Turning my obsession in the stock market into a side project | Hacker News Reader

Turning my obsession in the stock market into a side project

eduardosasso.co

382 pointsblakbelt78106 comments

The number one issue I have with a lot of finance newsletters is the lack of historical context so I think it's extremely valuable you featured historical data right next to the daily data to give context on how small daily moves actually are (minus this latest bout of volatility). I think that has a lot of overlooked behavioral value, why not also feature 20 & 30y data, considering this is the time series many young investors will need to consider for retirement?

I find myself often googling to check S&P futures so this email would remove that step for me. Might also be cool if the email had other features like Tax Loss Harvest notifications when an ETF you're watching drops more than X%.

I did some research on the finance newsletter space myself a while back, here's some of my favorites I ran across:

• https://capitalminded.com (more long term index fund focused)

• https://verdadcap.com (more nerdy quant/value stuff)

• Matt Levine's Money Stuff (couldn't find the sign up link but it's always great)

• https://www.finimize.com (general news)

• https://www.epsilontheory.com (somewhat annoying but also interesting at times)

• https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives (value/quant stuff from a billionaire hedge fund manager)

Tried Robinhood Snacks but can't get over the feeling it's written by low paid interns and doesn't offer any actual insight, just condensed mainstream narratives.

I like to see the historical data so I can put the numbers in perspective, Yahoo Finance doesn't provide 20, 30y time frame that's the main reason. Thanks for the list I'll check them out.

You should have a look at this nice and free stock market API. Also well documented.

https://financialmodelingprep.com/

Whoa! I love it, thank you for sharing this. It seems like it's a free API for personal use with some rate limitations.

Ah yea, this was recently on HN through some other project [1]. Financialmodelingpre.com is amazing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848779#22849272

There's also Alphavantage: https://www.alphavantage.co/documentation/

It has extensive technical indicators which can be handy.

Whoa, this is an incredible find! Getting historical testing data for anything other than the stock market is an absolute nightmare. Thanks for this!

Cool. I didn’t know about this one. Definitely looking into it.

Awesome project, I am sure it will help me lose lots of money.

Same. Thank you.

Github link for anyone interested in checking the code https://github.com/eduardosasso/bullish

Why does it say "Buy High, Sell Low" instead of "Buy Low, Sell High?" What it says leads to losing a lot of money...

That's just for fun. I guess I've been hanging out too much at r/wallstreetbets

I really like the tag line, especially in combination with the name of the service.

I don't think you have to hang out on r/wsb to have an ounce of irony about wallstreet in you.

You might consider the impact it has on potential customers. I can see how it's an in joke for r/wsb, but unless your target audience is only that community, it raises a red flag.

Lighten up, the effect of this quote is probably as effective as Code of Conduct

Nice, simple execution. I have a similar setup with Atom's daily premarket emails. One piece of feedback. Excluding the futures section, the centered text of the various timespans within the Performance section is harder to scan than left-aligned text or a 2x4 table would be.

Thanks. Yeah I agree I was just trying to come up with something decent given my limited design skills.

Nice simple idea. It would be cool to see today's current email on the sign up page so people get idea of what to expect the next day in their inbox.

Yeah, I wanted to do that but I was expecting Sendgrid to provide that which they don't so I need to build something. It's on my TODO list. Thanks for the feedback.

wow very good idea! but better to see the next week email, to get an idea of what to expect the next week in the market

Nice work mate! It's exciting turning your side projects into reality. Hopefully there will be thousands of subscribers in a year and you could make some good money out of it.

p.s. you can replace Google's captcha with hCaptcha ;) https://dev.to/stanbright/cloudflare-replaced-recaptcha-with...

Thank you! Yes it is, I really enjoy trying to solve my own problems. SendGrid provides that signup form and it’s very limited, probably I’ll need to have a custom one at some point.

I appreciate the effort, especially the free tier only approach, but... my framework for data collection and reporting: what behavior, if any, do I expect to happen as a result of data? If the answer is none, there is no point in the email / report / pagerduty alert.

