The number one issue I have with a lot of finance newsletters is the lack of historical context so I think it's extremely valuable you featured historical data right next to the daily data to give context on how small daily moves actually are (minus this latest bout of volatility). I think that has a lot of overlooked behavioral value, why not also feature 20 & 30y data, considering this is the time series many young investors will need to consider for retirement?
I find myself often googling to check S&P futures so this email would remove that step for me. Might also be cool if the email had other features like Tax Loss Harvest notifications when an ETF you're watching drops more than X%.
I did some research on the finance newsletter space myself a while back, here's some of my favorites I ran across:
Tried Robinhood Snacks but can't get over the feeling it's written by low paid interns and doesn't offer any actual insight, just condensed mainstream narratives.
I like to see the historical data so I can put the numbers in perspective, Yahoo Finance doesn't provide 20, 30y time frame that's the main reason. Thanks for the list I'll check them out.
You might consider the impact it has on potential customers. I can see how it's an in joke for r/wsb, but unless your target audience is only that community, it raises a red flag.
Nice, simple execution. I have a similar setup with Atom's daily premarket emails. One piece of feedback. Excluding the futures section, the centered text of the various timespans within the Performance section is harder to scan than left-aligned text or a 2x4 table would be.
Yeah, I wanted to do that but I was expecting Sendgrid to provide that which they don't so I need to build something. It's on my TODO list. Thanks for the feedback.
Nice work mate! It's exciting turning your side projects into reality. Hopefully there will be thousands of subscribers in a year and you could make some good money out of it.
Thank you! Yes it is, I really enjoy trying to solve my own problems. SendGrid provides that signup form and it’s very limited, probably I’ll need to have a custom one at some point.
I appreciate the effort, especially the free tier only approach, but... my framework for data collection and reporting: what behavior, if any, do I expect to happen as a result of data? If the answer is none, there is no point in the email / report / pagerduty alert.
> The idea is for the mailing list to go out every weekday before the market opens so you can be informed enough to decide if it’s worth paying close attention to the market on any given day and make some moves.
Looks like the behaviors this information is intended to induce is:
1. Gather more data more frequently (reload WSJ / Y! finance? front page?)
2. Make more trades ("Buy High, Sell Low")
If SP500 futures moving but markets are closed, what action could you possibly undertake profitably? Market open is a special auction you can't really arbitrage like that, so you'd be hoping for intraday moves? Are these the behaviors you _want_ to be inducing? Should retail investors be making trades during times of high volatility?
I suspect no; retail investors will buy into rallies and sell into slumps, exactly the behavior Bullish's tagline mocks.
The point is for average investors not day traders to get an uncluttered view of the market before it opens so they can have an idea if a possible big swing is happening on any given day. I find it useful in my use case since email is the first thing I check in the morning.
Damn, guess I should have written a blog post. Yesterday I launched the MVP of my stock news site http://stockqua.com with (eventual) goal to help people build up qualitative & quantitative analysis of stocks & industries to make better investing decisions.
This was a great read, really enjoy the branding, the feel, the minimalism in the design etc. From a product perspective, I have a hard time seeing what value this adds to your average trader, for me this wouldnt help influence any decision making. For example every morning I listen to Bloomberg's "Five things to start your day", this is largely actionable information that adds color and context to movement in the markets. I would think if you can hone into say sector-specific emails, like technology etc, to help zoom in on what sectors as a whole, say tech, are looking like this week versus historical, potential reports driving these changes etc, you may get a larger subscriber base. ps: the tagline under Bullish logo at the bottom is backwards. Says buy high sell low.
Thank you. It's a simple idea that scratches an itch, I like your idea about sector-specific info that might be something to look into to. The tagline is correct it's just for fun!
Ahh, I was thinking certainly this perfectionist didnt reverse these words on accident! Also, that shed build, pretty nice, the Al Merick behind the original garage desk, also nice. I lived in SD for a while, miss it but damn that water is cold compared to the east coast.
> It needs to be something I can finish in a week tops
> Ship it
Love the simple project idea & execution. I'm working on my own side-project during this isolation period, and your blog post is helping to inspire and motivate.
