hippofluff's comments

funny answer: 99% of fund managers aren't on Stock Unlock

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

Hi! Thanks so much for taking a look at us/Daniel and sharing your thoughts. You're not too late on the comment, and yes we like solving big problems!

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

this^ 100%

The companies and corporations that sell investment vehicles and services try to "make it cool/funny" to not understand money and that "rich people have their wealth managed for them", a bunch of bologne!

That being said, it's not simple, and people need to be serious about investing, it's very easy to get burned without the proper education/patience

> Frankly, all I've learned here is that if I want a co-founder in 2022, I should find a YouTuber.

Honestly... fair, it was pretty story heavy. I also agree though, Youtubers have existing audiences and communities that you can solve problems around.

I am curious if you have an opinion on Daniel Pronks channel? It seems we value the same things, getting information in a way that isn't opinionated, but rather something like: "hey, here's what I think and here's why, here's where I could be wrong, what do you all think of this? Lets talk about different opinions in the comments, etc". I find Daniel Pronk is the best (just my opinion of course)

_virtual high five_

Stock Unlock has 20+ years of fundamental data for 22,000 US/CAD stocks, and as of today 122,000 global stocks. And the data is high quality, we churned through 3 different data providers building our beta to find this.

Finnhub is not a "cheap" competitor. The entire financial system for executing trades/brokerages has been deflating for decades (used to be $50 per trade online, then $7, now free... 30+ years ago you had to be rich pay a lot and phone in to a broker at an exchange) and that is also happening to the financial data that has been behind the walled gardens of companies like Bloomberg.

So things like fundamental data are definitely becoming way easier to get, and the huge statue (Bloomberg) as I see it will continue to get chipped away at, I am seeing it now, but I guess time will tell here. It's totally possible I'll be wrong, but the evidence I see it stacking up/we are building in it everyday

Thanks for this perspective, I agree that financial literacy is far bigger topic than what we cover in Stock Unlock. Further, we definitely don't cater to every person today, we have a lot of users who love us but I know that there's also people that we don't appeal to right now (and that's okay). Daniel Pronk's Youtube I believe is a good way to understand what crowd we are catering to today.

In my personal experience there is a need for a better way to learn to get into long term investing, my hope is that we will continue to expand into other areas of financial literacy as well, but right now we are focusing on getting one thing right.

> So are you investment education or are you investment data?

Both! For example, think investopedia is great but it's not contextual education, aka it's not given to you at the right time. I was able to learn best by applying the numbers with education and actually exercising/using it. This is also why I believe that the static white text/endless pages of definitions isn't the type of education that ends up working in this case (people have short attention spans/it's boring/dry).

Responding to your other messages, I appreciate your honest concern around the gambling. I agree that when people trade/try to see patterns in charts, buy/sell within a year or two, that is gambling.

We may agree to disagree on this one, but long term stock investing, when you buy and hold great companies for 5, 10, 20 years, is what we are going for here. We believe that when you can identify a great company, and have patience/the right long term mindset to DCA into it over time, you can do well. You can do that with a small % of your capital, we are also adding suport for ETFs and I agree those are also great investment vehicles for people that don't have the time/care to truly analyze individual stocks/businesses.

Ah yes, the exchanges love to keep their data private/monetized... but they are a business too so I get it.

Lets definitely keep in touch, I'll check out your profile. I appreciate the support thanks!

ISINs... what a mess, ha! We don't touch those

You're speaking my language! I agree with everything you said. We are actually in talks with Refinitiv, they would allow us to re-sell their data on our website (bloomberg will not).

Here's my two cents here/my angle. I think that 95% of the data in bloomberg terminal isn't needed for the common investor. Further, companies like ours will not replace Bloomberg terminal, we don't plan to go for their customers, and we know we cannot compete with the ridiculous level of data they have. Honestly, full respect and hats off to them they have worked super hard to build that up and deserve their moat.

I do think there's a ton of room for more practical solution that works for the common person (not a financial professional) and that there will be more decentralization of financial data, maybe not all of it, but I see it happening now where companies like Finnhub and others are slowly building their own empires/chipping away at their own custom data and I think there will be competitors that creep up. I guess time will tell though!

It really is a fun snaky problem to solve, I love solving problems that people think are unsolvable, maybe I'm dumb (probably) but it makes the process all the more fun when you know you're swimming with sharks

We don't have any valuation models right now, we do plan to build a simple DCF model soon though!

Right now one of our most asked for features is to be able to graph/project future values (i.e. net income) and show potential future prices at various p/e ratios, etc.

Definitely not that deep! I would say those formulas/complex math are not things Stock Unlock believes are necessary for 99% of people to learn.