> The idea is for the mailing list to go out every weekday before the market opens so you can be informed enough to decide if it’s worth paying close attention to the market on any given day and make some moves.

Looks like the behaviors this information is intended to induce is:

1. Gather more data more frequently (reload WSJ / Y! finance? front page?) 2. Make more trades ("Buy High, Sell Low")

If SP500 futures moving but markets are closed, what action could you possibly undertake profitably? Market open is a special auction you can't really arbitrage like that, so you'd be hoping for intraday moves? Are these the behaviors you _want_ to be inducing? Should retail investors be making trades during times of high volatility?

I suspect no; retail investors will buy into rallies and sell into slumps, exactly the behavior Bullish's tagline mocks.

The point is for average investors not day traders to get an uncluttered view of the market before it opens so they can have an idea if a possible big swing is happening on any given day. I find it useful in my use case since email is the first thing I check in the morning.

but timing the market is not of investors interest so this seems conflicting

Okay, you read the email and think it says 'maybe a big swing'. what do you do?

Then it's up to you. You can buy the dip, sell whatever.

To your point, think the email should at least have major technical indicators / events. e.g. S&P fell below 50 MDA, withing friday, etc.

Damn, guess I should have written a blog post. Yesterday I launched the MVP of my stock news site http://stockqua.com with (eventual) goal to help people build up qualitative & quantitative analysis of stocks & industries to make better investing decisions.

You should. I've been hashing out my ideas in writing lately and it has been helping me a lot.

Do you adjust returns for dividends?

That’s always been a bugaboo of mine as it makes a big difference over decade+ time frames.

Yeah, I'm tracking adjusted closing points.

This was a great read, really enjoy the branding, the feel, the minimalism in the design etc. From a product perspective, I have a hard time seeing what value this adds to your average trader, for me this wouldnt help influence any decision making. For example every morning I listen to Bloomberg's "Five things to start your day", this is largely actionable information that adds color and context to movement in the markets. I would think if you can hone into say sector-specific emails, like technology etc, to help zoom in on what sectors as a whole, say tech, are looking like this week versus historical, potential reports driving these changes etc, you may get a larger subscriber base. ps: the tagline under Bullish logo at the bottom is backwards. Says buy high sell low.

Thank you. It's a simple idea that scratches an itch, I like your idea about sector-specific info that might be something to look into to. The tagline is correct it's just for fun!

Ahh, I was thinking certainly this perfectionist didnt reverse these words on accident! Also, that shed build, pretty nice, the Al Merick behind the original garage desk, also nice. I lived in SD for a while, miss it but damn that water is cold compared to the east coast.

thank you!

> Living the "quarantined" life

> It needs to be something I can finish in a week tops

> Ship it

Love the simple project idea & execution. I'm working on my own side-project during this isolation period, and your blog post is helping to inspire and motivate.

Awesome. Keep at it!

Very cool! I signed up. I was wondering if you did some research before picking sendgrid. I see their free tier has a limit of 100 emails a day after the first month. Their 100K/month is $15/month which is not bad I guess.

Yeah, I've done some research and decided to go with Sendgrid because they are the only ones that offer API in their free tier. Their free marketing campaign plan offers 2k contacts + 6k emails month which should be plenty to start.

Thanks! BTW, no email confirmation after signing up. Not a big deal but wanted to let you know. I expected email verification.

Update: $15/month is good for up to 50K emails. Not 100K as I initially said.

This looks cool. However, am I the only one that first saw Bullish▲ and thought it was really Bullshi▲, in other words a slightly censored Bullshit? Especially if reading the motto "Buy high sell low" quickly all at once.

Not sure if you're being downvoted for vulgarity, but I think your comment is serious and constructive feedback. (I misread it the same way as well.)

"Typoglycemia" is a real (if poorly understood and researched) human phenomenon, and it's definitely at play here: https://observer.com/2017/03/chunking-typoglycemia-brain-con...

