

Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming - timtamboy63
http://capp.io

======
yummyfajitas
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.

~~~
coffeejay
Thanks for the feedback.

We're trying to serve the less educated investor so we take basic fundamental
analysis and automate it while making the insights more accessible to someone
who is less financially literate.

It's interesting that you bring up personalization too because we're headed in
that direction with customizing reports and creating recommendations based on
factors like risk profile, age, and retirement plans.

We'd love to chat if you have time. You can shoot me an email at jay@capp.io

~~~
jamesaguilar
I thought that yummyfajitas' point was that fundamental analysis doesn't work,
like all public forms of stock market analysis. Financially illiterate people
are even less likely to understand that, which means that making the
"insights" accessible is actually worse for the user than having them not be
accessible.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Roughly what I was saying. I don't actually think all forms of analysis don't
work, and I currently run a strategy I do think works. Note the strategy
involves no web design or pretty colored boxes. I run it like this:

    
    
        $ python compute_trades.py
    

Then I manually enter the results into my broker.

However, you are correct that I believe accurately communicating dubious
information is nothing more than duping credible idiots with pretty web
design.

~~~
areyousure
Out of curiosity, where does your script get data (prices and whatever else)?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Quandl for now, but fairly soon I'll be collecting realtime prices from
interactive brokers.

(My strategies generally run on a daily basis, so daily data is good enough
for that. But soon I'm going to switch to a full algo strategy, which will
require realtime data to backtest.)

~~~
areyousure
Thanks for your response! Good luck.

------
encoderer
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.

~~~
minimax
_There are some people doing it right, though. Check out TastyTrade.com._

Your solution for retail investors who are getting burned in high beta tech
stocks is to go put on a bunch of complicated options positions? That seems
like kind of crazy advice. Maybe just buy some SPY and go do something more
interesting than stare at options prices all day.

~~~
encoderer
Sure, you can buy an index and forget it. Or, you can buy the index and then
sell a covered call on it every month at 1 standard deviation out of the
money. You decrease your basis and earn a monthly income, at the risk only of
capping your upside if SPY surged upward. One sd out of the money options will
expire worthless 85% of the time. No "staring at prices" required.

It's not your fault if you're scared of options (or scared for the masses).
It's because retail investing has been taught and presented totally backwards
for 20 years. Options have the same risk as the underlying. They are only more
dangerous because they give you leverage. So you trade 1 lots or 2 lots. Your
capital at risk in my apple spread example is an order of magnitude less than
buying even 10 shares of Apple stock at the then price of 5000+

The retail investor understands rankings and price targets and no load mutual
funds and other things we've said are I,portamt. I can teach you vertical
spreads in a few hours and that is all you need to use options in your
investment strategy.

In a vertical spread I can tell you with certainty that your probability of
profit is equal to the max loss divided by the width of the strikes. Max loss
is the width of the strikes less the credit you received when you sold the
spread. So if you sell the 190-189 put spread on the spy bc you think it will
go up, and you receive .35 for the trade, your Max loss is .65 so your
probability of success is .65/1=65%. Whether or not that's a good risk to take
depends but it's better than buying Netflix because some guy on tv invents a
price target.

~~~
drglitch
> Options have the same risk as the underlying.

Not really. Option pricing includes volatility (beta) and time-decay (theta)
in addition to basic price sensitivity (delta). In plain english, an option
has a premium not just based on how far from the money (from current price)
the strike is but also how much underlying is moving AND how far away option
expiry is.

Vol moves are not to be underestimated - if you look at option prices within a
buck or two of Intel when they announced earnings, you'll see how implied vol
changed.

Lastly, I believe options are too complex for retail, non-active investor to
grasp not because of needing to buy 4 legs to form an iron condor or
something, but from fact that there are inherently more built-in risks that
are very hard to understand, vs simple "company does good, it goes up, company
does bad, it goes down" proposition of a stock.

Lastly, i do agree with you that options present a very good set of tools, but
like with any power-tool, you should know what you're doing before pressing
that "on" button :)

~~~
encoderer
You're missing an important fine point here: I am not advocating buying
options. These strategies are _selling_ options. So implied volatility and
theta decay are your very best friends.

