Launch HN: Stock Unlock (YC W22) – Investment Education for Everyone
100 points| hippofluff | 4 years ago
As retail investors we noticed that many retail products have some combo of the following shortcomings: high paywalls, tricky to navigate web design, oversimplification of investing principles, and misaligned incentives that push users to trade more—instead of giving them adequate education to manage a successful portfolio. They are very non noob friendly.
Further, I am personally very “triggered” by the lack of financial education myself and friends were not given growing up. I am fortunate to be a software engineer, but it really hurts me to see a lot of close friends, and even family get bit by the financial system since they are not educated by it. And it’s not our fault. Much of America and the world falls into this bucket, which was exasperated by a deflationary financial brokerage environment that led to trading apps which would allow anyone to trade stocks in minutes from their pocket (for free!). Honestly, that’s great. Access to markets is important. However, many people are following a similar story line, you get easy access to trading for low costs/free, you probably started in the bull market from the covid flash crash, made some money if you’re lucky, but have since fallen into the red/realized how clueless we all are for what investing actually is.
I remember so clearly a few years ago looking at a Yahoo Finance page and feeling overwhelmed by price ratios, reported financials, stock prices cross stocks, analysts, different news articles from the same publishers saying the opposite headlines… It honestly felt impossible to learn. Especially since my family/close friends aren’t into finance or investing.
Then one day, sitting on my bed in NYC hiding from COVID in 2020, I stumbled upon Daniel’s Youtube account. I do not follow celebs, I don’t know famous people, I don’t twitter, but there was something about Daniel and the investment education content he put out that immediately had me captivated and drawn to his account. He is well spoken and presents investing and financial analysis in a way that I actually could understand, and it blew my mind. I proceeded to feverishly ingest his Youtube content for months.
I began to notice a pattern in Daniel’s videos, he would sometimes use third party sites to show investment graphs, but he would often open an excel sheet with 3-5 stocks in it (columns), and then fill in rows for financial metrics. I will quote Daniel “I spend about 5-8 hours a week making these spreadsheets, it takes a lot of time but it’s worth it”. So I’m an engineer sitting here watching this and I think… I could definitely write a program to do this. And better yet, I could give it to Daniel as a thank you for all the great work he puts into Youtube.
So on a weekend I whip up this program to automate his spreadsheet creation and give it to Daniel… I mean I tried to, but Daniel didn’t answer my Youtube comment! GASP!!!! Ok… so, I found his instagram, but still no luck. I was honestly pretty pissed, like this dude is so smart how could he not recognize that I can save him 5-8 hours a week if he used my program to automate his spreadsheet creation.
Well, another 2 months go by. Every week I iterated on the program more, started ranting to my co-worker at the time Nick (we were at Oscar Health together), and kept pinging Daniel shamelessly across multiple social channels. FINALLY he answered me… we ended up hopping on a zoom call, which itself went for 2-3 hours, a beer was cracked… the rest is well, history!
I was able to pretty easily write a Python script to hit a financial data API (Alpha Vantage at the time), and Daniel, Nick, and myself all saw a vision for us to create a software platform that actually taught users how to invest, without oversimplifying the process, and at a price that didn’t break the bank.
The moment at which this turned from a side project to a company, was when I shared my program with Daniel Pronk’s investing discord community and people basically freaked out. “This is the best thing ever”, “can you make it generate _this_?”, “how can I pay you for this”... I basically took the classic “push back chair from desk” moment and knew it was time to take this full time. Thankfully, Nick was also on board! We had a founding team of 3, and at the time the project was called “Stonk Reporter” (I’m still a bit salty we didn’t keep this name). After a long 4 month beta/pilot with around 200 users from Daniel’s discord, we launched Stock Unlock on December 11th 2021. Jake and Nick met Daniel for the first time a couple weeks ago, until then it was a fully remote co-founder relationship!
Today we provide a modern/easy-to-use web app which has data visualization tools for financials, and contextual, inline education. Sites like Investopedia are good for term lookup, but the education isn't given at the time the investor needs it. Typically you get confused, search the internet, and land there—we show it to you in place. For users who already know the ropes, our graphing tools allow users to compare 70+ financial metrics across as many stocks as they want. These tools either don't exist or are part of extremely pricey programs like Bloomberg Terminal (no retail investor can afford that). We have existing investors using Stock Unlock who say they save 80-90% of their time on company analysis with our tools.
