language to search for any financial data

91 points by coffeejay 12y ago

samirmenon 12y ago
How does this compare to Bloomberg? From what I've seen, people in the financial services industry have gotten very good at using the Bloomberg Terminal commands to examine this kind of data.
- coffeejay 12y ago
  Fundamentally, PennyWhale is targeted at a different market. While Bloomberg is tremendously powerful, it's also very expensive. We think there's an opportunity for the retail investors here.
- apaprocki 12y ago
  FYI You can literally ask the same question to the terminal -- we process English language queries (and can resolve textual company names to tickers :)).
Shrugs 12y ago
It's slow to load at the moment, so I'll describe what it does. PennyWhale lets you search, manipulate, and compare financial data with natural language queries along the lines of "how much cash does $GOOG have" and "show me the PE ratio for $AAPL". Seems like a really good research tool!
carlmcqueen 12y ago
Do you have to use one of their example questions for a free demonstration? I asked one of the questions and it asked me to log in.
- timtamboy63 12y ago
  What did you ask? There are a few premium features right now (holdings data, interactive financials). If you want to make an account I'll give you a free upgrade :)
  - carlmcqueen 12y ago
    I put in What are the holdings for $WF as an example. I wanted to see one of the big banks and how it showed versus yahoo finance/bloomberg sources.
  - andrewtbham 12y ago
    I did the same thing as my first query and I assumed you needed login for everything and gave up. I suspect you will bounce traffic if it's not obvious what's premium.
  - chromatic 12y ago
    I asked "Show me the Cash Flow Statement for $INTC". (I didn't expect it to work, but it would have been impressive.)
    - timtamboy63 12y ago
      That would actually work in the premium version. Again, if you'd like, I'll hook you up with a free premium account - just shoot me an email at chintan@pennywhale.com
makmanalp 12y ago
This is cool! We've been working on something similar, but the opposite direction (for world trade data). Instead of trying to NLP our way out of the problem, we pre-generate and index a bunch of possible questions, and let full text search handle the rest. It's interesting, because theoretically NLP should be able to "understand" what you mean but in reality I find that even if you parse sentence structure and extract some meaning, you're still at some level hardcoding the possible things that can be queried into the code. So it's a neat tradeoff of whether it's more worth it to create a mini query language, or go full natural language, or go somewhere in between. ... Anyway, try it out by clicking on the title (keeping it a bit hidden for now for testing purposes): http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/usa/all/show/2012/ http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/usa/all... Things you can try (mix and match too!): - "wine italy" - "france" - "germany spain" - "germany export wine 2002 to 2012" - "turkey feasible" ... If you want to see the code, check out our github: https://github.com/cid-harvard/atlas-economic-complexity/blob/master/django_files/observatory/views_search.py https://github.com/cid-harvard/atlas-economic-complexity/blo... (search view) https://github.com/cid-harvard/atlas-economic-complexity/blob/master/django_files/observatory/management/commands/index_questions.py https://github.com/cid-harvard/atlas-economic-complexity/blo... (indexer) Apologies for any mess, I recently joined and we're undergoing a huge overhaul right now.
- hrjet 12y ago
  Couple of years back, I implemented a natural-language-ish solution for querying ERP data. My approach was to a. have structured queries that can be precisely parsed b. provide query completion to guide the user while entering the query It turned out quite well, if I say so myself. But I never got the time to market it. It can be seen in action here: http://nlq.lavadip.com/servlet/demo http://nlq.lavadip.com/servlet/demo
  - sandGorgon 12y ago
    this is pretty cool ! could you talk about the parser-generator and ER relationships ? I was looking to build something similar for a webapp and was stuck at how to generate the autocompletes.
polskibus 12y ago
It's a pity you have to specify a ticker. I was really hoping it can do the hard work for me. https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=find+me+best+investment+in+2014&button= https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%9...
- willyum 12y ago
  hahaha we'll add an easter egg just for you ;) perhaps check out http://www.premise.com/ http://www.premise.com/ or https://kensho.com/ https://kensho.com/
drglitch 12y ago
Pretty interesting effort, but a bit of constructive criticism: - none of your query results have a date attached! While pretty, an earnings number without a date is like a chart without an axis. - Just how natural can the queries be? "$AAPL sales estimates" did not return anything. Neither did "$CAT cost of capital". "quarterly $CAT earnings growth" gave me a single EBIDTA number", e.g. not what asked. Is it easier to start with simple dropdowns? - Why the stocktwits $ prefix? Why cant a company name be used? - Another "sad face" feature - every not found/no results query takes away a "free query" :( On more positive note, things look really clean - good job on the design! A great start. Is the long-term idea here to build an accessible place for fundamental data research? What value added are you providing in your premium product (aside from heatmap) over just going over to EDGAR archive? Ping me directly - would love to provide more feedback! Edit: fix formatting :)
