My co-founder and I came up with the idea for Utradea about a year ago when we realized that we loved discussing our investment/stock ideas and process. This expanded within our friend group, at least to people who were interested in the stock market.
We thought it would be great to have a platform where we could have social interactions and combine it with core investment information/data. We didn’t like having to use multiple websites to connect all the pieces of information needed to make investment decisions. There are some sites out there that focus on providing investment information (Seeking Alpha), and other that focus more on the social interaction of investing (StockTwits).
Utradea is a social platform for investment ideas and insights. It is built around the concept that people enjoy sharing and discussing investment ideas. We built the usual social media functions (comments, chat, like a post, etc.) and included important investment data, charts, and a portfolio to help you track your investments.
Following up on the lightmode request. It's difficult to switch from income statement to cashflow or balance sheet because the menu is dark text on dark background. Additionally, you may want to add some spacing between % return and current price in the top leaders section to improve visuals for stocks with prices > $1,000.
Thanks for checking it out - we are using React. We made the design decision to go with Dark Mode off the bat. I see where you are coming from, we have had a few people mention that.
Cool idea. I will continue to check in to see your progress.
One note: the back arrow in the upper left is strange. Usually that’s where I find the menu. My browser already has plenty of ways to go back, so that element on your site seems confusing and unnecessary.
Yeah that's a good point, we did want to make it easy for people to go back - might be a bit redundant. We are launching an app soon which will be better than mobile site browsing.
SumZero is focused on Finance professionals. People who are working in the industry as their main job. WE are providing a platform for retail investors so we are targeting a different demographic.
I think you can develop this into something cool. However I think the current idea is a bit too similar to eToro and especially close to what Seeking Alpha is.
Thanks checking it out and the feedback. I would say eToro is more focused on copy trading as opposed to investment ideas/content and letting the user decide on what they are going to invest in. It is a bit similar to SeekingAlpha but we are focused on providing a better user experience and more focused on the community/social aspect. Regarding UX, would love to know if there is anything specific that you find overwhelming? This is important for me to understand and address.
Love the idea, and great effort put in! My initial impression is the same, overwhelming UX. There's a lot of information and there with very little visual hierarchy, it's hard to decide where to look first.
I find https://refactoringui.com/ has some digest-able design stuff for us developers. I'm not affiliated with them, but I've been the same boat with product design.
For me the key was understanding what roles spacing, color, and font-weight play in building a hierarchy.
This new wave of social investment platforms is really exciting. Stocktwits is just noise. I'm still shocked Twitter hasn't capitalized on cashtags by at least showing market data. I've recently been a big fan of Commonstock: https://commonstock.com/ it actually allows you to link your broker through Plaid and shows a leaderboard based on actual % gain on positions.
That said, I like you bringing more competition to the scene!
Twitter is crawling with scammers and pump-n-dumpers. It's impossible to use it for investment talk. You spend all your time blocking people, and ticker hashtags are abused by people selling their discord channel or other crap. Also, if you express negative emotion toward a stock, its investors go out of their way to dox you or harass you. I had to set my account to "protected" because of this.
Twitter missed out on a huge opportunity. They should have listened to investors who user their platform.
Interesting insight! Do you use Stocktwits? I see a lot of the same issues you describe with people abusing the cashtag & spamming their discord channels. Working on a new discussion site and I'd like to attract a community of people interested in stock/RE/investment etc.
If you're interested I'd like to connect and learn about your plans for a discussion site. I think there is significant demand for retail investors looking for a quality community to learn and invest with.
Thanks for the shoutout! (I'm David the Commonstock founder). We're sprinting to finish some things to improve content algos and sorting before we grow so it's very cool to see you and @joadha call out the value of that and to stay disciplined focusing on quality over quantity. It's actually the exact reason I started building it as a side project in 2016: I wanted a community for signal instead of noise. The original pitch deck said, verbatim: "stocktwits/reddit/twitter but without all the noise/garbage".