"Buy high, sell low"... isn't that the OPPOSITE of what an investor wants to do?

LOL. That's just me making fun out of it.

It's a really bald joke, like naming your restaurant "Tastes Bad Pizza". People are just like huh?

I thought i was the only. My brain keeps auto-completing bullish to bullshit.

> Get informed and decide if it’s time to Buy High and Sell Low

Love that tongue-in-cheek accent.

Some people get it. Thank you.

I’m curious why you used Yahoo finance instead of Alpha Vantage?

Alpha Vantage API showed inaccurate results from time to time and their customer support is nonexistent.

I've noticed the same thing with Alpha Vantage, but I switched to Alpha Vantage because Yahoo turned off their public API. It's the Yahoo API available again now?

They have an undocumented one that you can check in the network tab on your browser. this is how the API looks like https://query1.finance.yahoo.com/v8/finance/chart/%5EGSPC?in...

We've had the paid plan with "premium" support. Inexistent and borderline rude. We just moved to IEX cloud for data (proper documentation, sandbox, etc).

I'm using it in a project with the yfinance python module.

Neat project.

For something more detailed with top headlines, big movers, earnings highlights, etc. I really recommend the "Wall Street Breakfast" newsletter from seekingalpha.com.

In my experience from developing Backtest (https://backtest.curvo.eu), a backtesting tool for EU index investors, the hardest part has been finding good and reliable data that goes as far back in time as possible.

I only focus on index data so it's a bit easier but it's still hard. Lots of scraping, downloading and parsing CSVs, Excel sheets, some puppeteer magic...

Some sources that I use:

- MSCI data (https://www.msci.com/end-of-day-data-search)

- Financial Times website (e.g. https://markets.ft.com/data/indices/tearsheet/summary?s=SP5M...)

- Investing.com (e.g. https://www.investing.com/indices/us-spx-500)

- STOXX

- DAX

- FTSE for FTSE stock indexes (https://research.ftserussell.com/analytics/indexviewer/chart...)

- Yieldbook.com for FTSE bond indxes (https://www.yieldbook.com/m/home/index.shtml) - ICE website for ICE bond indexes

- ...

I'm constantly adding new indexes and sources (see https://backtest.curvo.eu/updates) but it's tough!

Some examples of what Backtest does:

- MSCI World: https://backtest.curvo.eu/portfolio/NoIgsgygwgkgBAdQPYCcA2AT...

- My portfolio: https://backtest.curvo.eu/portfolio/NoIgmg9gTghgdgcgM4AIAK0A...

If the author has any questions, just reach out to me! Happy to share my experiences.

Yeah, I'm trying to stay away from scrapping, parsing, and that whole mess. Right now I'm relying on Yahoo Finance undocumented API and possibly IEX Cloud in the future.

https://www.quandl.com/ has nice and clean datasets.

Just signed up and looking forward to seeing how this evolves!

We recently launched an investing newsletter at https://topstonks.com (just got our first paying customer yesterday), which tracks the social sentiment angle of a few weird places on the internet - WallstreetBets and 4chan.

We're definitely still learning the ropes, but Let me know if you ever want to talk shop!

I've already subscribed to your project, I like your idea quite a bit. I have some other plans in the pipeline lets see how this one goes first.

looks cool, very similar to: https://snacks.robinhood.com/

You should try out the Investopedia newsletter. https://link.investopedia.com/forward/5d121631cac67b640d47dc...

I like it a lot more than The Morning Brew.

The Morning Brew's jokes get too obscure and make it hard to read.

Caleb does a much better job than the Brew IMO.

The https://themarketear.com/ newsletter is pretty good

Appreciate the appreciation for a well crafted email. Nowadays it feels like emails are filled with mindless drivel as a part of some drip campaign or retention strategy optimizing for a high open rate rather than delight.

