

Show HN: Nvestly, Never Invest Alone - kyu
http://www.nvestly.com

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leventcemaydan
You need to define the value proposition a little better. Maybe you can find
some great ways to integrate it with startup investments too, you should check
out Angellist API.

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tinkerrr
Honest and serious question - what's the purpose of this service? Do you think
an investor will get higher returns if he knows what his friends are buying?
What experts are buying? It seems to me that no serious investor would ever
need this type of a service. I understand it's cool to make everything social,
but I can get absolutely no useful information from this aspect.

The reporting side can definitely be very cool though, and it could provide
serious benefits if done right.

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kyu
Thanks so much for this question!

There's ongoing debate as to whether a highly successful investor will surface
and be able to beat the market (i.e. the next warren buffett). We don't take a
position for or against that. To those that are up for the challenge, great,
but we don't at all count on it. In fact, we debate it internally, but it's
not as important bc our purpose right now is to provide this platform.

We believe there is value in the transparency of the platform to foster better
discussions. Most people make decisions alone. And current platforms like
Stocktwits are interesting for sentiment but are filled with banter and are
unreliable for real discussions.

In terms of reporting / tools, we're focused on investor self-awareness. Most
people have more than 1 account and have a hard time even finding out the
annual return on their portfolio. We'd like to start alerting people of things
like strategy drift, as well.

Slightly more advanced topic: There's also something to be said of the data
itself once people start sharing. The idea is that if you can get a cross-
section of sentiment / social data backed by real portfolio data, it adds an
element that wasn't previously available and should technically result in a
more efficient market, resulting in an opportunity for new value creation.
Brainstorming with few Anderson / GSB / Cornell finance professors on this.

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tinkerrr
Maybe I didn't phrase my question right. What I want to know is, as an
investor, why should I use your service? Personally, I don't see much value in
knowing what my friends are investing in. There are 10,000 stocks, I cannot
follow them all anyway. As an investor, the only thing that I am interested in
is increasing my returns. Everything else is secondary. So my question is not
whether markets are efficient (we'll leave that to the academics) but whether
you believe your service, in some way, would help investors improve their
returns. If the answer is no, the product, from the very start, will be very
limited in scope (e.g. only the investing newbies and other such small
segments would get a benefit).

Reporting-wise, I am with you. I think the current models are antiquated, and
most of the solutions I see are outright wrong (Hint: If you're looking only
at stock prices for returns, you're doing it wrong too).

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otavio
Hey tinkerrr, I believe the value to someone like you is in connecting with
others on the same boat to be better informed. I'm with you in the sense that
I don't always care what my friends are holding... unless my friends are
really smart.

For example, I see LVS dropping and am considering starting a position. I ping
the people who hold LVS right now (nvestly.com/ticker/lvs) and ask them what
they think and if they know what's driving the selloff. Reality is that people
on Nvestly are generally well-informed about what they hold, so new
information surfaces and the entire group benefits. The fact that people's
identities are tied to real portfolios tends to generate higher quality
discussions vs. a Stocktwits, Yahoo! group or even SeekingAlpha comments.

If you don't ever trade and don't have to discuss anything, it's most helpful
just to track your portfolios in one place without multiple logins and to see
your returns. The annualized return (IRR) figure for example is something you
can't generally get without paying an analyst (or investing hours into a
spreadsheet). The IRR is important because it's an annual return that all
funds in the world look at (like angels looking at traction).

Newbies do like to follow 'top investors'. I actually didn't think this would
be super relevant but people loved it so we made it the homepage upon login
and are adding a few things to protect people against blindly following.

Experienced investors have been using Nvestly as an investment resume of
sorts. The system pulls up to 10 years of historical track record info and
this is unprecedented afaik.