Our current business model is that we give everyone a 7 day free trial, no credit card/totally free to try the site. We ask for email, but you can give a fake email if you want and we don’t verify it/anything like that. After the 7 day free trial we are priced at $6.99 per month / $74.99 per year (USD, prices will vary for Euro/Canada).
We build the consumer web app layer and get our financial data from another startup called Finnhub. We are “serverless” using AWS for all our backend infrastructure. We use Cognito for user auth, Api Gateway & Lambda (Python) for the API, Dynamo & Postgres for data store, S3/CloudFront/Route 53 for static hosting. The frontend is all ReactJS with special help from Material UI for our designed components/us not needing to write tons of CSS (yay), and recharts for the lib to help draw pretty graphs. There are also a ton of fun technical challenges that we solve, currency conversion/alignment for the 122,000 global stocks we support has been hairy/filled with edge cases, also data staleness for prices/market caps is another area of complexity. Not to mention building around a 3rd party HTTPS/JSON api and caching those endpoints/storing some data internally is a fun juggle!
Your feedback/your stories about any of the above or this space in general would be amazing. I look forward to interacting with everyone in the comments, we embrace constructive feedback and feel fortunate knowing that you will hold us to your highest standards.
If you do decide to try our application, please let us know your thoughts! We launched with a pretty raw MVP and are adding features to the site weekly, with no end in sight. Cheers!
[+] [-] 1in1010|4 years ago|reply
Most are better served with a more conservative ETF market index portfolio approach. Picking individual stocks can be part of one's portfolio at some point but it is a hard place to start.
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
Also, we are developing support for viewing ETFs as I type this (well, Nick is today). Which will be released in the next couple weeks.
Our MVP here, is built around communities of people who want to learn more about stocks, as well as get better research tools than what they use currently. We do not have any intention of pushing people to buy anything, the "vibe" is moreso giving as much information and education as possible, which we believe/are seeing will lead to people making more confident informed decisions with their capital. Whether that's buying stocks, or something else, no skin off our back.
This is a great topic :)
[+] [-] wnolens|4 years ago|reply
It's meant for the financially mostly-literate and curious, not your mom/dad. It's for everyone who watches Jim Cramer.
[+] [-] searchableguy|4 years ago|reply
https://indiainvestments.wiki is the best resource and free for anyone to contribute to.
Most people don't need to research individual stocks as OP said.
They should learn about XIRR, excel, risk and portfolio management (which will cover insurance, emergency fund, expense management), and different types of investment instruments.
The wiki covers all of it and answers frequently asked questions related to Indian Market.
Everyone push toward trading individual stocks because it's profitable for businesses. Brokerage earn more money through those trades whereas many AMC which manage direct funds lose money on transaction cost in initial years and only make up for it via other side income. It is the case in India.
[+] [-] llampx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soniman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marban|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
More context... All the features your described for our watchlist are great, the current watchlist feature we have right now is pretty "bare bones" and we are planning a lot of improvements to that in the coming months. (Sneak peek: We are also building a portfolio tracker too!)
I also am on the same page as you with not needing to pay for a screener/things that are already free, we are doubling down on the tools in our platform that we just couldn't find a good/affordable solution for elsewhere (hence some of the prioritization of these features, it's a fun balance!).
The features you're requesting around news is great. We will be looking for a good way to find/filter news. I totally agree that a lot of news outlet are... so terrible I just never ever want to see them.
:)
[+] [-] 300bps|4 years ago|reply
Investment banks have literally rooms of people who spend 10 hours per day 6 days per week specializing in whatever security you're thinking of buying or selling. Literally - there are people that have a full time job specializing in out-of-the-money AAPL options with a 6+ month expiration. They also spend millions of dollars per year on proprietary data and software engineers to weaponize that data.
If you're a full time software engineer spending 10 hours per week researching and trading while relying on free/low-cost data, you cannot compete long term with professional traders. It is that simple.