Hopefully things change, but over the years, I've become allergic to subscribing to anything by email – I'd rather go to a website when I want to

I partially agree, there are good/informative emails out there. I for one subscribe to many and unsubscribe to tons all the time and my inbox is tidy, probably because I'm a little OCD

Just recently was also thinking about building some small tool to monitor my trades too. And few days ago start looking at the same yahoo finance library hah.

Anyway, after reading this, just went ahead and implemented my thing too.

In my case I just need to monitor a specific instrument, a few lines of code were enough after figuring out how to use the underlying libraries.

Great. Yahoo Finance is pretty good and there's https://www.iexcloud.io if you need something more robust.

Great idea! I would probably use this more if you looked at the futures performance from yesterday's market close to this morning, in addition to past 1 day. The reason why is that I don't care as much about futures specifically, as I care about what they could predict for the coming market open.

Thank you. Right, that's something to think about.

Just an FYI, the Hey.com hyperlink in the post seems to be a relative path, just slapping it onto the end of the post route. All of the others work fine, it looks like you just need to add an `http(s)://` on the front and you'll be good.

Fixed. Thank you.

For finance API I've used https://iexcloud.io/docs/api/ which is free/cheap.

Yep their API is solid.

Pre market isn't just for futures like the blog post says. Any security that has a trading session before the regular session trades "pre market"

Nice. I need a source API for short interest... ideas?

From all the API's I've looked at IEX Cloud seems the most comprehensive with a generous free tier https://www.iexcloud.io

You can get access to some of IEX's data for free with higher limits than IEX's free tier by opening an account with Alpaca. That gives you access to polygon.io as well, which doesn't limit API requests (Your API ID is used as the auth token for the polygon.io API).

The thing with Alpaca and Polygon I think is that their most affordable plans are only for personal use I believe.

That looks really good even on paid plans. Anyone using? Reliable, accurate.. .?

Came here to say this. It's great. I use it for my portfolio tracker - https://stockdaddy.io/ - it's quite powerful in terms of breadth of APIs and data available.

Thanks - nice work with stockdaddy, just signed up. Can you configure the markets tab at the top (add in futures, UST 5yr for example)?

It's configurable - https://stockdaddy.io/dashboard/edit/

IEX is pretty good with the markets they give access to, so you should be able to find most symbols (or comparable) you're looking to track.

Been using this for a few days.

Would be nice to make use of the subject line more so I might not even have to open to email (yes more minimalist!)

e.g

DJ +0.22% | S&P +1.2% | ...

I'm getting an error when trying to subscribe: "Error submitting the request. Please try again later."

send me a dm at blakbelt78 at Gmail and I can help you out.

Great work!

Building something end-to-end is a valuable experience, even if the end result might appear outwardly "simple".

Yep, it takes commitment even with the simplest idea.

We build something similar(UI is not polished) for the India's BSE Stock Market.

It sends buy/sell emails to users every morning(see below for links to screenshots)

Is there a need for something like in the US/elsewhere ?

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pc2eu4dQJh4b6UegsVmR...

Saves you $2000 a month rent on a Bloomberg terminal. Though I think they have additional functionallity.

Super cool. Thanks for doing this

Thank you. The daily email is missing a closing quote in the "Buy high sell low

Nice! But why must i enable javascript just to signup for your newsletter?

It's probably something with Sendgrid, the signup form is provided by them, I'll probably need to write a custom one myself at some point.

I have a personal setup that does something similar to this using Huginn.

I for one, went ahead and signed up!

Beautiful project, I like this idea.

Thank you! Trying it out to see if it's something useful to more people. I have a couple of ideas that I would like to add in the future.

buy high sell low? shouldn't it be the opposite?

That was just to make fun

He trades Puts...ha

Show HN is missing, title is a click-baity, does not summarize the idea.

After reading the article, the title seems pretty accurate.

OP did a Show HN a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867313

This article seemed to be a deep dive into how the project came to be.

Yep. That was the plan.

"Turning my obsession in the stock market into a side project" --- seems like a pretty accurate summary to me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com