- timtamboy63 12y ago
  Would love your email for feedback :) Or just shoot me an email at chintan@pennywhale.com. Thanks!
  - drglitch 12y ago
    Will shoot you an email! One more thing: you seem to be hotlinking to images on nasdaq, e.g. apple pe ratio shows http://www.nasdaq.com//charts/aapl_per.jpeg http://www.nasdaq.com//charts/aapl_per.jpeg - what determines is a datapoint is presented as a hotlink/image vs a number (like apple's price to book?). Aside from as-of date on each datapoint, ideally you should provide attribution as well (anyone who worked in finance knows that all data sources provide different data for same query at any given time :)
tmoullet 12y ago
Hey Jay, This is really cool. One idea is it would be great if you could interface with EDGAR and gather the links to the various financial statements. The EDGAR database search/navigation is horrendous. As another commenter said, it would be great if it could detect the company name or at least the ticker without the $. Also, a failed query subtracts from the guest query allotment. That doesn't seem ideal as I'm first learning how to phrase my requests. Lastly, mutual fund data would be awesome. Morning star rating, fund performance, fund assets, etc.
- coffeejay 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We're definitely looking into interfacing with EDGAR as well as getting rid of the 'cashtag'. Mutual fund data is a great idea too - shouldn't be too difficult to tie in.
  - badamson 12y ago
    We have an API for a lot of EDGAR stuff & lots of it is free so feel free to give it a try: www.jivedata.com
malchow 12y ago
This is intriguing. Large implications when applied to private datasets ---- think Factiva, etc. There the data schema differ so wildly that natural language can really make it more useful. Publicly traded equities is the facile, simple place to start, obviously. Can I spin off a search and get pinged on updates? Love to learn more.
- coffeejay 12y ago
  Private datasets is brilliant, great idea. As of now, updates aren't available but definitely could be in the future. We'd love to chat more and get some feedback! My email is jay@pennywhale.com
jwblackwell 12y ago
Congratulations on launching! Cool idea and a good start. I think since you're targeting the non-professional market here, you need to focus on user experience a bit. Some feedback: - Found it a bit slow, but guess that's partially the HN effect. - As per above, I'd make the queries ajax rather than refreshing the whole page every search, should improve the UX a fair bit. - I expected autopredict when I started to type $... to predict a ticker, would be nice to guess company names as well if no ticker is entered. Probably an essential feature for non-pros. - You need a clear signup link. And the redirect when you run out of free credits should go to the signup page with small link to login, not the other way around. - Also look at highcharts.com, they have a stock chart product as well. Hands down the best JS charts, mobile friendly, highly customisable etc.
- Legend 12y ago
  +1 I like these suggestions given that I was expecting the exact things :)
- timtamboy63 12y ago
  Thanks so much, this is great advice. Definitely all things we plan on doing.
nrao123 12y ago
I didnt get any results for this query: https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=%24tsla+sales+growth&button= https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%9...
- coffeejay 12y ago
  Still very early stage, so we're working on collecting more data. Meanwhile, you can inspect sales growth on the financials - ex. 'Income statement for $TSLA'. If you're interested, shoot me an email at jay@pennywhale.com we'd love to make you a free premium account.
theyCallMeSwift 12y ago
Wow this looks great! Congratulations on launch.
samcrawford 12y ago
Congrats! Looks good! Small issue: you're calling Google fonts over HTTP, but your site uses HTTPS, so Chrome is blocking the request. This leads to your fonts rendering in the default (Times New Roman here). [blocked] The page at 'https://www.pennywhale.com/' https://www.pennywhale.com/' was loaded over HTTPS, but ran insecure content from 'http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Montserrat:400,700' http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Montserrat:400,700': this content should also be loaded over HTTPS.
- coffeejay 12y ago
  Thanks for the catch!
- _puk 12y ago
  Does indeed look good. Have to say, love the logo. Think it would drop into a favicon nicely too.. Congrats
  - justinpaulson 12y ago
    I don't know about the logo. It immediately made me think of docker. That could be an issue.
canistr 12y ago
How do you guys plan to compete with Google Spreadsheets? I can already do this stuff in it (free) and just use the built in GoogleFinance calls (and their limit is 1000 per sheet). Plus I have all the other advantages of a spreadsheet program.
- jwblackwell 12y ago
  I wasn't aware you could do this and I'm sure many causal investors aren't. Plus this is not as user friendly: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093281?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093281?hl=en
