Ranking people by their recommendation performance is going to be very misleading for most people. There is this natural intuition to look at the top performers and try to learn from them. In reality, the rankings would look almost identical if everyone just picked everything randomly. Mutual funds and hedge funds exploit this all the time. They start lots of funds that all invest a little differently. They cull the losers and keep the ones that happened to do well. Then they sell prospective investors on their past performance of one particular fund when in reality they didn't need anything more than random chance and multiple tries to get it.
Curious to see how this will be different from Marketocracy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketocracy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketocracy</a> which has been crowdsourcing public's opinion on stocks, then highlighting the best stock pickers, and then finally building a mutual fund based on the top stock pickers' recommendation.<p>Long-term Marketocracy funds are under-performing broad index funds FWIW.
I had an Econ professor who insisted individual stock picking is a fool's errand, and he had some pretty compelling evidence to back it up. If you have a thousand users picking stocks randomly, some will by chance do well. I wouldn't be comfortable putting money behind the lead users who are likely victors by luck. But then again, its very possible I'm missing something.
Buy/sells seem to be only time stamped to a day. Surely you need greater accuracy than that, e.g. the exact second? Otherwise, if I buy a stock on a day where it rises 10%, what price do I get?<p>Do you take dividends into account? If not, why not?<p>How do you rank people who make different numbers of picks? A naive method would be to add up all the returns, but this would then favour people who make more stock picks. For example, if I recommend two 'buys' that both give a 10% return, have I gained 20% in total or 10%? (As I would have had to split my bank to invest in both at once)
congrats on launching, yet another flashy site with an unoriginal idea. been done before (and better) elsewhere, yet you failed to tackle anything that your predecessors have failed at. Investing is not just about return; the other side of the coin is risk, and you fail to mention that anywhere.<p>investing is more than just a buy or sell. what about position sizing? what about position risk? portfolio risk? portfolio beta? how do you benchmark? what kind of drawdown do you incur? what's your sharpe ratio? why are you not adjusting returns for at least the market, and moreso common factor returns?<p>rank(total_return) != investing success<p>Your "metrics" should be educational and make people more aware of the financial decisions they are making. By boiling it down to buy/sell recommendations, you make investing into gambling with a 50% chance of being right.<p>your "transparent" ranking algorithm is not disclosed anywhere - do you have any documentation that your algorithm does more than just show who made the most "money" historically? (past performance is not indicative of future performance!) are your rankings stable? how do you identify persistence?
Good luck with it guys. There was a site long ago called clearstation which was bought by Etrade and killed. It offered similar features (charting, profiles, following, tracking, discussion, etc.), they built a great community of traders which was educational and enjoyable to participate in. It's hard to build something good. Keep pushing and good luck.
Well done on the website. Navigation is smooth, and the layout is nice. I'm interested to see how this social network for stocks does once you get more users.
Are there really enough other places besides Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool's CAPS and StockTwits that publish people's recommendations in such volume that the number of recommendations would be large enough to be valuable outside of these already large established communities?<p>Or is this whole site's effort merely a feature that StockTwits and the other sites may add later on?
I have a hyphenated first name, and was told it was invalid. Replaced the hyphen with a space, was again told my first name was invalid.<p>Maybe worth looking into your broken name validation.
Will you pull existing recommendations from StockTwits and Seeking Alpha? Or will stock-pickers have to sign up on Nvest before you will track their recommendations?
Overall a fan and signed up. Some feedback: dated icon and layout has too much of a bootstrap feel. Also, single page application for more responsive UX.