hippofluff's comments

I see your point here, honestly it was incredibly challenging to pick only 4 words in our title so we may have missed the mark there.

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

Hi! I am unaware of this but would love to learn more, I hear/and use this term daily with a lot of different people and this is news to me.

Any resources you can share for me to gain more knowledge around this? Also is there a term that is more acceptable we can use instead?

Thanks!

Hi! We would have so much fun having a coffee/beer together over this/I would love to learn more about your experience.

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!

People like you are awesome, again, thank you! This did result in us wanting to double check we aren't entering a grey area with our data provider.

> You personally might not mind, but I suspect the people who license you the ticker feeds might. ;-)

You're right... We will double check this with them. Appreciate the nice push here and thank you. It's definitely worth our due diligence to make sure this doesn't breach any "grey areas" for the restrictions we have to not re-sell their api directly.

Hi! Sry for the lag on the reply here, I didn't have time to read those through fully but I skimmed both.

I want to make one thing super clear, we don't make money off users trading, we are an investment/analysis tool and we make no claims/would never be a predatory entity that makes claims of x% returns/anything like that. We genuinely care about educating our users, and then letting them make their own decisions.

As for the links you sent (thanks for that btw!) I would bucket this with a bulk of the education out there, that's existed for a while, but hasn't been solving the financial literacy issue. The reason we believe this is the case is that education you sent is boring/static white text. Most people in the younger generations just don't learn that way. Further that education isn't inlined/when you need it while looking at financials.

A lot of our users/the founders find it much easier/more inviting/more fun & interactive to learn with the "clicky" ? modules we embed inline all over the site to define everything in small chunks. We are finding this is a way to learn where you actually remember things, but more importantly are engaged/having fun learning it. We have yet to see a tool besides ours to execute on this properly since it's very hard to create a consumer product that makes learning investing easy. Most importantly noobies feel comfortable in our tool, 99% of people who are brand new to investing get scared to death and never start when sent 20+ 10pt size font articles.

Lastly, my point isn't to say those resources aren't great, they are. But statistically people will just not read that, and/or not internalize it since it's not being applied when they need it while researching numbers/S1 filings/SEC reports/etc

Hi! I really appreciate this perspective, you're not wrong, but I do think there's room for a lot of investment styles. I know a lot of middle/upper class people that enjoy analyzing stocks for long term holds in companies they believe in.

I respect we won't cater to everyone, but the numbers/data we are seeing is showing a lot of our subs are middle aged/middle class people that are loving our tool. So some people will want it, some won't, that's my take.

If you ever get curious, please think of us! Again, thanks for the insight :)

Hi! Thank you for informing us of this potential issue, I really appreciate the good intention behind making us aware of this.

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 ^_^

Thank you so much for sharing these feedback and I appreciate the insight.

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 :)

Hi, thanks for sharing your perspective. While Stock Unlock is a great tool, I don't think it's meant for everyone. If you are a passive investor that is DCA'ing into an index, I don't think a tool like Stock Unlock would be for you.

Further/mathematically you're correct, statistically you will beat people that try to beat the market.

That being said, there's a lot of angles to this. For example, you can put x% of money into safe investments, but a lot of people do really nerd out on companies/understanding them (and will take smaller chunks of their money into more risky investments). For people like myself I can even use my capital to fund/invest in companies that are supporting causes I like (like green energy). We have found a lot of our users just enjoy learning, and it doesn't even mean they will invest.

I'll end this by highlighting that a lot of apps today are incentivized/have revenue structures which are built upon user trade frequency. That's bad. At Stock Unlock, we are incentivized to teach our users & we make money from the subscription fee for the platform. We don't care/would never push people to buy, well anything. They can take our opinionless/open research and data visualization tools and do with that what they want.

I'll end this by highlighting again, that your point makes sense and I fully respect/anticipate that we won't cater to everyone's needs today. Please keep us in mind if you ever get curious about how to analyze a single stock!

This makes a lot of sense, we are going to work really hard internally to work on our branding/what our marketing site is saying. It seems that we aren't properly conveying what we are, and that's on us. I'm grateful for you taking the time to bring this to our attention.

I'm all ears for any other feedback you have!