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
To say it simply, I agree! Like completely, my own opinion here (building on yours) is that it's really unwise/not smart for anyone, whether they are an engineer or not, to day trade/trade options/trade on short timelines.
Stock Unlock is built around long term investing, and being able to more quickly learn how to understand a company. We don't push/have anything that would influence someone to trade/invest, our tools are very catered to a long term investor and facilitating their investment education journey and analysis. For example, we have no options anything in our site, no day trading charts. However we do have very in depth data visualization tools around historical financials/ways to compare companies financials/and ways to dive further into a companies executive team/all the other things you'd want to look at when considering a long term hold.
Shameless plug, I am very "bullish" on also teaching the investing mindset, basically platformitizing great minds like Warren Buffet and Peter Lynch so people know what to expect when buying a stock in terms of price fluctuations/unpredictability of prices short term.
If you're up for it I'd love to continue this thread, thanks for the thoughts!
[+] [-] theonewolf|4 years ago|reply
For example, many people don't use credit cards properly.
Many people don't take advantage of lower interest loans.
Many people don't understand the importance of certain forms of permanent / life / disability insurance.
These are all things I hope my kids get to learn _before leaving high school_!
Your tool feels like it could really expand financial literacy across the board, not just for investments.
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
Right now we are a team of 3 and we haven't had time to expand our business into those other niche's. But you best believe we have our eyes set on all the above! There is such a big need to have easier/more fun ways to get the public more aware about these things.
I'd love to hear more thoughts if you have any :)
[+] [-] smt88|4 years ago|reply
OP is expecting to get money from stock pickers and day traders, which is a much more lucrative market than the average "person who doesn't understand retail banking products".
[+] [-] traceroute66|4 years ago|reply
Looking at the homepage all I see is "yet another" .... yet another screening tool, yet another charting tool, yet another analyst expectations tool, yet another watchlist tool.
And frankly, for a company that claims its all about "investment education for everyone", I don't know why you are selling stuff that does not work.
Screening tools don't work. They don't work as a pure concept (i.e. there's no magic screen to make money / avoid loosing money). They don't work on the basis that you are mostly screening against lagging data (company reported financials). In the right hands screening tools can sometimes give you something resembling a "shortlist", but there's still a whole load of donkey work to be done after that to verify/validate.
Technical analysis (reading tea leaves on charts) doesn't work either.
Analyst expectations ? Give me a break. Most analysts are sell-side, not buy-side.
Its like come on guys. If you're about "investment education for everyone" then you really need to do the Right Thing (TM) and explain to people there's no magic wand, there's no shortcut to hard work, and explain to people what they really should be doing, i.e. understanding what they are investing in (understand the company, understand the industry, understand the geo-political context), and explaining people how to evaluate their appetite for risk and how to invest within that risk profile.
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
"explain to people there's no magic wand, there's no shortcut to hard work, and explain to people what they really should be doing" - we could not agree more, I'd go further to say this is what we are building, so we are going to dive deep to make sure we are putting across the right message when users first hit the website. (Side note, I think you'd love Daniel Pronk's Youtube channel!)
I agree about screeners, Stock Unlock doesn't have screeners. I am curious what other sites you have used that have what we do in the "free form" tool (maybe bloomberg terminal but they cost around 25k a year-ish)? Also a huge angle on this is the embedded education, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. The embedded education has been helping newer investors feel comfortable/learn terms/learn how to analyze financials on their own. We find many other sites have sub par design or they present things in a way that assumes the user is already an investing pro/or has a finance degree
As for analyst data I actually agree, I had a light argument with founders about this but "lost" since many investors and most of our users expect this. But for me personally, I never listen to analysts. And low and behold... it's one of our most viewed pages after insights tab and free form tool.
Again, thanks for being honest. I appreciate that
[+] [-] andrewmcwatters|4 years ago|reply
Every finance professional reads 10-K and 10-Qs, so I have no idea where you're coming from with this complaint. Where else are you getting finance information? CNBC? Teslarati?
The technical analysis and analyst ratings crap needs to go, for sure. I'm tired of seeing that bs. They're immediate signals someone's peddling amateur hour.