Anyways, Thanks for the kind words!
(I'm all for more competition too, btw)
Yeah, I agree - Commonstock is a nice/minimalist platform and the ability to see and investor's portfolio is useful. The issue I see right now with commonstock is that they are heavily reliant on twitter for content - which can be mixed in term in terms of quality of investment information.
We do have broker integration on our dev roadmap because we see that as a key aspect of the overall investment process: decision, execution, tracking.
Please stop with the icon menu bars. It is 2021, and people are still doing this. Why. Just stop. Arrrgh.
Anyway, I absolutely love this idea! I signed up and am poking around now. I think I already like this more than Benzinga, Stocktwits, SeekingAlpha, you-name-it.
Text. You can scan it in an instant. It takes orders of magnitude longer to hover over each icon, wait for the tooltip, repeat for the more obscure ones.
Hello joadha, your first paragraph comes across as ranty and even arrogant (i.e. implying you are the authority on UX choices). You offer no valid support for your argument.
I perceived it that way as well, but I have to partly agree.
Here's my reasoning: if someone just invented a new icon (created it from scratch and gave it a meaning), they should be aware that majority of their users will not understand the meaning of the icon, at least not at first.
Historical icons, such as a floppy disk or a cogwheel, are fair game. Creating new icons is dangerous territory, especially if you are hoping for your users to focus on the content, rather than getting familiar with your UI.
What do you think the following two icons (taken from utradea example) represent:
* A lightbulb with a dollar sign
* A deck of cards
Having to hover (which may or may not work on mobile), and actually clicking the icons and observing what happens, is not a good recipe for good UX. To read more about actual authority on UX, I recommend reading about Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles[1] for interaction design.
Thanks for providing a bit of history and principles for UX design. It's a valid point, we wanted to come up with something that was unique and intuitive with our icons but it makes sense that people have different perceptions or associated with icons. We will likely move to standard icons or make it clear with text what the button/menu item is.
I'm continually triggered by this horrible pattern that frustrates me and wastes my time.
In turn, I think it is arrogant of UI designers to assume that everybody will automatically understand what their icons mean, and that it's worth my time to repeatedly hover over them to get to things they should want me to find.
What is the plan to police/moderate the content to prevent scams? I think something like this works great when you know the people or at least believe that they have positive intent, but is hard to do right at scale (as WSB has experienced over the last few months).
yeah, that's a good point and something we've had on our minds since day 1. Our overall principle would be to let the community self-moderate to an extent. I believe most of the content that is spam or pump/dump would be flagged and filtered out. Some of our users have posted with their actual names and other have random usernames. I would be interested in seeing if the community reacts differently to an identifiable user vs an anonymous user.
Ignoring all the criticism regarding retail traders from outlets, there's a whole history of it being abused by mods for personal gain as well as the literal bots.
Not too long ago one of the mods created a fake account and posted fake Tesla gains in attempt to manipulate the market as well as monetize the sub for a scam company.
More recently some mods tried to monetize the whole sub with movie deals and other media venues. The reddit administrators ended up nuking a lot of mods include one who was doing actual moderation and was good for the community of the sub. (The one mod was later reinstated by Reddit)
Separate from all the mod issues is the large amount of astroturfing that went on. All too often tons of newly created accounts were posting trying to create hype around some stocks (suspiciously Chinese owned companies).
Annecdotally, I've seen a few posts complaining about the quality of the posts in the sub as new users have flooded in. But I haven't been paying attention long enough to know how true it is.
Previously most of the people who were on WSB at least knew what they were talking about and all the dumb jokes were known to be jokes. Made a lot of fun stories, because the people who did exceptionally dumb stuff got sucked into the hype of people who knew what they were doing winning/losing big.
When $GME happened the sub got flooded with people who thought that buying $GME was a social movement and caused the quality of everything to go down a ton. It's gotten better over time and massive user growth has happened before, but not on this scale. Honestly the place is totally different from where it was even six months ago, which is unfortunate as the culture was really something.
