Hey guys, I was there for the demo yesterday. I wanted to talk to you but I had to leave early due to a prior commitment. I hope you'll take the comments below as constructive criticism.
To better prepare for my comments, let me start with a few facts most investors don't know. (For the impatient, there's a TL;DR at the end).
1) The stock market is not infinitely resilient; the price of a security does respond to investors' actions, as per supply-demand.
2) The price of a stock is not a random, meaningless number that keeps going up and down in funny ways; it actually measures the market price of the company (aka 'market cap', which is roughly equal to the number of shares times the share price).
3) The market price of a company is a very, very important barometer for both the company and the overall economy; to name a few, decisions for M&A (mergers and acquisitions) by other companies are based on such numbers, as are lending and investment decisions by banks.
4) For a lot of companies, the vast majority of their shares are traded/held by individual investors like you and me (as opposed to institutional investors, like pension funds, college endowments, mutual funds, etc); for the curious, you can check out the quantity 'institutional ownership' percentage of a company using your favorite stock quote tool (e.g. Google Finance).
An important corollary of the above facts is that, collectively, individual investors like you and me have an enormous power in driving up and down the market prices of public companies. Consequently, if most investors base their buy/sell decisions on criteria other than company valuation, it is likely that their actions will be doing a serious disservice to the market as whole: market prices of companies will no longer reflect the company's value (see below), and will instead reflect whatever is it that investors based their decisions on (such as the phases of the moon, whether the company is being hyped up in the media, amazing little charts that try to predict what the market will do next, etc).
Somehow we've got to an unfortunate place where many companies and publications incentivize investors to think in terms of "what will the market do", "let's ride this climbing wave", "don't be the last sucker to leave this stock", etc, instead of asking the simple question "is this company over- or under-priced?". This is bad for the market, bad for the economy, and consequently bad for investors.
I hope these words will help you reconsider the direction you're heading with StockYoyo. We need tools that empower investors to make more educated decisions, and not more "go-with-the-flow" services.
Check out Trefis.com for a step in the right direction. (DISCLAIMER: I am not by any means affiliated with them).
May I recommend the following literature:
- Irrational Exuberance, by Robert Shiller
(For a gentle introduction on how collective misguided investment can lead to bad things)
- Value Investing, by Bruce Greenwald et al
(For a gentle introduction to value investing)
- Security Analysis, by Graham and Dodd
(To learn from the masters, using good old English from the 30s)
TL;DR: Services that treat the stock market as a gambling machine ("will it go up??") are doing harm to the market and the economy. Stock prices have a purpose and a meaning, and the market is suffering from the ill-advised actions of investors, who are victims of services that incentivize trades based on things other than company valuation, such as silly technical indicators, or popular consensus on whether a stock is going up or down.