

Ask HN: Please review my startup - gaika
http://whomovedmystock.com/

======
blurry
Love the UI but feel a little ambiguous about the basic principle behind it.
Would love to hear others' opinions about it though... I could be wrong on
this one.

As I understand, you basically attempt to correlate stock movement with two
major components: (1) market/sector movement, and (2) news.

The first one is easy. Market/sector goes up, stocks go up, market/sector goes
down, stocks go down (in absence of major news, more on which below). I doubt
you would have created the website to prove the obvious, so I'll leave this
one alone.

The second one is where I see the major problem. The problem being that NEWS
DO NOT MOVE STOCKS. You'd think they would. After all, good earnings report,
stock goes up, bad earnings report, stock goes down, right? Except that's not
what happens. Granted I have limited trading experience
(selling/buying/sometimes shorting several times a month at the most) but I've
seen enough to conclude that there is no _meaningful_ correlation between news
and stock movement.

I just tracked several stocks that I happen to follow where I have a
reasonable idea as to why they've moved in the last year. Your chart only
proved the above. News were well presented along the spikes/dips (again, the
UI is awesome) but the clear presentation only served to show that no
correlation exists. (To clarify, by news I mean anything and everything, e.g.
earnings reports, analysts upgrades/downgrades, company announcements, actual
news, etc; and by no correlation I mean good/bad news accompanied spikes/dips
equally.)

Anyone care to argue with me? Prove me wrong!

~~~
gaika
Thanks! Agree that _most_ of the news are fluff or something that is already
expected by the market. But there are events that have profound effect on the
stock and we try to identify them.

~~~
blurry
If you want to talk about events that have a profound effect on stocks, it
would be tremendously useful to add trading volume high/lows to your charts. I
don't mean trading volume in general but rather exceptional events, like a
hedge fund or an institutional owner unloading a bunch of shares for example.
You could compile a history of NYSE Arca trading spikes/dips as one source
([http://datasvr.tradearca.com/arcadataserver/JArcaBook.php?Sy...](http://datasvr.tradearca.com/arcadataserver/JArcaBook.php?Symbol=V))
and there are probably several others.

Those are true movers and would add tons of credibility to your tool by
showing what I'd expect to be a near 100% correlation.

Another not-so-crazy crazy idea would be to plug amazon's mechanical turk
worker bees to track stock mentions on Jim Cramer's Mad Money and plot that
into your charts. I am not suggesting this for the actual usefulness but
rather as a gorilla SEO/marketing trick. I once consulted for a company that
does online doll dress up games and it occurred to someone to create a Hannah
Montana doll. That basically made them. Little girls search for Hanna Montana,
see the Hanna Montana dress up game, and voila, they go from several thousand
to 2MM+ registered active users (with paying parents) in several months. I
really think Jimmy C could do the same for you.

------
blakeweb
It took several minutes of playing with a chart and exploring the contents of
the page before I had that 'aha' moment when I realized what your site is
trying to do. (example: whomovedmystock.com/goog)

From the questions in the comments here on HN, it seems clear that everyone
else is in the same boat, not really getting why this is any different from
google finance.

You need to experiment with better visual ways of communicating that the blue
'market index' curve in the graph is something you invented, defined by the
pie chart to the right.

It also wouldn't hurt if there was some unobtrusive way for you to emphasize
why that's important. You're trying to isolate market movements out of stock
movements, so that you can correlate news with times when the stock diverges
from what would be expected based on the market and the industry/sector it's
in. To me, that's great, but neither your intention to do that nor the effect
of everything you've done to try to illustrate that is quite coming across.

~~~
gaika
Agree that is the main weakness right now, do you have any hints how this can
be expressed better?

~~~
tomsaffell
Maybe try not calling it 'market index'. This is a familiar (sounding) term to
most people, so they will assume they know what it means, and wont look for an
alternative definition.

