New Finance Website based on Arc / HN
wallstbeat.com
wallstbeat.com
We're actually pivoting away from the social news aspect of financial news, however. Instead we're focusing on automated tagging and indexing of financial news articles. It's a tough problem, but it's really pretty interesting, and I think that there's a potential for a huge upside.
If you click on the "discuss" page, you can see a little bit of the automated tagging that we're doing.
and add a way to search industry/geography.
You really need some 'life' if you expect to keep this going, just launching something is not enough.
You could probably write whole books about how to bootstrap a community. It's a pity nickb could not be bothered to pass newmogul.com off to others to keep it alive, it already had the hardest problem (initial audience) solved.
And any new launch of something like that will make it harder for the next to be taken seriously.
Maybe all you guys should pool or something instead of everybody running their own 1 user domain?
The phone number in the newmogul.com registration is answered by someone that says there is no 'nick' there.
What's the proper etiquette for signing off from a website anyway? Is there some kind of moral obligation to announce your departure? I'm sure plenty of people leave HN daily (and plenty arrive), surely if everybody would say 'bye' every time they leave it would get pretty messy.
But for long time contributors it might make sense, or at least an update in your profile or so...
Feel free to contact me (see my profile) if you'd like some more input if you decide to move in that direction.
Finance is one of those worlds that's so big, it's kind of hard to find a place to start digging in.
Technical guys are usually trading, they are looking at price charts and trying to gauge supply/demand and figure out how prices will change.
Fundamental investors take longer term perspectives, they analyze reported financials and qualitative factors, model earnings, etc, to determine where they think the company's performance will go and how that ultimately drives the stock price.
From there, you have some other possible divisions. There are traders for every asset class (fixed income, currencies, commodities, derivatives). Then, some investors differ by strategy (value, growth, global macro, event driven, long, short, long/short, market neutral, distressed debt). Some might use a combination of both.
E.g.: a macro trader might use technical analysis in the day to day while analyzing data releases from foreign countries to determine how their bonds will perform. So a combo of both fundamental and technical analysis.
Hope that helps.
No site has been able to replicate the New Mogul community and I don't believe it's the UI's fault entirely, though New Mogul actually did a good job sprucing up the default look. I believe the intense interest along with communal enthusiasm just doesn't exist in that industry under normal circumstances. And certainly not enough for a shared information / aggregation system to prosper.
Consider the nature of the industry. Knowledge is power. If you're not all in a sinking ship together, why would you give up your competitive edge?
innate habit of "consumption" rather than "contribution" may be difficult at first, but perhaps self-reinforcing if it gained a dedicated readership?
"The best analogy for traders ? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you."
http://blogmaverick.com/2010/05/09/what-business-is-wall-str...
Problem with finance aggregrators is filtering the high quality articles, so much of finance writing is subpar.
What made HN successful isn't the presentation, but the character of its members and its association with Ycombinator.
Whether wallstbeat succeeds is more a function of its ability to attract valuable commentary and users willing to share analysis in a public forum. Failing this, it's vulnerable to the same pump-n-dump trash you see on Yahoo! finance and other sites.
question: are the real smart investors (individual and other) out there willing to be part of a public forum? people have mentioned the need-to-keep-my-trading-edge-with-secrecy point, but the ego-value of being recognized in a community might also be powerful for this constituency.
Hackers like plain boring lists (like HN and reddit) We do a quick scan and determine what is interesting or not in a second.
Non-hackers don't like plain boring lists, they like visuals, pics of the day, planes crashing, latest hairdos, etc.
So unless you put a couple of graphs and stats about the dow plunging, S&P in blood red, etc that site is just, booooring.
banking analysts sit around all day and wait for their Directors/MDs to turn them work at 5pm. drawing attention away from "work" cuts into facetime. so something non-flashy might actually work.