Yes, right now we are leaning towards broker integration so users could stay with their existing brokerages. We want to make it easy for users to find an investment idea, validate it, then place a trade without leaving Utradea
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah we are trying to balance relevant information vs information overload I've found that on a lot of finance related sites there is too much info on one page.
I'm curious about the idea of a social investment platform, if someone gained a significant following on a platform like this could they end up being charged with market manipulation? I can imagine someone with a significant following on a platform like this could potentially be able to have some small sway on parts of the market.
on eToro, the top investors have hundreds of thousands to low millions under management. I think the top investor has 5m or 10m under management which is the maximum allowed, I assume by some regulation. meanwhile, billionaires drop billion dollar trades left and right.
If a signal to noise ratio could be negative Stocktwits would be negative. The content on there is absolute bottom of the barrel garbage from Robinhood traders.
This platform has a lot of cool new ideas and I hope it works
Agree with the point about stocktwits - not the best place for investment quality investment content or discussions. Let me know if you have any suggestions on things you'd like to see.
How does this compare to Iris? I've seen that pushed more heavily within the finance/wannabe finance community. Otherwise, great product! Love the design! Should consider partnering with the bigger instagram accounts - litquidity, trustfundterry, etc to push it further and get some more adoption.
I'd say the biggest difference is the content. We are aiming to provide people with quality investment content (more detailed/informative write ups) whereas Iris seems to be more similar to StockTwits or twitter. Agreed, in the process of chatting to a few finance "influencers"
What really needs to exist as ideas don't matter and execution does.
Let me sign in, hook my brokerage, then just track me versus the rest.
If you like what I am doing, let you follow me for a percentage of profits I want, and the system auto executes the trades I am making in your for you.
That is definitely one way to approach it. eToro (copy trading) already exists and commonstock is similar - you can see someone portfolio and % holdings but not their $ amount. We are focused on investment ideas, social engagement, and building a community.
How do you know the person's ideas are useful is my issue. With Reddit you have all sorts of comments, and you have no idea if this person is posting random ideas, or if they are actually good at what they do. The issue is who is going to engage here is my concern. StockTwits has it by stock which works and creates a conversation. Here the main page has daily stories, so the conversation has to occur right away.
Equating posts (news) with a change in price is not an investment idea. Most of the time, the news is counter to the way the stock moves in the short term. I think you need to find a way to differentiate yourself. The UI is nice and all the info available is great however I think you need a something to provide to your end user with respect to engagement/community, but news stories die so fast it's hard to create a conversation around that.
Good question, AlphaSwap is operates on a reward based system for investment ideas/content that factors in both community consensus voting and performance of the idea. We are more focused on the social engagement aspect of bringing investors together.
No. It beats active traders most of the time. Many active traders vastly outperform it -- by over 2X before compounding -- over 20+ year periods, and not by luck. julian robertson, warren buffet, and ~100 of their proteges, as examples. Basically anytime a new understanding of markets which introduces the potential for profit is developed, there's a period of at least a decade or two when small funds can generate extremely outsized returns before it's arbitraged away. Just like in business.
Your belief is the basic reddit tier intelligent belief: Bogglehead, Vanguard, blahblah. I used to believe what you believed too.
Please reread your comment and realize that it also disproves the ability to make money in business (ie non financial markets) consistently other than thru luck and that the efficient market theory is a hypothetical never-reached endstate.
No it doesn’t. The appeal of index funds is that they are perfectly average. Sure, beating the index every year is a challenge, but who cares about that? The game is making money turn into more money, not trying to get 1% more than the S&P for everyone except fund managers. Beating the index by a massive amount once pays for all the times you underperform it.