Since it is an original metric that you have created, why not give it an
original name? Even better if you can link that name to your company name,
think 'Zestimate' from Zillow - easy to say, obviously a 'new term' so
something that I need to learn, and feels like it belongs to the company, due
to the 'Z'

All that said, I'm still not quite sure what real world problem this site
solves..

------
steveplace
A couple notes:

\- It might be a good idea to note stock:market divergences on your chart

\- Don't know where your parsing your news, but you might want to incorporate
a filter for SEC filings and PR releases along with a way to eliminate the
fluff/SEO (Motley Fool comes to mind)

It seems (as blurry pointed out) that you are assuming that news leads/lags a
stock. There's also a whiff of efficient market theory in there, and at the
expense of pissing off half of HN, the markets aren't efficient.

Other than that, I find a hard time finding the difference between what you
have and other tools I use.

~~~
gaika
Stock/market divergence is marked on the chart with a green dot, might have to
make it more prominent.

What do you use to filter out the news?

~~~
steveplace
I usually ignore the news during the trading day, and I use stocktwits.com for
a pretty good feed.

I'm not saying your site won't work: you can carve out a pretty good niche in
finance-world.

------
danteembermage
I think what you've got here has a lot of potential; let me echo some things
and maybe make some other suggestions.

First, I think it is a great idea decomposing stock variance. Really, I do
want to know what moved my stock. However, it's not really clear what your
chart is telling me. I see market and I see the stock price and I see that
they are different but I don't know why they are different. What I'd imagined
was suppose you start with the return on the value weighted Wilshire 5000
possibly adjusted by empirical beta. Presumably there will be some residual
price movement, some of that is coming from sector changes. It would make
sense to see the sector effect as a different color tacked on to the market
effect. Then you add news effects and then the leftover would be unknown or
some such. Perhaps on news days you assume all the residual movement is due to
news and then carry forward that price difference through the non-news
periods.

As you've got it I assumed your chart was just comparing the stock return with
the return on the S&P until I read the comments here. You're news history and
the associated price change is awesome, in academic finance there is a long
tradition of doing event studies (e.g. what is the effect on a stock price to
an announcement of a seasoned equity offering?). If I understand what you're
doing you've essentially done an event study of every possible event for all
stocks throughout time. That's pretty cool. In fact, if you used academic
standard methods calculating your expected returns you might even have a
dataset that research universities would be interested in buying from you.

One possible thing traders might like that you might be able to pull off.
Suppose I'm worried a stock is going to get hit with an "identify theft" leak.
If you put a little text processing on your news titles you could determine
the average effect that kind of announcement will have on the average and
maybe for a stock in particular. So lets imagine "identity theft" has an
average negative return of six percent. Then I check identity theft with
American Standard and I get 0.1 percent because the negative identity theft
returns are linked with banking and retail sector returns and not really with
the market.

I'm a little worried that your design is too cutesy. I would expect websites
that do lots of statistics to have more hard corners. I understand you want
the site to look accessible but you want it to appear intelligent and
accessible. There's got to be a compromise in between somewhere.

------
mstefff
Doesn't Google Finance do this already?

I don't understand the use of the "index"...

The logo and interface looks a little '5 years ago'..

~~~
mstefff
Also, it isn't always the news that moves the stock. These features could be
very misleading.

~~~
gaika
We are adding other things, like what mutual funds and insiders are buying and
selling. News and market are just a start.

------
browser411
You may want to check out wikinvest.com. They also annotate stock charts but
are taking a crowd-sourcing approach to it (they are a wiki after all).

------
owkaye
The first thing I noticed is the bad grammar. It never impresses me to see a
website that fails to get the spelling and grammar correct. As you're using it
here, the word "identify" should be "identifies":

>>> For every stock we create an index that measures market and sector
influence and identify the news that make the difference. <<<

But I think you're trying to say too much in that sentence anyways. A simpler
and better statement that's easier to understand and probably has greater
impact might be this:

>>> We measure market influences for every stock in America, and we identify
the news that makes a difference. <<<

If you use this new wording you can pay me $1000 ... :)

Aside from this change, I like the grab-and-pull interface that works like
google maps, but I'm not into investing so I don't know if real investors will
find any value here.