  - canistr 12y ago
    Possibly. But I suspect many casual investors (on HN anyway) might be familiar with Excel. In which case =GoogleFinance("GOOG", "price") may not be all that complicated. Plus it helps that it's free. Examples: Function list - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydEVqWERkWEh3Nkl4QjVIR0lFVE93dlE&output=html https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydEV... Watch list - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydG5IVWt3blltWWVXdDR1T2otaDBqTXc&output=html https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydG5... Watchlist + holdings - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydDlBY1dSeF9iOGlaQmRFclNkNUtHMUE&output=html https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydDl...
    - coffeejay 12y ago
      This is very interesting - thanks for pointing it out. I think one way we're working on being competitive is the breadth and depth of our research. Rather than just fundamental data points, we're working on integrating more complicated queries such as 'What's the weighted average cost of capital for $AAPL'. We view it as a great opportunity for automation of financial research.
benpbenp 12y ago
This is pretty great. I am convinced there is lots of room in this space for services that cater to people who aren't quite in the Bloomberg terminal crowd, and yet would benefit from easy access to financial data for whatever reason. I've been working on a service to open up EDGAR data to more people: www.easyedgar.com (pre-launch). Not quite as fancy as Penny Whale but I think a lot of people just want the data in their spreadsheet and don't know how to do that.
lquist 12y ago
What is the source of the data? It seems crazy to provide EPS estimates (etc.) without the source.
- coffeejay 12y ago
  We're pooling a lot of disparate sources (Yahoo, Morningstar, NASDAQ, etc.)
  - RayVR 12y ago
    This issue has come up multiple times. Anyone that will pay you money for your tool will need the source of the information and the date associated with it. On top of this a link to where the data originated is likely going to be essential. You're tool _still_ hasn't broken past the minimum requirement of doing a single thing better than any tool that kind of solves this problem.
twrkit 12y ago
not sure if this is the right place to report bugs (and/or if this is intended behavior), but if one clicks the COMPUTE button without a query entered, it decrements the guest query counter
floil 12y ago
Neat. I can see myself using this. Two bugs: "$brkb book value per share" gives a number that's way off. "$brk.a book value per share" and "$_x EV/EBITDA" yield apparent server side errors.
- coffeejay 12y ago
  Thanks for the catches. We're still refining our data sources so we'll look into these.
regularfry 12y ago
"Show me the UK's GDP" doesn't.
wodenokoto 12y ago
Searching for "pe ratio for google" in pennywhale doesn't return anything, while the same query in google actually returns the PE ratio for GOOG.
robot 12y ago
I suggest including parameters mentioned in the book "The intelligent investor" praised by Buffet. For example, the earnings in last 20 years, total value of tangible assets, etc. Company information on value investing are hard to find, and this could be a great help.
saganus 12y ago
When I tried the query: "show me the ratio of $SLV vs $GLD" I get: "We're sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the application owner check the logs for more information." Is this due to the usual HN overload? or did I hit a bad spot? This looks extremely interesting!
- timtamboy63 12y ago
  Yeah, definitely HN overload. That query may not work though - you'll want to specify what ratio you're looking for (PE, PEG, EPS, etc)
  - saganus 12y ago
    Oh, I thought I could get just "the ratio", like, SLV price at date X / GLD price at date X. Would that be too hard to implement? I would love being able to pull ratios out of (almost) any arbitrary data.
    - timtamboy63 12y ago
      We definitely plan on doing that soon
FlyingLawnmower 12y ago
Keep reppin' GT :)
- coffeejay 12y ago
  Always.
andyhmltn 12y ago
Looks pretty cool but I get the rails error page with this query: how much cash does $APPL have vs $GOOG
RayVR 12y ago
Honest feedback from a quant working for an asset manager: This is not (yet) useful. None of these queries even come close to being a real question a financial researcher would ask. What's a real question like? here are examples which your system doesn't even try to handle. * companies in S&P500 with P/E less than 15 * companies in S&P500 with more than 20% of their revenue coming from China * $TSLA Beta with technology sector (returns the wrong answer). * https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=%24TSLA+beta+with+%24AAPL&button= https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%9... (this produced a serious error on your server) If you want to answer trivial questions your product will fail. nothing you've done isn't done better by Google RIGHT NOW. Not trying to discourage you but this just doesn't solve any existing problem. All you have is a pretty interface to a tool that does one thing poorly. If you can actually solve 15% of the real problem with converting natural language questions into financial queries and return accurate, well formatted data, you will have a serious product. Right now you are nowhere close.