Surprisingly, most people don't understand price ratios, whats each line of a financial report means (i.e. operating cash flow vs investing cash flow). So you can maybe label it "investing 101", "Intelligent Investor" type stuff.

Thank you for all these insights! We also went "through the ringer" finding good quality financial data, that would allow us to build a consumer web app around.

I think it would be worth you time to look into Finnhub, you can tell them "Jake from Stock Unlock" referred you (if you haven't tried them already).

I like to think of them as the "anti-Bloomberg", their data quality is great and their coverage is excellent.

We also churned through meeting with a lot of the "legacy" data providers that have ridiculous/terrible contracts that make it complex/really annoying to build a consumer platform around.

I'd love to chat more about this! Very few people have really had to dive deep on this, so it's neat meeting others that feel the pain.

Lastly, the term I use is "data cartel". There is literally a financial data cartel, but I am convinced this is the decade that get's broken up, and entrepreneurs like us will have a lot more "innovation" room. Cheers!

This is a great ETF! Stock Unlock is adding support for ETF's in the next couple weeks ^_^

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!

Thanks for this question, we current use Finnhub (https://finnhub.io/). We are also in talks with other data providers since as we scale we see ourselves connecting to multiple, but it's just Finnhub for now.

> I wish you would just be honest and say you are trying to assist people in _gambling_

I have to apologize if we are putting off a message (that I'm not aware of*) that we assist with gambling. Long term investing is not meant to be gambling, and that's the entire point of our platform, to educate people/having them think that stocks aren't just lottery tickets you buy when someone at the bar says "it's going to the moon"

I understand this space in general has trust issues, I understand that a lot of people are burned/on their heels for this space, I get it, that's why we are here building this. On our side we never promise returns, or sell this as a tool that will make you rich, we advertise this as a way for people to gain fair access to market data with tools the pros use, embedded with education that makes it accessible for anyone to learn. We have no skin in the game for how people invest/trade but hope to influence less "gambly" decisions through our platform.

> The world would be infinitely better off without the services you are trying to provide.

I am getting a sense that you will be saying this blindly to any app you see that comes around, and I don't blame you, it's an unfair world out there with a lot of shady people trying to make a quick buck. If you look at companies core fundamentals, investing is not gambling. Investing is understanding a business and industry and forecasting when there's a margin of safety of that companies future growth, relative to it's current trading price and reported financials/leadership/company earnings communications/all that (it's not simple and takes time to learn! We make that process easier.). It's an entire world. If you ever change your mindset here to be more open minded that not everyone is out to get you, I'm sure Stock Unlock will show that we are different. If you have more constructive feedback I'd love to continue this conversation, if not I appreciate your time and comments here.

I agree with your sentiment here that gambling on stocks is bad.

Our goal is to provide education and analysis tools, since we believe investing is not gambling. Even though, many people today treat it like it is. We don't make money/aren't incentivized on our users making/executing trades (unlike a lot of other services today).

I understand that our product isn't going to interest everyone, there's nothing wrong with only investing in index funds. That being said, a lot of people take 5-15% of their money and put it into riskier investments. Also, a lot of newer investors are investing in causes/things they believe in as a social/environmental cause. By being supplied with investing education and tooling that most people are deprived of/never shown, we hope that we can remove the word "gamble" from long term investing

I was unaware how active Bogleheads is, that seems like a great forum thank you for sharing that.

If you try Stock Unlock I'd love to hear your thoughts ^_^

Wow 5 figures in fees... Not cool! On thing that personally kicked off this journey for me was the thought that I didn't have to have someone manage my money for me and that it brings great peace of mind and calmness when someone has fully understanding of how their money is invested. It just takes some time/care to learn the basics just like any subject

Cheers friend!

Not at this time, we simply don't have enough CS volume for a team.

That being said we are in a growth trajectory to need a team likely by years end. If you're still interested then I'd love to touch base! My email is predictably Jake {at} StockUnlock [dot] c0m (take that web crawlers!)

Our investment education right now is 100s of interactive "?" widgets all over the site that are built from 200+ pages of definitions written by Daniel Pronk. Things like definitions, how to calculate, how investors use this, etc (I hope that further clarifies, you're right that "investment education" is vague)

And I see your points and it's definitely a trustless space we are in which is why we are built off the ground from discord communities/not people leaving finance jobs in suits. We will work on our branding, we never promise people will make money, only that we provide resources to help people better analyze and understand stocks. Sure, that should result in better money management, but as a co-founder I'd never promise returns/tell someone this will get you rich

Your 2cents is worth a dollar to me. Appreciate all this!