------
vaksel
This looks pretty much like a knock off of google finance

As far as site wise -too much space on the bottom -newstrends are pretty
useless for terms, since you get results like you have now "EPS" etc, I'd
replace that with newstrends for actual companies.

------
sutro
Great work. I really like everything you've done here. Though it will be
difficult to improve upon what you already have, I do have three very minor
suggestions for you:

1\. Change your domain name from whomovedmystock.com to whomovedmycheese.com.

2\. Change your product from a website to a childishly simple business book.

3\. Stop coding and start lecturing and conducting business seminars.

Other than those few small tweaks, I'd say you're on the right track. Keep up
the good work!

~~~
sutro
Oh, and if the whomovedmycheese.com idea has already been done, I would
consider addressing the pent-up demand for web-based constipation advice with
whatmovedmybowels.com.

------
cabalamat
Here are my observations for the page <http://whomovedmystock.com/GOOG>

1\. it looks pretty

2\. when I move the bar at the bottom of the chart, the applet keeps
reloading. This is annoying. Is it intentional or a bug?

3\. the bit at the top left where it shows a pie chart of Google's "Market
index allocation" -- how is this calculated?

4\. On the chart, it's not obvious to me what the blue line "market index"
means

~~~
huhtenberg
_> 1\. it looks pretty_

No, it doesn't. It looks flashy.

The UI appears to have been inspired by the Bratz website or similar. Playful
tone is just plain inappropriate given the subject matter and it will drive
people away. This is the most evident problem with the project at the moment.

------
thomasmallen
Looks good, although I'm no investor (put a bonus in for two weeks way back:
The stress wasn't worth it). Obviously, the site will only be as good as how
current the news is: People need this information practically in real time.
And you'll have to find those angles that people can't get by viewing the
"News" tab on Google Finance.

On another note, I'd like to see a site called whomovedmysocks.com

~~~
owkaye
If you're married you can probably guess who moved your socks since it's
almost always the same person ... :)

------
tptacek
Are there other things you can chart and correlate news stories to, besides
the stock market?

Can you put in the extra effort to chart indicators, like VIX and TED and
Case-Schiller? CSCO and MSFT stock charts might be tapped out, but this might
become useful if it acts as a portal to lesser-known stats.

------
sahaj
reading the title, i thought, oh cool, this will tell me which investment
firm(s) are buying/selling a particular stock.

as others have pointed out, this doesn't provide anything more than what
google finance already does.

~~~
gaika
We have that information, it will show up soon.

------
comatose_kid
Can you explain how/why this would help my returns? I trade options from time
to time, and don't really understand the value this service would bring, since
it focuses on things the market has already priced in.

~~~
gaika
Right now it is mostly educational. It can also save you a lot of time if you
track many stocks as it will highlight only important news / events.

------
davidw
It looks pretty, and looks kind of interesting, but where's the 'there'? Like
vaksel notes... it's pretty similar to Google Finance - what's the compelling
reason to keep coming back to your site?

~~~
gaika
There are 2 main things right now: measuring market influence and filtering
the news. We plan to let people submit their own explanations and add
discussions soon.

~~~
davidw
Your "blog" (I hate that word:-) is empty, and yet it's linked from the site.
Either put something in it, or get rid of the link.

~~~
gaika
Thanks, fixed :)

------
thorax
Might also be good to track the value of the USD against other currencies in
the world in relation to stock moves, too.

~~~
gaika
Right now it is part of the overall market exposure, but yes, some companies
might be more sensitive to it than others.

------
volida
the graph doesn't look very professional/serious because of the curves in the
change of the direction.

------
paraschopra
Clearly your news index lags the market price of the stock.. I wonder what use
can that be?

------
Prrometheus
The world doesn't need another stock market charlatan, even one with flash
graphics.

------
Aries09
this site is great as a tool i think you are wrong by calling it a google
clone also with all that's happening now on wallst i get a chuckle checking it
out