91 points by coffeejay 12y ago

How does this compare to Bloomberg? From what I've seen, people in the financial services industry have gotten very good at using the Bloomberg Terminal commands to examine this kind of data.

coffeejay 12y ago
Fundamentally, PennyWhale is targeted at a different market. While Bloomberg is tremendously powerful, it's also very expensive. We think there's an opportunity for the retail investors here.
apaprocki 12y ago
FYI You can literally ask the same question to the terminal -- we process English language queries (and can resolve textual company names to tickers :)).

Shrugs 12y ago

It's slow to load at the moment, so I'll describe what it does. PennyWhale lets you search, manipulate, and compare financial data with natural language queries along the lines of "how much cash does $GOOG have" and "show me the PE ratio for $AAPL". Seems like a really good research tool!

carlmcqueen 12y ago

Do you have to use one of their example questions for a free demonstration? I asked one of the questions and it asked me to log in.

timtamboy63 12y ago
What did you ask? There are a few premium features right now (holdings data, interactive financials). If you want to make an account I'll give you a free upgrade :)
- carlmcqueen 12y ago
  I put in What are the holdings for $WF as an example. I wanted to see one of the big banks and how it showed versus yahoo finance/bloomberg sources.
- andrewtbham 12y ago
  I did the same thing as my first query and I assumed you needed login for everything and gave up. I suspect you will bounce traffic if it's not obvious what's premium.
- chromatic 12y ago
  I asked "Show me the Cash Flow Statement for $INTC". (I didn't expect it to work, but it would have been impressive.)
  - timtamboy63 12y ago
    That would actually work in the premium version. Again, if you'd like, I'll hook you up with a free premium account - just shoot me an email at chintan@pennywhale.com