> Why gain insights into future performance if you're not screening stocks for purchase? Your comment about not being a screener confuses me. It sounds more like. "Our product owner doesn't like the word screener"

Most of the insights we have are analyzing past financials for things like "is this company profitable", "is this companies dividend payment > than their free cash flow" for example. I did look up the english definition for "screener" and it's a bit vague. I always viewed it strictly as an input tool, where users enter in criteria and then get "screened" search results which filter from a large DB/etc. I may be mistaken if that term applies to more than just things like finviz, but that's my experience with it. I've never seen someone use the term "screener" for a new feature like ours that doesn't conform to/behave like any other screeners I've used to date.

English is hard lol, I prefer Python :p

You're right, there likely was an opportunity for a TLDR there.

I will post one for you here for your convenience:

TLDR; Stock Unlock is a web app providing investment education and analysis tools, which is built by a group of stock nerds with an interesting company origin story. We are on a mission to show everyone that investing isn't meant to be hard, the tooling today is just inaccessible/hard to use. By focusing on education and building tools which save our communities time, Stock Unlock is looking to be the online place for everyone to learn to invest/manage their own capital.

I hope that's not too sale-y? I am much better at writing code than english, I promise :p

If this is still unclear please let me know and I'd love to give more insights.

Wow... TLDR reply here is: I am extremely grateful for all these feature requests (thank you!!!), we are recording all of these internally! We have been/and will continue to build Stock Unlock around feedback like this (from the community!)

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.

:)

This insight is 100!!! And thank you very much _blushes_

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 ^_^

I love you

Hi! Thank you so much, super appreciate the "congrats", woo! _enqueue rockets_

You are super right, there is 100% a lot of investment education out there. For my generation, no one I know (including myself) is going to go through static content/white pages with black text and just read that. Further when it's not contextual/inlined with the real financials it's hard to make that connection/memory commit.

Building on that, an insight we had here is that education needs to be provided when you need it. And most investors have no idea when it's a good time to learn a p/e ratio for example.

One thing we did in Stock Unlock, was put inlined education, everywhere, defining every term.

Given your experience in this space it would be an honor (seriously) to get your honest thoughts about how we are doing it. Daniel Pronk has written 200+ pages of custom education content which is embedded through 100s of interactable widgets throughout the site.

I hope you have a great day, the markets are pretty turbulent out there!

> Do you show non-GAAP measures for its divisions? That would be neat.

We do show this, this can be found on insights tab, financials tab (shows GAAP financials, 20+ years), graphed in free form tool, and seen in the "quick view table" for stats next to a stock graph on a stock landing page

I totally agree, we do look a bit similar from our marketing page, these comments are insightful and it will lead us to find different branding to better put across what we are. So thanks again for that!

You are also right, financial analysis is just one piece of the puzzle, there are a lot more things to look at when deciding to make an investment.

> All that said, your company could make money if it tapped into the take-a-screenshot-and-tweet market. It won’t help people understand. But many traders don’t care about that. That’s a valid target market.

We will be working hard here to prove that isn't our brand, but I don't blame you for getting that vibe based on how our marketing site looks. Our site is the only website, with embedded/contextual education inlined everywhere, we defined everything, and many new investors have told us personally how helpful our site has been to help them getting started. Our companies mission/incentives are for our users to learn how to invest the right way. We don't make money from user trade frequency, it's from our subscriptions.

I don't mean to sell at all, I get super passionate about this stuff and this is a very engaging thread. (Hopefully it's not coming across that way, but if it is I can handle you telling me that and I'll learn quick!)

Hi! This space has a lot of "trust issues" and I completely agree with the sentiment that this type of headline/web app has seemingly "crossed our path" before, and that this may just be another one...

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 :)

I love the way you think! 100% we are considering all of this.

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 :)

> Unless you are going to tell me that output is specifically adapted to each individual company and the industry where it operates. But I doubt that.

That's what we do! For example, if you look at a REIT stock like "bxp" that will have different insights than BAC which is a bank stock. Same for MSFT, which is not a REIT or a bank, and must have different financial metrics to care about.

No automations, we are working HARD and coding in a bunch of static text/education/etc (200+ pages and counting of custom education content to date).

Daniel Pronk is the content creator and creates the product specs for how we analyze different industries. We actually aren't doing anything too fancy here, you request a ticker, we pull it's financials, run analysis on them, then print that to the user. MOST importantly imo, we have detailed explanation for everything/never push our users, but rather guide/teach our users how to analyze and interpret these things for themselves so they can make their own decisions.

If you have time to crawl through the tool/click around I'd be curious to see what you think. Again, I am not taking this as offense, I'm grateful you're giving raw feedback. It helps us improve!