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 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.
Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming
61–70 of 75 posts
Re: Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will do. Point about NFLX wasn't the drop -- stocks go down and it's almost always stair-steps up, elevator down. It was that literally just days before ER CNBC put an analyst on TV crowing about $600 PT. How many millions of dollars did that person lose for the total viewership of CNBC and other outlets that carried her advice? You read an analyst report from Goldman saying "we like apple going into the fall, you sh…
Options might not be the best advice for the target audience.
I can understand why a lot of people think that way. Check out my reply above for more color on the subject.
Re: Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 option…
1 or 2 lots? The margins after commissions are going to be crap (if anything) for big indexes. I know the phrase "efficient market" gets thrown a lot but its pretty relevant here - there simply isn't much, if at all, to be made doing this.
Lets say you have 100 shares of SPY - $19.6k. You propose what - Writing Nov 22 calls? Look at the chain - $0.31 bid for 204, for instance, which is pretty high-risk already, but 205 is to $0.23, 206 down to $0.15. You can even find an index that does this for you - http://www.cboe.com/micro/bxm/ . I'll save you the looking, but it underperforms SPY at 1,5,10 years + inception.
Options are valuable tools for certain situations, but average investors shouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole.
Re: Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming
#64I 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.
Re: Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 option…
1 or 2 lots? The margins after commissions are going to be crap (if anything) for big indexes. I know the phrase "efficient market" gets thrown a lot but its pretty relevant here - there simply isn't much, if at all, to be made doing this. Lets say you have 100 shares of SPY - $19.6k. You propose what - Writing Nov 22 calls? Look at the chain - $0.31 bid for 204, for instance, which is pretty high-risk already, but 2…
It seems you're arguing theoretically, and that maybe I moved a little too quick in my previous post and wasn't clear.
What I actually suggested above was buying the SPYs and selling covered calls. The only risk you're taking on is limiting your upside to your strike price.
Tell me this: what can an investor do to increase his probability of success in a trade other than reducing basis? The argument for reducing basis is simple: Reducing the amount you've paid for the shares, making them cheaper for you than somebody just buying the stock, gives you an edge.
The monthly sd in SPY is $9. So yes, if you sell the $205s, 85% of the time the calls you sell will expire worthless OTM, and when that happens if you roll your position forward another month, doing that will increase your total profit over just holding the stock. Limiting upside to increase odds of profitability is the lynchpin of professional trading strategies. And that's what you're doing here.
And yes, selling 1 and 2 lots, commissions do absorb a larger percentage of your PL than on bigger transactions. And complex strategies that require 4 legs like an Iron Condor won't be profitable at that size, it also happens that an IC is a low-risk strategy (and thus small effect on your buying power) so in those cases you can increase the leverage or widen the strikes.
Your attitude about options is understandable given the way they've been portrayed to the retail investor. And everybody should think about what's right for them. But most retail investors buying stock, making directional bets, buying netflix at $500 a share, you think that's less risky than buying a $100 debit spread on NFLX with a higher probability of success and massively less capital. And you think that way because it's how you and the retail sector has been conditioned for 20 years.
And, like I said up top here, the retail sector has underperformed the market. And it's not because of evil HFT firms who do nothing but cheapen transaction costs for everybody. It's because of the way we trade. It can be better. Check out this TastyTrade video covering a study they've done on reducing cost basis with covered calls:
http://www.tastytrade.com/tt/shows/market-measures/episodes/...
Re: Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming
#66beautiful boys
Re: Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming
#67beautiful boys
Re: Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
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.
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
However, you are correct that I believe accurately communicating dubious information is nothing more than duping credible idiots with pretty web design.
Re: Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming
#69Please 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 :)
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 :)
It's not so bad after all. http://codio.com, on the other hand... ;)
Re: Show HN: Cappio – stock research that isn't overwhelming
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Quandl[1] is one such resource of free stock data. [1] Quandl.com
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