makmanalp 12y ago

This is cool! We've been working on something similar, but the opposite direction (for world trade data). Instead of trying to NLP our way out of the problem, we pre-generate and index a bunch of possible questions, and let full text search handle the rest. It's interesting, because theoretically NLP should be able to "understand" what you mean but in reality I find that even if you parse sentence structure and extract some meaning, you're still at some level hardcoding the possible things that can be queried into the code. So it's a neat tradeoff of whether it's more worth it to create a mini query language, or go full natural language, or go somewhere in between. ... Anyway, try it out by clicking on the title (keeping it a bit hidden for now for testing purposes): http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/usa/all/show/2012/ http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/usa/all... Things you can try (mix and match too!): - "wine italy" - "france" - "germany spain" - "germany export wine 2002 to 2012" - "turkey feasible" ... If you want to see the code, check out our github: https://github.com/cid-harvard/atlas-economic-complexity/blob/master/django_files/observatory/views_search.py https://github.com/cid-harvard/atlas-economic-complexity/blo... (search view) https://github.com/cid-harvard/atlas-economic-complexity/blob/master/django_files/observatory/management/commands/index_questions.py https://github.com/cid-harvard/atlas-economic-complexity/blo... (indexer) Apologies for any mess, I recently joined and we're undergoing a huge overhaul right now.

hrjet 12y ago
Couple of years back, I implemented a natural-language-ish solution for querying ERP data. My approach was to a. have structured queries that can be precisely parsed b. provide query completion to guide the user while entering the query It turned out quite well, if I say so myself. But I never got the time to market it. It can be seen in action here: http://nlq.lavadip.com/servlet/demo http://nlq.lavadip.com/servlet/demo
- sandGorgon 12y ago
  this is pretty cool ! could you talk about the parser-generator and ER relationships ? I was looking to build something similar for a webapp and was stuck at how to generate the autocompletes.

polskibus 12y ago

It's a pity you have to specify a ticker. I was really hoping it can do the hard work for me. https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=find+me+best+investment+in+2014&button= https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%9...

willyum 12y ago
hahaha we'll add an easter egg just for you ;) perhaps check out http://www.premise.com/ http://www.premise.com/ or https://kensho.com/ https://kensho.com/

drglitch 12y ago

Pretty interesting effort, but a bit of constructive criticism: - none of your query results have a date attached! While pretty, an earnings number without a date is like a chart without an axis. - Just how natural can the queries be? "$AAPL sales estimates" did not return anything. Neither did "$CAT cost of capital". "quarterly $CAT earnings growth" gave me a single EBIDTA number", e.g. not what asked. Is it easier to start with simple dropdowns? - Why the stocktwits $ prefix? Why cant a company name be used? - Another "sad face" feature - every not found/no results query takes away a "free query" :( On more positive note, things look really clean - good job on the design! A great start. Is the long-term idea here to build an accessible place for fundamental data research? What value added are you providing in your premium product (aside from heatmap) over just going over to EDGAR archive? Ping me directly - would love to provide more feedback! Edit: fix formatting :)

timtamboy63 12y ago
Would love your email for feedback :) Or just shoot me an email at chintan@pennywhale.com. Thanks!
- drglitch 12y ago
  Will shoot you an email! One more thing: you seem to be hotlinking to images on nasdaq, e.g. apple pe ratio shows http://www.nasdaq.com//charts/aapl_per.jpeg http://www.nasdaq.com//charts/aapl_per.jpeg - what determines is a datapoint is presented as a hotlink/image vs a number (like apple's price to book?). Aside from as-of date on each datapoint, ideally you should provide attribution as well (anyone who worked in finance knows that all data sources provide different data for same query at any given time :)

tmoullet 12y ago

Hey Jay, This is really cool. One idea is it would be great if you could interface with EDGAR and gather the links to the various financial statements. The EDGAR database search/navigation is horrendous. As another commenter said, it would be great if it could detect the company name or at least the ticker without the $. Also, a failed query subtracts from the guest query allotment. That doesn't seem ideal as I'm first learning how to phrase my requests. Lastly, mutual fund data would be awesome. Morning star rating, fund performance, fund assets, etc.

