Show HN: Nvestly, Never Invest Alone(nvestly.com) |
Show HN: Nvestly, Never Invest Alone(nvestly.com) |
The reporting side can definitely be very cool though, and it could provide serious benefits if done right.
There's ongoing debate as to whether a highly successful investor will surface and be able to beat the market (i.e. the next warren buffett). We don't take a position for or against that. To those that are up for the challenge, great, but we don't at all count on it. In fact, we debate it internally, but it's not as important bc our purpose right now is to provide this platform.
We believe there is value in the transparency of the platform to foster better discussions. Most people make decisions alone. And current platforms like Stocktwits are interesting for sentiment but are filled with banter and are unreliable for real discussions.
In terms of reporting / tools, we're focused on investor self-awareness. Most people have more than 1 account and have a hard time even finding out the annual return on their portfolio. We'd like to start alerting people of things like strategy drift, as well.
Slightly more advanced topic: There's also something to be said of the data itself once people start sharing. The idea is that if you can get a cross-section of sentiment / social data backed by real portfolio data, it adds an element that wasn't previously available and should technically result in a more efficient market, resulting in an opportunity for new value creation. Brainstorming with few Anderson / GSB / Cornell finance professors on this.
Reporting-wise, I am with you. I think the current models are antiquated, and most of the solutions I see are outright wrong (Hint: If you're looking only at stock prices for returns, you're doing it wrong too).
kyu: Can you speak to this? What is the ideal experience that you are hoping for people to get out of this which adds value to their stock market experience?
The value in this space is in the shared data. It's analogous to Twitter -- the individual tweets might be useless, but the collective data is valuable. If you could see all the real portfolio data that people are sharing, it would be magnitudes more interesting than sentiment data from i.e. stocktwits because it represents real dollars (and in that sense we let people share trades to stocktwits, too). Actually, if someday people were to start publishing real dollar amounts you'd even see total aggregate volume. And if people were to add target holding period to their trades, you could see volume by expected holding period. There's definitely inherent value in that, but it's a very long-term play.
For now, the value is in better investment discussions. It's impossible to have one on i.e. stocktwits. The real portfolio info provides an environment for higher quality conversations. A few experiences people have expressed are valuable on Nvestly: - Finding others who hold a stock they hold and discussing what to do next. - Finding people who have traded a stock a lot and sharing research - Having a little more fun by earnings investment merits (similar to badges) or getting feature as a top weekly investor
The 'business' way to describe the value to society is that the social element helps introduce the concept to the younger generation. >50% of millennials are saving for retirement but only 10% are investing even though the majority who save think of the stock market as a viable vehicle for retirement (had to memorize this for a pitch).
f2JANi#_ywTBcLTeWJ3>y3PsOPt2#pDSomething I immediately noticed: I'd like to have the ability to filter by diversified accounts. If I am looking at someone that gained 50% over the last year, and 91% of their holdings are 1 stock, I don't really gain anything. They bought shares in Tesla a couple of years ago. That's fine, but what do I get out of knowing that? Several members of your top group are like that.
When I open up 'professional investors' and go to an individual account, there isn't an easy way that I can see to go back to the overall view of professional investors, and going back sends me to the week's top performers window. I don't really want to go there at that point.
What might be useful for me too is a way to see what the professionals listed have invested in tracked over time, based on their past filings. It'd be interesting, anyway.
We just added the "professional investors" section today and will be sure to work on the UX. Agree with your points here. That feature would be awesome, we're adding it to the list.
You need a lot more cryptographic detail if you want this product to be treated as secure.
TBH, we leveraged some of the same technology and thus wording that SigFig, Personal Capital, Mint and other pioneers in the space use.
It feels to me like all the online brokerages are stuck in the dark ages. I'd like to be able to trade on a nice modern site with good reporting tools. Maybe you guys could build that eventually. I'm sure in the meantime I will be interested in watching people who are doing really well -- that information is extremely interesting to me.
Yes we'd love to get there. Our CEO left the investment management industry precisely for that reason. Said his boss, who managed $6 billion, still typed with 2 fingers. No offense, but probably time to start embracing technology.
For example, I see LVS dropping and am considering starting a position. I ping the people who hold LVS right now (nvestly.com/ticker/lvs) and ask them what they think and if they know what's driving the selloff. Reality is that people on Nvestly are generally well-informed about what they hold, so new information surfaces and the entire group benefits. The fact that people's identities are tied to real portfolios tends to generate higher quality discussions vs. a Stocktwits, Yahoo! group or even SeekingAlpha comments.
If you don't ever trade and don't have to discuss anything, it's most helpful just to track your portfolios in one place without multiple logins and to see your returns. The annualized return (IRR) figure for example is something you can't generally get without paying an analyst (or investing hours into a spreadsheet). The IRR is important because it's an annual return that all funds in the world look at (like angels looking at traction).
Newbies do like to follow 'top investors'. I actually didn't think this would be super relevant but people loved it so we made it the homepage upon login and are adding a few things to protect people against blindly following.
Experienced investors have been using Nvestly as an investment resume of sorts. The system pulls up to 10 years of historical track record info and this is unprecedented afaik.
So these are 3 use cases. Let me know if it doesn't answer your question.
Do you mean for experienced investors or for regular users? If it's the latter, I'm curious as to how - by parsing PDFs from the supported brokers? It would be in fact pretty cool since places like personal capital only do 90 days max when a new account is imported.
i suppose if your friends were trading everyday, the value in that would be tiny, but for longer term investments, seeing the herd mentallity might make it easier for people.