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MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

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Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#41

Post by BrentRitterbeck »

dereg wrote: post #28
Gaussian wrote: post #26

There's a ton of places that this can go. Just building on top of the functionality they've already enabled, this could become quite powerful very quickly. Here's this raw data stream that's existed for years that hasn't seen any good tandems of algorithms+UI applied toward it. Big opportunity. Watch Bloomberg, Reuters and Yahoo...they could be jousting for this in six months or less.

Bloomberg and Reuters already have competing services that cost tens of thousands of dollars each year for a subscription. If they bought this, it'd be to eliminate a competitor.

I hope that a competitor hangs around long enough to revolutionize this industry. The system does not serve retail investors well at the moment. This is a space with low hanging fruit.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#42

Post by lambtron »

BrentRitterbeck wrote: post #39
lambtron wrote: post #38

seems like a great product for a pain that most people have. i don't seen professional investment firms or bulge bracket banks would use this, however; at citi we use factset and capiq and even those services don't reveal everything and have errors sometimes. the analysts, at the end of the day, usually goes through the filings no matter what. like other comments posted here, professional investors, on the other hand…

We do a great job at locating resources. This has created a new problem: we have too much information to wade through. I would now like to see some sort of effort to structure this information. You make the comment that the financial information technology space is already pretty crowded, but I still haven't seen anything that structures all of this financial information CHEAPLY. EDIT: Hell, if I could assemble a tea…

thats true; i have yet to see structured financial data for cheap. although depending on the targeted audience, that 'structure' varies. equity analysts might be concerned about operational performance, top line growth, margins, and stock buyback programs. debt/credit analysts might be concerned about cash flows, revolver draws, commercial paper programs, etc. there are many niche markets and existing services out there may have already provided these structures (albeit not cheaply and they may be proprietary if at a firm).

building a retail brokerage firm around structured market information i think is harder than it sounds. unless the transaction costs for each trade reflect the value-add of having a 'free' service structure financial data. currently, transaction costs reflect the quality of investment reports prepared by (usually) CFA investment professionals. i'm not sure if the free structured investment information would yield a transaction fee material enough to warrant a sustainable business model.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#44

Post by BrentRitterbeck »

lambtron wrote: post #42
BrentRitterbeck wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do a great job at locating resources. This has created a new problem: we have too much information to wade through. I would now like to see some sort of effort to structure this information. You make the comment that the financial information technology space is already pretty crowded, but I still haven't seen anything that structures all of this financial information CHEAPLY. EDIT: Hell, if I could assemble a tea…

thats true; i have yet to see structured financial data for cheap. although depending on the targeted audience, that 'structure' varies. equity analysts might be concerned about operational performance, top line growth, margins, and stock buyback programs. debt/credit analysts might be concerned about cash flows, revolver draws, commercial paper programs, etc. there are many niche markets and existing services out th…

I have thought about the targeted audience portion of your comment. That is fully addressable through the use of templates. My daily work is in the interest rate risk space for a bank. As part of keeping up on the space, I read the financials of other banks. There are certain things I look for in these financials. If there was a way to create a template that was automatically populated with the information I am looking for, then that would be an improvement over the method I currently use. With that said, I'm not a computer scientist. My programming skills are limited to the more mathematical side of finance. I don't know how difficult it would be to provide such a thing given the challenges of parsing natural language.

As for the pay wrapper, I will admit that operating a brokerage firm at a large enough scale and a low enough price to attract a significant portion of the market share while somehow turning a profit would certainly be a challenge; however, I am not ready to abandon this line of thinking yet.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#47

Post by dctoedt »

patio11 wrote: post #32
rorrr wrote: post #5

So who is the target audience? Finance pros can already read SEC filings. SEO is the only obvious source of traffic and money I can think of.

Make a team of finance analysts who all cost $200+ an hour 10% more efficient. Collect money hats. Seriously, this is like "Bug tracking? You've got high priced professionals, why can't they just use Excel or sticky notes?"

I'm only a single data point, but I'd rather see data like this in a non-prose format, preferably in tables -- the way SEC documents are served up from EDGAR.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#48

Post by jhowell »

I first saw this post on my mobile and didn't click on the story link. Taking a look at the site, I was expecting something really user friendly, with big letters and numbers with explanations alongside. Perhaps the mint.com of public finance. To me, this site still looks like market watch or bloomberg or any other finance site.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#49

Post by ScottBurson »

Semiapies wrote: post #46
ScottBurson wrote: post #43

Sigh. Nobody knows what "obtuse" means anymore.

Hate to spoil a good melodramatic sigh of intellectual superiority, but "difficult to understand" is an accepted secondary definition of "obtuse" in many dictionaries.

[citation needed]

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#50

Post by Semiapies »

ScottBurson wrote: post #49
Semiapies wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to spoil a good melodramatic sigh of intellectual superiority, but "difficult to understand" is an accepted secondary definition of "obtuse" in many dictionaries.

[citation needed]

That's cute, since it was your unsubstantiated assertion in the first place that the word was being misused.

Tip: when unsure about the definition of a word, try googling define and the word in question. You will get results from a number of sources.

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