coffeejay 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We're definitely looking into interfacing with EDGAR as well as getting rid of the 'cashtag'. Mutual fund data is a great idea too - shouldn't be too difficult to tie in.
- badamson 12y ago
  We have an API for a lot of EDGAR stuff & lots of it is free so feel free to give it a try: www.jivedata.com

malchow 12y ago

This is intriguing. Large implications when applied to private datasets ---- think Factiva, etc. There the data schema differ so wildly that natural language can really make it more useful. Publicly traded equities is the facile, simple place to start, obviously. Can I spin off a search and get pinged on updates? Love to learn more.

coffeejay 12y ago
Private datasets is brilliant, great idea. As of now, updates aren't available but definitely could be in the future. We'd love to chat more and get some feedback! My email is jay@pennywhale.com

jwblackwell 12y ago

Congratulations on launching! Cool idea and a good start. I think since you're targeting the non-professional market here, you need to focus on user experience a bit. Some feedback: - Found it a bit slow, but guess that's partially the HN effect. - As per above, I'd make the queries ajax rather than refreshing the whole page every search, should improve the UX a fair bit. - I expected autopredict when I started to type $... to predict a ticker, would be nice to guess company names as well if no ticker is entered. Probably an essential feature for non-pros. - You need a clear signup link. And the redirect when you run out of free credits should go to the signup page with small link to login, not the other way around. - Also look at highcharts.com, they have a stock chart product as well. Hands down the best JS charts, mobile friendly, highly customisable etc.

Legend 12y ago
+1 I like these suggestions given that I was expecting the exact things :)
timtamboy63 12y ago
Thanks so much, this is great advice. Definitely all things we plan on doing.

nrao123 12y ago

I didnt get any results for this query: https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=%24tsla+sales+growth&button= https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%9...

coffeejay 12y ago
Still very early stage, so we're working on collecting more data. Meanwhile, you can inspect sales growth on the financials - ex. 'Income statement for $TSLA'. If you're interested, shoot me an email at jay@pennywhale.com we'd love to make you a free premium account.

theyCallMeSwift 12y ago

Wow this looks great! Congratulations on launch.

samcrawford 12y ago

Congrats! Looks good! Small issue: you're calling Google fonts over HTTP, but your site uses HTTPS, so Chrome is blocking the request. This leads to your fonts rendering in the default (Times New Roman here). [blocked] The page at 'https://www.pennywhale.com/' https://www.pennywhale.com/' was loaded over HTTPS, but ran insecure content from 'http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Montserrat:400,700' http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Montserrat:400,700': this content should also be loaded over HTTPS.

coffeejay 12y ago
Thanks for the catch!
_puk 12y ago
Does indeed look good. Have to say, love the logo. Think it would drop into a favicon nicely too.. Congrats
- justinpaulson 12y ago
  I don't know about the logo. It immediately made me think of docker. That could be an issue.

canistr 12y ago

How do you guys plan to compete with Google Spreadsheets? I can already do this stuff in it (free) and just use the built in GoogleFinance calls (and their limit is 1000 per sheet). Plus I have all the other advantages of a spreadsheet program.

jwblackwell 12y ago
I wasn't aware you could do this and I'm sure many causal investors aren't. Plus this is not as user friendly: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093281?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093281?hl=en
- canistr 12y ago
  Possibly. But I suspect many casual investors (on HN anyway) might be familiar with Excel. In which case =GoogleFinance("GOOG", "price") may not be all that complicated. Plus it helps that it's free. Examples: Function list - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydEVqWERkWEh3Nkl4QjVIR0lFVE93dlE&output=html https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydEV... Watch list - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydG5IVWt3blltWWVXdDR1T2otaDBqTXc&output=html https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydG5... Watchlist + holdings - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydDlBY1dSeF9iOGlaQmRFclNkNUtHMUE&output=html https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ault2FD3uBwydDl...
  - coffeejay 12y ago
    This is very interesting - thanks for pointing it out. I think one way we're working on being competitive is the breadth and depth of our research. Rather than just fundamental data points, we're working on integrating more complicated queries such as 'What's the weighted average cost of capital for $AAPL'. We view it as a great opportunity for automation of financial research.

