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Ask HN: Review my investment website startup, StockYoyo.com

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Ask HN: Review my investment website startup, StockYoyo.com

#1

Post by tmfkmoney »

We just started StockYoyo (http://www.stockyoyo.com)3 months ago and feel like we're about ready to do a bit of marketing. Before we spent our hard earned cash we wanted to see what things we should be focusing on and the best feedback we've gotten so far is from members of a hacker news meetup I've been going to.

StockYoyo is an investment website based on game mechanics and social networking principles to help people learn about investing.

We would love general feedback on the site, and we are particularly looking for feedback on the following things:

1) UI. We've recently made some changes and we'd like to know how the experience is. 2) The game mechanics/feedback loop. We're trying to make it stickier. 3) The rating system. Is it understandable/useful.

Of course those are just the things we know we need to know about. I'm sure we're missing stuff we should be thinking about so any other ideas would be great.

Re: Ask HN: Review my investment website startup, StockYoyo.com

#4

Post by alimoeeny »

I saw the demo last night, too. Sure there is a need for this, personally I have tried to do something like that using Google Finance and see how I perform over time, without actually buying anything. I should say I didn't understand were the credibility of the site comes from. I mean why should a user trust the scores? or maybe I missed something there.

Re: Ask HN: Review my investment website startup, StockYoyo.com

#7

Post by staticshock »

The Motley Fool has a similar system called CAPS, except that their system is structured around outperforming the S&P 500 index. I like their approach a lot, because it reinforces the oft-forgotten idea that if you're losing to the S&P 500, then a passive investment strategy would have suited you better.

Re: Ask HN: Review my investment website startup, StockYoyo.com

#8

Post by tmfkmoney »

alimoeeny wrote: post #4

I saw the demo last night, too. Sure there is a need for this, personally I have tried to do something like that using Google Finance and see how I perform over time, without actually buying anything. I should say I didn't understand were the credibility of the site comes from. I mean why should a user trust the scores? or maybe I missed something there.

Thanks for the feedback. This is one of the main things we're trying to get right.

To answer your question about the scores, we are using collective intelligence to generate the stock ratings. Ideally the scores will be a kind of average opinion of everyone on the site.

One thing that makes StockYoyo different than other collective intelligence rating sites is that our ratings actually affect how you score when you pick the stock. We reward contrarian opinion and try to drive the ratings to zero. With enough users that means any non-zero rating should hopefully be a meaningful indicator of sentiment.

Unfortunately, we're not sure any of this is very clear and we're not entirely sure how to make it clear without users having to read our scoring FAQ. Better UI? Tool tips? walkthrough?

Re: Ask HN: Review my investment website startup, StockYoyo.com

#9

Post by aspiringsensei »

I'll offer feedback on the ratings system. My one gripe with your site is that the "buy" or "sell" justifications provided by your users seem weak. For example:

    Electric cars are pretty modern now and Tesla is one of  the few companies, that really can offer some excitement to them
- User Vlado

If you'd really like these guys to learn about investing, you should think about putting prompts in to get them considering the various factors that might lead to this being a successful investment:

* What's this company's valuation? * How does it compare in the competitive landscape? * How well-capitalized is it? * Etc, etc.

It seems like these are "bus station judgments" in large part, where people go "i like this company, it will do well." Build in prompts for deeper consideration if you really want to teach people something and generate useful data.

Re: Ask HN: Review my investment website startup, StockYoyo.com

#10

Post by trueluk »

hucker wrote: post #5

Very interesting idea! Looks like you have a small graphical error right here: http://i.imgur.com/cfICi.png , too little spacing between "dots" and the text when there is a big headline. (I am using Chrome 11.0.672.2 dev on OSX)

Along the lines of display errors, you have a problem with your slides when a user has JavaScript disabled: http://i.imgur.com/lThGo.jpg. I think you could set slide.p2, slide.p3, and slide.p4 with display:none; initially in your css, as opposed to doing it via JavaScript as the page loads, to account for this.
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