So these are 3 use cases. Let me know if it doesn't answer your question.

~~~
drglitch
> the system pulls up to 10 years of historical track record

Do you mean for experienced investors or for regular users? If it's the
latter, I'm curious as to how - by parsing PDFs from the supported brokers? It
would be in fact pretty cool since places like personal capital only do 90
days max when a new account is imported.

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spott
I'm with tinkerr: What is the value here? Openfolio.com is another player in
this space, but I'm missing the value that this space has.

kyu: Can you speak to this? What is the ideal experience that you are hoping
for people to get out of this which adds value to their stock market
experience?

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otavio
Hey tinkerr, I'm the CEO, thanks for the question.

The value in this space is in the shared data. It's analogous to Twitter --
the individual tweets might be useless, but the collective data is valuable.
If you could see all the real portfolio data that people are sharing, it would
be magnitudes more interesting than sentiment data from i.e. stocktwits
because it represents real dollars (and in that sense we let people share
trades to stocktwits, too). Actually, if someday people were to start
publishing real dollar amounts you'd even see total aggregate volume. And if
people were to add target holding period to their trades, you could see volume
by expected holding period. There's definitely inherent value in that, but
it's a very long-term play.

For now, the value is in better investment discussions. It's impossible to
have one on i.e. stocktwits. The real portfolio info provides an environment
for higher quality conversations. A few experiences people have expressed are
valuable on Nvestly: \- Finding others who hold a stock they hold and
discussing what to do next. \- Finding people who have traded a stock a lot
and sharing research \- Having a little more fun by earnings investment merits
(similar to badges) or getting feature as a top weekly investor

The 'business' way to describe the value to society is that the social element
helps introduce the concept to the younger generation. >50% of millennials are
saving for retirement but only 10% are investing even though the majority who
save think of the stock market as a viable vehicle for retirement (had to
memorize this for a pitch).

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spott
Also: you have a bug in your password matching algorithm. The following
returns "must contain one letter and one number:

    
    
        f2JANi#_ywTBcLTeWJ3>y3PsOPt2#pD

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spott
Actually, it appears to not like symbols at all...

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otavio
Thanks for spotting this ... no pun intended Actually my fault for not
creating accurate error messaging. It should say "No special symbols allowed."
The code itself is fine. Love that you found this. We'll fix it on the next
push. Ftr, these are some of the characters that are not allowed:
<,>.?/:;"'{[}]|\\`~

~~~
toxic0Nion
errr why are they not allowed?

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ameister14
I made an account and checked it out, but I don't think I'm going to use it. I
just don't get much out of it that I can see right now.

Something I immediately noticed: I'd like to have the ability to filter by
diversified accounts. If I am looking at someone that gained 50% over the last
year, and 91% of their holdings are 1 stock, I don't really gain anything.
They bought shares in Tesla a couple of years ago. That's fine, but what do I
get out of knowing that? Several members of your top group are like that.

When I open up 'professional investors' and go to an individual account, there
isn't an easy way that I can see to go back to the overall view of
professional investors, and going back sends me to the week's top performers
window. I don't really want to go there at that point.

What might be useful for me too is a way to see what the professionals listed
have invested in tracked over time, based on their past filings. It'd be
interesting, anyway.

~~~
otavio
Hey I'm one of the co-founders. Thanks for checking it out and for the
comments! Right now the site doesn't filter for concentrated portfolios and
we'll certainly be adding that. This is our first version of the product. Glad
you noticed that! You might find more value in finding people who hold
something you hold or something you're considering investing in.

We just added the "professional investors" section today and will be sure to
work on the UX. Agree with your points here. That feature would be awesome,
we're adding it to the list.

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minimaxir
> _Your sensitive information including brokerage account login credentials
> are always kept encrypted using 256-bit level complexity._

You need a _lot_ more cryptographic detail if you want this product to be
treated as secure.

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kyu
Thanks for the feedback. We wanted to keep it simple for the general audience
and we dig in just a little bit more in FAQ. We're in the process of creating
a dedicated "security" page. As this is probably the smartest community we can
find on the subject, would love any specific input on security.

TBH, we leveraged some of the same technology and thus wording that SigFig,
Personal Capital, Mint and other pioneers in the space use.

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JazCE
I qute like this idea. I'm not sure how much I'd use it. Currently though this
seems to be aimed at the US market. I'm a UK investor and you don't support my
platform, that said I'm not sure my platform even has an API you could plug
into. It'd be nice to look up my individual funds to list, so I can see my
investments without needing to plugin to my platform.

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hpvic03
This is really cool, nice work.

It feels to me like all the online brokerages are stuck in the dark ages. I'd
like to be able to trade on a nice modern site with good reporting tools.
Maybe you guys could build that eventually. I'm sure in the meantime I will be
interested in watching people who are doing really well -- that information is
extremely interesting to me.

~~~
kyu
Thanks for the kind words my friend.

Yes we'd love to get there. Our CEO left the investment management industry
precisely for that reason. Said his boss, who managed $6 billion, still typed
with 2 fingers. No offense, but probably time to start embracing technology.

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krapht
Wish you supported more brokers. I personally am interested in support for
Optionshouse and Interactive Brokers.

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kyu
Thanks for the input! We're integrating more brokerages as we go. We've been
swamped with requests, so any indications on your favorite brokerages would
help us choose. Right now we've queued up Interactive Brokers, OptionsHouse,
TradeKing and Wealthfront. Also have requests for Betterment, Loyal3 and
Motif. If there are any more we should add to the list we'd love to hear it.

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DougN7
For some as serious and processional (and you hope long-lived) as investing,
I'd personally drop the cutesie -ly ending.

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abshomali
Looks cool, will check it out

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kyu
Thanks for checking it out! Any feedback/suggestions = appreciated