This "options are too complex" language is just silly. Retail investing
doesn't work as it's been taught! It underperforms the market and professional
investors, and it doesn't have to. You don't have to run complex positions,
selling a vertical spread is every bit as easy as buying stock (one
transaction to open the position, one to close it, and sometimes you don't
need to close it.)

Anybody who wants to tell me options are risky has to explain this: Suppose
you want to capture upside in, say, Amazon. Why is it riskier to sell a put
spread or buy a call spread, in either case risking just a few hundred
dollars, than it is to buy shares when just 25 will cost you $7500 or more?

The fact that you mistook the value of theta decay and IV in my proposed
scenario of selling a covered call makes me think you just don't understand
some of these things. And that's not your fault, it's a huge fail IMO that the
retail investor has had to learn the finer points of front load vs back load
on some overpriced mutual fund but has been taught that options are scary.

Again, I do not advocate for taking long option positions and I definitely
think you should check out TastyTrade.com to learn a bit more about the
philosophy.

------
ankurpatel
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](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.

------
oomkiller
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.

~~~
jndsn402
That's a terrific idea (the backtest - sentiment analysis is interesting but
the backtest could be a core part of the offering).

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cornflake
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.

~~~
coffeejay
We're pulling as much free data as we can but have plans to transition onto a
paid data source as soon as we can.

~~~
cornflake
Oh hey, that's awesome, I was under the impression there wasn't any free data
sources available. This would make FinTech way more accessible for startups.
Which ones do you use?

~~~
otoburb
Quandl[1] is one such resource of free stock data.

[1] Quandl.com

~~~
drglitch
Quandl is great but be sure to truly understand their ToS correctly - they
pull a lot of their data from sources that forfeit (or dont explicitly allow)
public/for profit redistribution

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drcode
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.)

~~~
timtamboy63
Thanks so much! Feel free to reach out to me directly if it's easier -
chintan@capp.io

------
mandeepj
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.

~~~
coffeejay
Thanks!

Yes, definitely, right now it is just opinions but we do want to analyze for
actual sentiment (bullish vs bearish).

------
eastbayjake
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.

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

~~~
timtamboy63
Yep, too much traffic. Fixing now, let me know if it works!

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palakchokshi
I get an error when I try it using BAC

[http://www.capp.io/queries/new?query=bac&button=](http://www.capp.io/queries/new?query=bac&button=)

~~~
timtamboy63
Dealing with some traffic issues right now. Should work now.

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andrea_s
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 :)

~~~
timtamboy63
We somehow didn't find that out until we'd already built everything out.
Considered a re-brand, but we figured we'd go with it :)

~~~
andrea_s
It's not so bad after all. [http://codio.com](http://codio.com), on the other
hand... ;)

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

~~~
timtamboy63
Definitely a timeout unfortunately. We're bumping up dynos, so hopefully it'll
get better!

~~~
codelitt
I'm getting timeout errors too. Rather than just "more dynos," on Heroku - you
may want to try:

\- Adding caching static assets/images/etc (Not sure how this is done on
Heroku but fairly straight forward with Nginx or Apache). Currently, your
assets are taking a full 6 seconds to serve.

\- Possibly serving your static homepage etc from one server/Heroku instance
and your functional app from another so you don't put the stress of traffic on
a homepage on the app server as well.

 __Edit: Adding this link to be a bit more
helpful.[https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-caching-ruby-
rail...](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-caching-ruby-rails)

------
davidw
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.

~~~
coffeejay
It is meant for individual stocks as of now. We're hoping it serves pain
points for retail investors who need some hand holding when it comes to
investing smarter.

------
dschiptsov
_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.)

~~~
coffeejay
haha love the reference :)

------
UXDork
Do you guys have an API for queries?

~~~
timtamboy63
We've actually been considering making it available for others to use. Shoot
me an email chintan@capp.io.

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

~~~
coffeejay
Thanks for the kind words! Glad you find it useful. Shoot me an email at
jay@capp.io if you ever have more feedback.

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

~~~
timtamboy63
Only NYSE/NASDAQ for now, but we're definitely going to be expanding out soon!

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dataminer
Where are you sourcing the data from?

~~~
timtamboy63
Different places right now. MorningStar, FinViz, etc. Transitioning onto paid
data asap.

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frenchhugger
beautiful boys

