Thanks for the feedback.

We're trying to serve the less educated investor so we take basic fundamental analysis and automate it while making the insights more accessible to someone who is less financially literate.

It's interesting that you bring up personalization too because we're headed in that direction with customizing reports and creating recommendations based on factors like risk profile, age, and retirement plans.

We'd love to chat if you have time. You can shoot me an email at [email protected]

I thought that yummyfajitas' point was that fundamental analysis doesn't work, like all public forms of stock market analysis. Financially illiterate people are even less likely to understand that, which means that making the "insights" accessible is actually worse for the user than having them not be accessible.

Roughly what I was saying. I don't actually think all forms of analysis don't work, and I currently run a strategy I do think works. Note the strategy involves no web design or pretty colored boxes. I run it like this:

    $ python compute_trades.py

Then I manually enter the results into my broker.

However, you are correct that I believe accurately communicating dubious information is nothing more than duping credible idiots with pretty web design.

Out of curiosity, where does your script get data (prices and whatever else)?

Quandl for now, but fairly soon I'll be collecting realtime prices from interactive brokers.

(My strategies generally run on a daily basis, so daily data is good enough for that. But soon I'm going to switch to a full algo strategy, which will require realtime data to backtest.)

Thanks for your response! Good luck.

I think you're doing a good job, but keep in mind that good UX for an investor are metrics which helps me him make more profit. For instance if I come up with a metric which helps me make a better decision that is a good UX for me. But at the same time, a better way to interact and look at existing metrics also helps me better utilize them.

To put it simply, whether some guy thinks you have a product or not, you definitely do. Its not just stock market info porn, or a fancy web design over google finance, rather its as important as a new 'indicator', i.e. it does(could) have the right substance.

I'm going to be more bearish than you and say that people who find stock research "overwhelming" as in the HN strapline shouldn't be investing in individual stocks at all (unless they get employer equity on a very favourable basis, or the individual stocks they're invested in are all ETFs)

That said, I do quite like the idea of an algorithm that hedges risk, but for the average person's retirement fund wouldn't that be best done with a proper fully diversified portfolio minus a few stocks whose performance is heavily correlated with your earning potential? If so wouldn't that be best as actual funds marketed at employees in particular industries rather than a software stock-selection tool.

> The fact of the matter is that if I'm actually going to be speculating on individual stocks (which I do, but mostly as a quant), I need a lot more info than this.

I disagree, I think this tool could have value in the stock screening process, where you look at 100s of stocks quickly to winnow it down to a few promising candidates. After that step, I agree with you a more traditional stock analysis data interface is better.

> If a person expects lots of medical care later in life, suggest them a portfolio heavy on medical stocks so that if their expenses go up, their investment does too. How is what an individual spends in medical care correlated with medical stocks?

Every individual holds a short position on medical costs.

If medical costs and the value of medical stocks are correlated, then one can hedge that underlying medical short by going long medical stocks. I don't actually know if that correlation holds. I should have been clearer that I was guessing it might.

I actually don't know the right sort of hedging for medicine - would be great to have some help with that.

I agree, this doesn't make much sense to me, the correlation is flimsy.