

Introducing Nvest - harrychenca
http://www.nvest.me/

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gibybo
Ranking people by their recommendation performance is going to be very
misleading for most people. There is this natural intuition to look at the top
performers and try to learn from them. In reality, the rankings would look
almost identical if everyone just picked everything randomly. Mutual funds and
hedge funds exploit this all the time. They start lots of funds that all
invest a little differently. They cull the losers and keep the ones that
happened to do well. Then they sell prospective investors on their past
performance of one particular fund when in reality they didn't need anything
more than random chance and multiple tries to get it.

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carbocation
Thanks, this was my immediate thought. If Bogle's thesis is correct (which is
perhaps equivalent to the efficient market hypothesis), then there should not
be anything to be gained by looking at these folks' stock picks in general.

Retrospectively, of course, some of their picks should look like pure gold.

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masterleep
I'm creating 2 ^ N fake accounts in order to ensure that I have at least one
account with N perfect recommendations. Then pump and dump, baby.

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harrychenca
We do plan to implement features, such as validating phone numbers, to prevent
that.

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opendais
Phone numbers cost $1 to bypass this.

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Pacabel
Notice that he wrote "features". That's plural, meaning more than one. And
then notice that he wrote "such as validating phone numbers". The "such as"
part indicates that phone number validation is just one example among several.
I'm sure he's quite well aware that phone numbers alone are insufficient.
That's why they would likely be combined with other approaches.

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opendais
I'm uncertain why pointing out the mentioned feature is easily bypassed is
irrelevant?

It isn't like I was attacking him on it, just pointing out that feature is
effectively ineffective except against truly mass bot type stuff.

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prostoalex
Curious to see how this will be different from Marketocracy
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketocracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketocracy)
which has been crowdsourcing public's opinion on stocks, then highlighting the
best stock pickers, and then finally building a mutual fund based on the top
stock pickers' recommendation.

Long-term Marketocracy funds are under-performing broad index funds FWIW.

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sciguy77
I had an Econ professor who insisted individual stock picking is a fool's
errand, and he had some pretty compelling evidence to back it up. If you have
a thousand users picking stocks randomly, some will by chance do well. I
wouldn't be comfortable putting money behind the lead users who are likely
victors by luck. But then again, its very possible I'm missing something.

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sumedh
> I had an Econ professor who insisted individual stock picking is a fool's
> errand, and he had some pretty compelling evidence to back it up.

What does your Prof say about Warren Buffett.

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vidarh
Presumably this, from the comment you were replying to:

> some will by chance do well.

Buffet's performance _could_ be due to being skilled, or the reason we're
talking about Buffet instead of someone else _could_ just be survivor bias.

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sumedh
You should read this then.

[http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/null?&exclusive=filemgr.downloa...](http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/null?&exclusive=filemgr.download&file_id=522)

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joosters
Buy/sells seem to be only time stamped to a day. Surely you need greater
accuracy than that, e.g. the exact second? Otherwise, if I buy a stock on a
day where it rises 10%, what price do I get?

Do you take dividends into account? If not, why not?

How do you rank people who make different numbers of picks? A naive method
would be to add up all the returns, but this would then favour people who make
more stock picks. For example, if I recommend two 'buys' that both give a 10%
return, have I gained 20% in total or 10%? (As I would have had to split my
bank to invest in both at once)

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harrychenca
We do take dividends and splits into account. Currently, our approach is
compounded ROI.

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pyguysf
congrats on launching, yet another flashy site with an unoriginal idea. been
done before (and better) elsewhere, yet you failed to tackle anything that
your predecessors have failed at. Investing is not just about return; the
other side of the coin is risk, and you fail to mention that anywhere.

investing is more than just a buy or sell. what about position sizing? what
about position risk? portfolio risk? portfolio beta? how do you benchmark?
what kind of drawdown do you incur? what's your sharpe ratio? why are you not
adjusting returns for at least the market, and moreso common factor returns?

rank(total_return) != investing success

Your "metrics" should be educational and make people more aware of the
financial decisions they are making. By boiling it down to buy/sell
recommendations, you make investing into gambling with a 50% chance of being
right.

your "transparent" ranking algorithm is not disclosed anywhere - do you have
any documentation that your algorithm does more than just show who made the
most "money" historically? (past performance is not indicative of future
performance!) are your rankings stable? how do you identify persistence?