Not to mention: hedge funds have beat the market very consistently for decades (before fees), starting a new job is often a higher roi, real estate has a higher sharpe ratio over the last 100 years, private equity has a higher return before fees for decades, venture capital has beat the market consistently, starting a business frequently has a higher or even much higher roi, all these especially in absolute terms (nobody rich before 50 got that way from index fund returns).
To say “the index beats the active traders”, or that active traders lose everytime, or that it’s impossible to beat the market is just 1. Not relevant because it’s a vanity metric on its face, 2. Not strictly correct. It’s just said by people who want to convince themselves that the dominant strategy in investing also happens to be the easiest one for them. Index funds are about average returns - and thats ok! That’s probably best for any investor not looking to put in serious time or effort, but it’s certainly not the best strategy for maximizing returns (in fact, there are literally infinite strategies that have consistently beat the market on average for the entire duration of the exchange that don’t have foresight or overfit). The index itself is arbitrary: rank order the public equities by revenue, then select the top 500 and weight them by market cap. For the total market: you still chop off the companies that aren’t public arbitrarily, you still weight by market cap (why not volume? Why not weighted trade volume which correlated better with prices?).
As a parting note on this rant: the efficient market hypothesis is about determining fair value is an open system with minimal barriers and motivated rational players playing by the same rules with instantaneous info propagation. Do we all play by the same rules? Do we all have the same barriers? Are we all rational players? Is info propagated instantly? Are these values true enough? The market is efficient - except when it isn’t. Plenty of people succeed in business when the efficient market should have meant there was no opportunity for them, plenty get rich on trades when the efficient market says that trade shouldn’t exist. It’s paradoxical that the market can be perfectly efficient and those could be true, because even tiny risk-free profits should be consistently and equally arbitraged out of existence immediately. That just doesn’t describe our world.
>real estate has a higher sharpe ratio over the last 100 years
Does it really? Every home price index looks something like this: https://i.imgur.com/7fluMBz.png (If you can find a better one, please post it. This was just the first google result)
If you wanted to plot stock market returns on the same chart, you'd have to make the Y axis log scale. Meanwhile max drawdown isn't all that much higher for the stock market.
where researchers tracked several asset returns since the 19th century across several western countries. While real estate and equities have similar absolute returns (7%) real estate returns are 4x less volatile, resulting in a sharpe ratio for real estate 5x higher than equities in a country like France, closer to 2x higher in the US, and just slightly higher in Australia - the rest of the measured developed countries fall in that range. In no country measured in the developed world are real estate sharpe ratios lower than equities on average annually over the last ~150yrs.
The biggest difference is that eToro is copy trading based and Utradea is investment idea based. We let users make their onw investing decision, you don't have to copy another persons trades as you would with eToro.
It allows you to automatically copy trades done by the others. So instead of trading $10k yourself, you automatically mirror the trades done by an experienced trader.
The platform allows you to find and follow many top-performing traders (eg. that usually obtain 20%-50% trading profit during a year). So you just "follow" them and you can forget about it. Personally I'm at 50% profit by following only one guy for about 2 years.
No, that's not the gist. The main idea is that you can mirror the trades done by someone, by doing copy-trading. It is a lot better for unexperienced traders to just follow someone that knows what he's doing and let them trade for them.
IF this were ycombinator and someone pitched me this startup, I would pass, sorry. This market for social investing is saturated and I dont see anying special about the site. It also does not look like there is anyting there. There is nothign that jumps out at me that would compell me to register or stay. It's not a good idea, sorry.
We thought it would be great to have a platform where we could have social interactions and combine it with core investment information/data. We didn’t like having to use multiple websites to connect all the pieces of information needed to make investment decisions. There are some sites out there that focus on providing investment information (Seeking Alpha), and other that focus more on the social interaction of investing (StockTwits).
Utradea is a social platform for investment ideas and insights. It is built around the concept that people enjoy sharing and discussing investment ideas. We built the usual social media functions (comments, chat, like a post, etc.) and included important investment data, charts, and a portfolio to help you track your investments.
Thanks for checking it out!