Show HN: Simply Wall St – A new visual way to look at the stock market

Show HN: Simply Wall St – A new visual way to look at the stock market(simplywall.st)

10 points by AlBentley 11 years ago | 6 comments

sirances 11 years ago |

This looks really interesting! It's a refreshing way to research stocks compared to how I do it at the moment.

How regularly is the data updated?

dang 11 years ago | |

Sockpuppets and astroturfing are not ok on Hacker News. This looks like a cool project—please don't spoil its reception here with bad voting and commenting tactics.

AlBentley 11 years ago | |

The data is update daily from our provider Capital IQ. We are looking at pulling 15 min delayed price data in soon for the value screen.

_ud4a 11 years ago |

nicely done! as a beginner investor, i really enjoyed it

kyu 11 years ago |

Nicely done

RickS 11 years ago |

As a UIX designer/hobbyist finance geek:

Building a common visual language to convey the health of securities is a fantastic, ambitious goal. I love it.

With that said, this information is basically unparseable, especially at a glance.

---- The home page is dense. This is a psychological double-whammy, because it's both technically difficult to take in, while also being daunting in the more abstract sense.

---- ~30-50% of the vertical space for each graph entry is an oddly cropped photo that contributes no knowledge and that makes navigation no easier.

---- Things have tightly clipped, sometimes translucent black background for seemingly no reason.

---- You've contained the filter system, one of the first actionable sections on the page, in a thing and wide internally scrolling box, completely arbitrarily.

---- Cute illustrations of bulls and bears are unprofessional. Stock photos of cityscapes are robotic. You've struck a strange balance that seems like you're trying to please everyone, without really committing to any one demographic. This isn't idea. If you're too cute for the business guys and too technical for the luddites, who's supposed to pay you?

---- Berkshire hathaway is the worst-looking entry on the homepage. This is a giant red flag for your system. It's widely known, especially among amateur investors, as one of the greatest of all time. It plants the thought in my head "Either these guys have some secret, amazing knowledge of BH that hasn't yet been reflected by the market, or their system doesn't work very well..." BH came out on top of that contest.

---- You force modal windows on me. Don't do that. The escape key doesn't close them. Now I hate you. Wait, there's no X button... You failed to explain that it's required(?) to view some pages.

---- And yet, modal lockout is trivially bypassed by developer tools, only to read "Sorry, no analysis for Berkshire Hathaway's competitors could be found in our database."

---- Most of these graphs are pretty for the sake of pretty. They don't add significant value over raw data. They do add significant size and time-to-parse.

---- Much of the picking process is about juxtaposition. If there are comparison tools available, they're not obvious.

---- I can't get back to the homepage from this subpage (/berkshire-hathaway)

---- Back to the drawing board on that side menu. Why is it even hidden? It could coexist with the existing content in a way that adds value. Why can't I scroll why the menu is open? Tell me that visually before I try and get frustrated.

---- Nothing about this system shows changes over time. I may be biased, as a technical trader rather than a fundamental value investor, but change over time matters a lot to me.

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This list could be much longer, that's just off the top of my head in the time I felt like talking about it.

Very cool idea. Could do really well. Design will make or break your execution here, and right now it's broken.

Feel free to email if you'd like to chat more about it.