from Hacker News

Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming

by timtamboy63 on 10/24/14, 2:38 PM with 70 comments

  • by yummyfajitas on 10/24/14, 3:10 PM

    Near as I can tell, this site is basically Google finance with a bunch of nicely color coded indicators of various components of the stock. It looks pretty, prettier than google finance. At a glance, I can easily tell whether you think I should buy or sell that stock.

    This is nothing but stock market info porn. All you are doing is using web design to convince me to take seriously your opinions on whether GS or TWTR is going up or down. It's the web 2.0 version of an analyst in a nice suit. It looks cool, but no reason to believe there is real substance.

    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 don't want to be entirely negative, so I'm going to suggest a tool which I think might actually be handy, and could use with some nice presentation. Ask the user a little about themselves, and then suggest stocks/ETFs they can put money in to hedge their risks. E.g., if a person works in tech, suggest to them a portfolio that is disproportionately less tech heavy - that way, if their industry tanks, their retirement won't necessarily do the same. 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.

  • by encoderer on 10/24/14, 4:01 PM

    Above all, congrats on shipping.

    The problem I have is, you may have built a better mouse trap here, but for the last 20 years the retail investor -- your customer -- has been the mouse. And few people in your industry acknowledge that.

    The stock market has a built-in upward bias of 3-5 percent. It represents the premium over the risk free rate that entices people to invest in equity instead of debt (bonds, treasuries). So retail investors don't "lose" money but they have underperformed the market to a extent that is IMO criminal. Literally.

    All of the education, services and tools (like yours) are teaching investing all wrong. Price targets? Made up numbers by analysts? What were the price targets on Netflix before it fell 100 handles (and then clawed half of it back)? The day before the drop CNBC said $600/share. How about GTAT? Jim Cramer loved that stock.

    There are some people doing it right, though. Check out TastyTrade.com. These guys have made a massive investment in teaching the retail investor techniques for investing that don't rely on the magic of technical analysis or analyst prophecy. And even more awesome -- they built a trading platform that is free to use and provides tooling to support their principles, which are basically: do many small, high probability trades to give yourself many independent occurrences to smooth statistical variance, and let duration work for you. The platform is Dough.com

    I'm obviously not affiliated, just a fan. And I don't mean to take away anything from what you've built. But I think we're just doing it wrong and i want to see that changed.

  • by ankurpatel on 10/24/14, 7:52 PM

    Good job on shipping. I can tell you have made this site in Rails just by looking at the 404.html page http://www.capp.io/404.html which people usually forget to change form the standard rails template. Can you tell us what is the hardware configuration you are running on as it is holding up well considering a lot of people are trying it out from Hacker News.

  • by oomkiller on 10/24/14, 5:35 PM

    Have you run your %w[Buy Sell Hold] indicators over historical data to see how accurate your suggestions are? It would be really nice to offer this feature for transparency and to keep yourselves honest. It could also improve your product and help users to better understand when you make errors. Does your app do sentiment analysis on tweets? That would be insanely cool if you get it right.

  • by cornflake on 10/24/14, 3:17 PM

    It'd be interesting to know how much you are paying for your data. If you're doing things legally, balance sheet data and exchange licensing for stuff like this costs 10's of thousands of dollars a year.

  • by drcode on 10/24/14, 3:06 PM

    I'm probably in the target demographic for this (small semi-serious hobby investor) and I like what I see. I'll send more detailed feedback to your site's email. (I figure you folks did the work putting this together, so you should be the first to benefit from feedback.)

  • by mandeepj on 10/24/14, 5:35 PM

    It looks neat. Great job.

    For market sentiment you are just showing tweets. How about if you just show if market sentiment is +ve or -ve?

    I think you are taking only fundamental analysis into account to suggest buy or sell otherwise you would not suggest GPRO as a buy.

  • by eastbayjake on 10/24/14, 9:53 PM

    I haven't seen anyone else commenting in the last few hours, but the site has been mostly down for me since 11 AM Pacific. I was able to do my first few test queries and sign up for an account, but it has been unavailable since.

  • by davesque on 10/24/14, 3:42 PM

    I'm getting 500s on the query page. Getting too much traffic maybe?

  • by palakchokshi on 10/24/14, 4:44 PM

    I get an error when I try it using BAC

    http://www.capp.io/queries/new?query=bac&button=

  • by andrea_s on 10/24/14, 3:54 PM

    Please note that "cappio" means "loop" (as in, for hanging people) in Italian. Not sure if it's deliberate, but perhaps it's good for you to know :)

  • by rpedela on 10/24/14, 3:03 PM

    I got a generic "Application Error" message when I searched "tsla". The website seems to be running very slowly so maybe just a timeout?

  • by davidw on 10/24/14, 3:03 PM

    I tried a mutual fund, for the heck of it. Not there. Looks kind of neat, but my guess is that it's more of a feature than a company.

  • by dschiptsov on 10/24/14, 4:57 PM

    Nobody knows if a stock is going to go up, down, sideways or in circles. You know what a Fugazi is?

    Sorry, I can't resist.)

  • by UXDork on 10/24/14, 5:00 PM

    Do you guys have an API for queries?

  • by UXDork on 10/24/14, 5:04 PM

    Guys, this is awesome. Just wanted to say thank you. This is definitely very useful to me!

  • by lordlarm on 10/24/14, 3:08 PM

    Missed stocks from London Stock Exchange (LON). Anyways, cool concept. Congrats.

  • by dataminer on 10/24/14, 3:51 PM

    Where are you sourcing the data from?

  • by frenchhugger on 10/25/14, 3:39 AM

    beautiful boys