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zhoufred
On the landing page, they have shown how they calculate the ROI. Also, the
idea of acting on recommendation is to seek alpha rather than beta.

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pyguysf
calculating ROI= (sell_price / buy_price -1 ) *100 does nothing to account for
beta

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gesman
Can I track consistently worst stock pickers too?

Then I can fade their bets and become the top :)

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rahimnathwani
Hmmm... that would entail you going short when they go long. However, the
potential payoffs from going short are asymmetric, with theoretical unlimited
downside risk.

How would you deal with that, or would you try to execute through options?

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foobarian
You could only trade when they go short.

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shon
Good luck with it guys. There was a site long ago called clearstation which
was bought by Etrade and killed. It offered similar features (charting,
profiles, following, tracking, discussion, etc.), they built a great community
of traders which was educational and enjoyable to participate in. It's hard to
build something good. Keep pushing and good luck.

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Chromozon
Well done on the website. Navigation is smooth, and the layout is nice. I'm
interested to see how this social network for stocks does once you get more
users.

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rustyconover
Are there really enough other places besides Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool's CAPS
and StockTwits that publish people's recommendations in such volume that the
number of recommendations would be large enough to be valuable outside of
these already large established communities?

Or is this whole site's effort merely a feature that StockTwits and the other
sites may add later on?

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zhoufred
Just browse through the Motley Fool website, there are similarities for sure.
Then I came across this,
[http://caps.fool.com/player/bbmaven.aspx](http://caps.fool.com/player/bbmaven.aspx).
This person has a rating of 100, and for a period there, each of his
recommendations have consistently made over 500%. I don't know how it is
ranked, and I don't think it is correct either.

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Jsssj
But it definitely felt weird on how they score each recommendations.

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weitingliu
Reminds me of SocialPicks =)

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harrychenca
Interesting site!

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spyder
On etoro.com you can even copy the transaction of others with one click. Can
you do the same on Nvest or it just provides information?

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harrychenca
We are currently focused on providing information and stock market. Etoro is
mostly working on Foreign Exchange.

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mikkom
You don't adjust the returns to risk? Why?

You should have the basic sharpe and sortino ratio at least.

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harrychenca
I mean there are many mathematical model to calculate risk. But, how do you
objectively evaluate risk? We can definitely include multiple different models
on the site.

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mikkom
> how do you objectively evaluate risk?

You should know this, you are advertising a trading performance evaluation
site.

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jblesage
I have a hyphenated first name, and was told it was invalid. Replaced the
hyphen with a space, was again told my first name was invalid.

Maybe worth looking into your broken name validation.

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harrychenca
Thanks for the feedback! We fixed the issue. You can now use hyphen or space
in your name. Please try it again at www.nvest.me. If there's any other issue,
please let me know! Thanks.

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rahimnathwani
Will you pull existing recommendations from StockTwits and Seeking Alpha? Or
will stock-pickers have to sign up on Nvest before you will track their
recommendations?

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harrychenca
Currently, they have to sign up before they can get tracked. There are
challenges to track non-structured recommendations from other platforms. If
you have suggestions, we would love to hear about them!

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math
We have a system in place for quantifying quotes at
[http://backrecord.com](http://backrecord.com) . On the system that is live,
all data has been entered by hand. The task is difficult enough that I've
found even educated people who know about finance screw up the data entry more
than I would like. So we have a sophisticated verification system in place to
try and deal with that. We have also experimented with NLP algorithms with
some success. If the data extraction is tailored to a particular source, it is
quite doable in some cases.

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1945
Overall a fan and signed up. Some feedback: dated icon and layout has too much
of a bootstrap feel. Also, single page application for more responsive UX.

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harrychenca
Thanks for the feedback!

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sumedh
How are you going to monetize this?

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harrychenca
There are actually many ways! If you are really that interested, ping me at
harry@nvest.me!

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santa_boy
I'm curious too. Will send you an email.