[+] [-] altdataseller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raidicy|4 years ago|reply
Can you recommend any books/media for this specifically? I've often wanted this type of material but haven't been able to distinguish pop-economic feel-good/self-help books from high value ones.
[+] [-] FredPret|4 years ago|reply
There are some very successful investors who might disagree with that assessment somewhat, to put it mildly
[+] [-] morpheuskafka|4 years ago|reply
However, I'm not really sure that this is the kind of knowledge that you talked about. I mean it certainly doesn't hurt to know of this, but I don't really think this is what is meant when we talk about American's financial illiteracy levels.
There are countless reddit posts where people don't know that tax refunds (except in the case of certain refundable credits) simply repay them for taxes they already paid in but did not owe that year. People who don't know what the difference between the minimum payment and the payment needed to avoid interest is. People who routinely use overdrafts as a form of credit. People who use high-fee prepaid cards to "avoid overdrafts" instead of simply not making them.
And as smt88 said, there's just not much profit in that. There are perfectly good websites, blog posts, and videos out there that cover this already, and it can't really be coupled with data for monetization the way stocks can. Frankly, while it absolutely should be taught to kids, there's a point at which if you're an adult and you can't sit down for five minutes to read an article about how your credit card works, its no one's fault but yours. I agree that optimizing for readability is great, but I don't know that "no one will read black text on a white page." That describes a book, after all.
[+] [-] tyrfing|4 years ago|reply
I understand the motivation, a lot of existing options aren't particularly good in varying ways. I just don't see any real differentiation here.
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
I'm curious how much time you have spent on Yahoo Finance or Google Finance, almost everyone who uses those tools for over a day finds Stock Unlock and usually ends up subscribing since we are just worlds away from what they offer. We are totally free to try/you can even type in a fake email, so I'd be curious to hear more of your thoughts after you try out our tool.
I am not here to brag about numbers, but our growth/number subscribers backs up our own angst/annoyances we had as founders that every single tool out there today whether it's free or paid cannot do simple things like: "Show me Google/Apple/MSFT revenue for last 20 years graphed together, okay now lets throw price to sales in there", you can do this on our platform in 60s in the free form tool.
Further, for anyone that spends a lot of time investing/analyzing companies, YF and Google Finance just don't cut it. We are gaining subscribers daily that are leaving those platforms since they believe (and our telling us) how much value they are getting from our platform, at a price that is lower than anyone else (we care about our users free cash flow)
I really don't mean to come out here and sell, but I believe if you used our tool you would see/feel that we are not the same as the sites you quoted.
Again/to reiterate, your opinion is appreciated and thank you for taking the time to comment and share your thoughts :)
[+] [-] tboxer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
I cannot agree more, one our biggest issues right now is it take a person a good amount of time (relative to a "typical" site) so really see the value we offer/what we are aiming to do.
Daniel will be thrilled to hear that and thank you so much for taking a dive on Stock Unlock! We have been having so much fun building this, if you have any thoughts/feature suggestions/things like that, that come to mind, please let me know ^_^
[+] [-] shanehoban|4 years ago|reply
This should be done on the backend as currently you can just make open requests for any ticker currently to that endpoint, and it allows it [1].
[1] https://x8ijjvlkb0.execute-api.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod/...
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
You may not agree, but here is the context on this: We purposefully do not restrict this, and actually do have the code that can restrict (if we want to turn it back on). Anyone can make a free account to Stock Unlock, and have unrestricted access to our whole site (and therefor the "API"). I personally do not mind if someone uses that URL as it's almost trivial to do the same thing with logged in cred/curl.
There may be something I am missing here and if that's the case please call me out on it. Again, thanks! Also, welcome to our "API" lol ^_^
[+] [-] irutirw222|4 years ago|reply
I have lightly researched David Pronk you provides you with the actual financial content, and he himself claims on his website he is not a financial advisor. While I don't mean to discredit him in any way and don't want to imply his advice is bad (it seams reasonable enough for someone like me who doesn't know too much about finance), I am still wondering why you didn't also hire a professional to audit what Daniel has written? There are various certificates within the finance industry and it would increase my trust in our offering if I knew that a professional with at least some experience and/or certificats has vetted it.