Very cool! I signed up. I was wondering if you did some research before picking sendgrid. I see their free tier has a limit of 100 emails a day after the first month. Their 100K/month is $15/month which is not bad I guess.
Yeah, I've done some research and decided to go with Sendgrid because they are the only ones that offer API in their free tier. Their free marketing campaign plan offers 2k contacts + 6k emails month which should be plenty to start.
This looks cool. However, am I the only one that first saw Bullish▲ and thought it was really Bullshi▲, in other words a slightly censored Bullshit? Especially if reading the motto "Buy high sell low" quickly all at once.
I've noticed the same thing with Alpha Vantage, but I switched to Alpha Vantage because Yahoo turned off their public API. It's the Yahoo API available again now?
We've had the paid plan with "premium" support. Inexistent and borderline rude. We just moved to IEX cloud for data (proper documentation, sandbox, etc).
For something more detailed with top headlines, big movers, earnings highlights, etc. I really recommend the "Wall Street Breakfast" newsletter from seekingalpha.com.
In my experience from developing Backtest (https://backtest.curvo.eu), a backtesting tool for EU index investors, the hardest part has been finding good and reliable data that goes as far back in time as possible.
I only focus on index data so it's a bit easier but it's still hard. Lots of scraping, downloading and parsing CSVs, Excel sheets, some puppeteer magic...
Yeah, I'm trying to stay away from scrapping, parsing, and that whole mess. Right now I'm relying on Yahoo Finance undocumented API and possibly IEX Cloud in the future.
Just signed up and looking forward to seeing how this evolves!
We recently launched an investing newsletter at https://topstonks.com (just got our first paying customer yesterday), which tracks the social sentiment angle of a few weird places on the internet - WallstreetBets and 4chan.
We're definitely still learning the ropes, but Let me know if you ever want to talk shop!
Appreciate the appreciation for a well crafted email. Nowadays it feels like emails are filled with mindless drivel as a part of some drip campaign or retention strategy optimizing for a high open rate rather than delight.
Hopefully things change, but over the years, I've become allergic to subscribing to anything by email – I'd rather go to a website when I want to
I partially agree, there are good/informative emails out there. I for one subscribe to many and unsubscribe to tons all the time and my inbox is tidy, probably because I'm a little OCD
Just recently was also thinking about building some small tool to monitor my trades too. And few days ago start looking at the same yahoo finance library hah.
Anyway, after reading this, just went ahead and implemented my thing too.
In my case I just need to monitor a specific instrument, a few lines of code were enough after figuring out how to use the underlying libraries.
Great idea! I would probably use this more if you looked at the futures performance from yesterday's market close to this morning, in addition to past 1 day. The reason why is that I don't care as much about futures specifically, as I care about what they could predict for the coming market open.
Just an FYI, the Hey.com hyperlink in the post seems to be a relative path, just slapping it onto the end of the post route. All of the others work fine, it looks like you just need to add an `http(s)://` on the front and you'll be good.
You can get access to some of IEX's data for free with higher limits than IEX's free tier by opening an account with Alpaca. That gives you access to polygon.io as well, which doesn't limit API requests (Your API ID is used as the auth token for the polygon.io API).
Came here to say this. It's great. I use it for my portfolio tracker - https://stockdaddy.io/ - it's quite powerful in terms of breadth of APIs and data available.
I find myself often googling to check S&P futures so this email would remove that step for me. Might also be cool if the email had other features like Tax Loss Harvest notifications when an ETF you're watching drops more than X%.
I did some research on the finance newsletter space myself a while back, here's some of my favorites I ran across:
• https://capitalminded.com (more long term index fund focused)
• https://verdadcap.com (more nerdy quant/value stuff)
• Matt Levine's Money Stuff (couldn't find the sign up link but it's always great)
• https://www.finimize.com (general news)
• https://www.epsilontheory.com (somewhat annoying but also interesting at times)
• https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives (value/quant stuff from a billionaire hedge fund manager)
Tried Robinhood Snacks but can't get over the feeling it's written by low paid interns and doesn't offer any actual insight, just condensed mainstream narratives.