benpbenp 12y ago

This is pretty great. I am convinced there is lots of room in this space for services that cater to people who aren't quite in the Bloomberg terminal crowd, and yet would benefit from easy access to financial data for whatever reason. I've been working on a service to open up EDGAR data to more people: www.easyedgar.com (pre-launch). Not quite as fancy as Penny Whale but I think a lot of people just want the data in their spreadsheet and don't know how to do that.

lquist 12y ago

What is the source of the data? It seems crazy to provide EPS estimates (etc.) without the source.

coffeejay 12y ago
We're pooling a lot of disparate sources (Yahoo, Morningstar, NASDAQ, etc.)
- RayVR 12y ago
  This issue has come up multiple times. Anyone that will pay you money for your tool will need the source of the information and the date associated with it. On top of this a link to where the data originated is likely going to be essential. You're tool _still_ hasn't broken past the minimum requirement of doing a single thing better than any tool that kind of solves this problem.

twrkit 12y ago

not sure if this is the right place to report bugs (and/or if this is intended behavior), but if one clicks the COMPUTE button without a query entered, it decrements the guest query counter

floil 12y ago

Neat. I can see myself using this. Two bugs: "$brkb book value per share" gives a number that's way off. "$brk.a book value per share" and "$_x EV/EBITDA" yield apparent server side errors.

coffeejay 12y ago
Thanks for the catches. We're still refining our data sources so we'll look into these.

regularfry 12y ago

"Show me the UK's GDP" doesn't.

wodenokoto 12y ago

Searching for "pe ratio for google" in pennywhale doesn't return anything, while the same query in google actually returns the PE ratio for GOOG.

robot 12y ago

I suggest including parameters mentioned in the book "The intelligent investor" praised by Buffet. For example, the earnings in last 20 years, total value of tangible assets, etc. Company information on value investing are hard to find, and this could be a great help.

saganus 12y ago

When I tried the query: "show me the ratio of $SLV vs $GLD" I get: "We're sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the application owner check the logs for more information." Is this due to the usual HN overload? or did I hit a bad spot? This looks extremely interesting!

timtamboy63 12y ago
Yeah, definitely HN overload. That query may not work though - you'll want to specify what ratio you're looking for (PE, PEG, EPS, etc)
- saganus 12y ago
  Oh, I thought I could get just "the ratio", like, SLV price at date X / GLD price at date X. Would that be too hard to implement? I would love being able to pull ratios out of (almost) any arbitrary data.
  - timtamboy63 12y ago
    We definitely plan on doing that soon

FlyingLawnmower 12y ago

Keep reppin' GT :)

coffeejay 12y ago
Always.

andyhmltn 12y ago

Looks pretty cool but I get the rails error page with this query: how much cash does $APPL have vs $GOOG

RayVR 12y ago

Honest feedback from a quant working for an asset manager: This is not (yet) useful. None of these queries even come close to being a real question a financial researcher would ask. What's a real question like? here are examples which your system doesn't even try to handle. * companies in S&P500 with P/E less than 15 * companies in S&P500 with more than 20% of their revenue coming from China * $TSLA Beta with technology sector (returns the wrong answer). * https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=%24TSLA+beta+with+%24AAPL&button= https://www.pennywhale.com/app/queries/execute?utf8=%E2%9C%9... (this produced a serious error on your server) If you want to answer trivial questions your product will fail. nothing you've done isn't done better by Google RIGHT NOW. Not trying to discourage you but this just doesn't solve any existing problem. All you have is a pretty interface to a tool that does one thing poorly. If you can actually solve 15% of the real problem with converting natural language questions into financial queries and return accurate, well formatted data, you will have a serious product. Right now you are nowhere close.