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
I totally respect your opinion here. The type of education we are providing is not hedge fund level trading algos/any deep monetary theory, it's pretty bare bones stuff like "how to understand/use price ratios such as p/fcf", or "what financial metrics should i look at for bank stocks"
If/when we get to deeper topic, and actually have money/aren't a scrappy bootstrapped startup, as the CEO I am 100% going to continue to make sure we are properly resourced/reviewed so that our content stays trusty worthy/helpful for our subscribers. If you try the app I'd love your feedback! Think, investopedia type stuff but with examples and actually inline in our app when you need it, not as a standalone piece of info you need to go to google for and then forget what you read the next day
[+] [-] wnolens|4 years ago|reply
But I'll ask for results/case studies :) What are some trades you/others have made by using this tool which resulted in gains?
Describing successful uses of the tool would go a long way in getting potential users at least excited and believing they could do the same.
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
We launched on December 11th, we don't have numbers on "trades" since we don't suggest or push trading. Long term investing is more of the vibe, and the time frame is too short for anything meaningful to share there. Short term trading is hard/98% of people loose money after 2 years, we aren't about that.
What I can say is this. Daniel Pronk, many other financial youtubers, myself, and our users have reported the following (not exact quotes, I'm paraphrasing): "Stock Unlock saves me 80-90% of my time it used to take me to analyze a company", "The insights feature really helps me get a quick first look at a stock when I start my analysis", "education mode is a game changes, finally a website I can use and learn how to invest"
The last thought I'd leave here, financial youtubers have millions of followers, and many people are looking for a way to learn how to invest, and not have things abstracted/done for them (these tools just do not exist in brokerage sites today). This tool is basically a platformization pulling together all the knowledge basins from Youtube accounts/other tools priced way too high.
(7 day free trial/no credit card/no pressure to purchase anything) Our price is also, the lowest out there, for the most value. There simply isn't another product out there with our feature set at our price point, not to mention education embedded everywhere makes up approachable to all investors, not just experienced ones.
I feel that may be too long of a response... but here we are. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to make a case for that, I'd love to continue this thread :)
[+] [-] jfmatth|4 years ago|reply
I'm not sure I agree that there isn't Financial Education out there? I've used Schwab for 20+ years (yes old guy here) and now TDAmeritrade and I can tell you, they are all about education.
Have fun building your idea
[+] [-] glutamate|4 years ago|reply
There, I saved you not only $75/yr but also countless hours of your time.
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
I would like to add, a lot of investors will have a majority of their holdings in indexes/ETFs/Mutual Funds, but that doesn't mean you can't take an allocation and put it into other assets, that some may consider more risky (i.e. an individual stock).
If you ever get curious about looking at stocks/"opening the hood" I'd appreciate it if you thought of us, if not have a great day. Thanks!
[+] [-] shmatt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
Is there somewhere on our marketing material that makes it seem that we are a screener? If that's the case we would love to iterate/make it clear we aren't a stock screener.
Thanks for this insight ^_^
[+] [-] jonnylynchy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmportilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] punkspider|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faangiq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moneywoes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
real answer: Are those actively or passively managed funds or both? And, fund managers are people to, and the public is lead to believe they are great/good at what they do but the truth of the matter is, they aren't. I actually don't see the value in funds, the reason Stock Unlock exists is that we as a society have been manipulated into believing investing is hard and we must use the products of big banks/big finance to manage it for us, that in my opinion is a lie.
I have hard opinions here so I'll stop there, I can go on more if you'd like to continue this thread. I love chatting about this
[+] [-] harrisonjackson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hippofluff|4 years ago|reply
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify: we are a product for anyone who is curious to learn more about investing, as well as for any existing investors who want to save time/money with our powerful tooling like the Free Form tool
Many of my friends who are financially illiterate are loving the tool, as well as financial YouTubers and professionals who love the simplicity and ease of our data visualization features all over our site to easily spot trends/analyze companies they may want to invest in
I'd love to clarify more if you have additional questions! The best way to see our value is to use the tool, which is honestly something we need to work on since it's not immediately obvious at a glance why we are a great platform