Show HN: My cofounder and I created a social platform for investment ideas

[stuartjm5]

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.

Thanks for checking it out!

[rsp1984]

Congrats, very well done! I look forward to trying this. Just curious: What framework are you using for the frontend?

One feature request right away: Please offer a light mode. Dark mode is very tiresome for me to look at for longer periods of time.

[ethn]

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.

The UX is also very, very, overwhelming.

[stuartjm5]

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.

[greggman3]

Please take this in the spirit of constructive feedback. The tiny thin fonts are super hard to read for my non perfect vision.

[stuartjm5]

I appreciate the feedback - that is a valid point to consider and we will look at adjusting the font weight.

[jsomau]

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!

[joadha]

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.

[DavidMcDoughnut]

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)

[stuartjm5]

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.

[joadha]

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.

[lgas]

As phrased your suggestion to stop using icon menu bars is unhelpful. What should we be using instead and why?

[latenightcoding]

aren't icon menu bars a somewhat recent trend (last decade), I remember text menu bars were more popular back in the day and then boostrap came along.

[xpe]

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.

[nvr219]

I think icon menu bars are great

[tqi]

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).

[stuartjm5]

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.

[a_imho]

Huh, I assumed scams ARE the content and the fluff needs to be added as cover.

[the-dude]

Who is saying anything went wrong at WSB?

[stonlyb]

Are you thinking of eventually merging social + trade execution like https://public.com/ ?

[stuartjm5]

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

[cjpb]

Looks nice

Probably a good idea add `cursor: pointer` to your .feed-card class for the desktop folks.

A lot of wasted/unused screen real estate on my 1080 desktop as well.

[stuartjm5]

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.

[werber]

This is the first thing I've seen on here in a while that looks original. I don't fully get it, but it makes me want to learn more.

[aqme28]

Some of the marketing implies that I could be "rewarded" by picking stocks well. What are the rewards? How does that work?

[uptown]

Oh, well, knowledge is my reward, sir.

[slimeylimey]

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.

[high_byte]

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.

[aqme28]

Your email verification is broken. It sends you a broken URL.

[stuartjm5]

Thank you - updated the link

[tschellenbach]

Stocktwits/eToro are both quite popular.

[stevewodil]

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

[fsn4dN69ey]

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.

[stuartjm5]

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"

[marketgod]

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.

[MattGaiser]

How does this differ from AlphaSwap or the recently defunct Vetr?

[stuartjm5]

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.

[gfiorav]

If you ignore things like $GME (which will eventually be regulated like the rest), traders keep their strategy a secret.

Interested in knowing how this will pan out

[jacobsenscott]

Buy index fund, wait, profit. Not a secret and beats active traders every time.

[ab_testing]

WSB lite ?

[stuartjm5]

Lol, maybe from a year ago before it was overrun by bots. There used to be some quality investment ideas on the sub

[failwhaleshark]

Way better than https://halfbakery.com Congrats!