Show HN: One thousand in – I've built an IPO “FOMO” web app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: One thousand in – I've built an IPO “FOMO” web app

onethousand.in

81 pointssircon52 comments

People tend to remember the good outcomes. I'm not sure that "Never miss an IPO again and invest in companies from the start" is good advice.

They should have a big banner explain survivorship bias.

The site is a marketing tool for their IPO notification newsletter so presumably that would not be in their interests

And this is for Groupon: https://onethousand.in/GRPN

this one was quite the experience: https://onethousand.in/APRN

Maybe there should be a way to see what the current value would be if you'd invested $1000, divided equally among all IPOs in a given year (or other time period). Anyone care to build it?

And I made it open source if you want to take a look: https://github.com/sircon/onethousand

I used Yahoo Finance hidden API for all stock related stuff, Next.js + Vercel and a lot of Tailwind CSS love!

Hit me if you have any questions or feedback!

Cool stuff, thanks for sharing :)

More of a question about the technology rather than the product itself: Considering that you're a single developer and the codebase is very small (~1000 LoC of source code), why did you go with TypeScript here rather than just JavaScript?

It's just easier and faster for me, as I've been working full mode with TS for the last 3 or 4 years, so it's hard/weird to go back to just javascript. Those strong types are a life saver!

I have two suggestions:

1. You have this grid with a few big company names on the right. When you click, it shows you a number and some other information. I feel like, when you click again, it should take you back to that grid, or you could have an "X" in the top-right corner to close that information and get back to the grid (home page). Right now you have to use the back browser button, which feels awkward.

2. To maximize the FOMO, you should show a graph of the stock price over time, which of course would look exponential. You can download that information in CSV format from yahoo finance. You probably don't need it to be updated everyday. You will need to adjust for stock splits.

Uh... The back button IS the natural way to do it. I commend the OP for making the back button actually work how it's suppsoed to!

I'm not saying the back button shouldn't work. I'm saying it would be nice to have a way to do it from the webapp's UI as well.

Agreed. At this point people have been conditioned to expect the back button to lose their place or take them off the domain. So it's important to have a way in the webapp's UI even if you have the back button behaving properly.

Thanks! Number 2 takes a bit more time, but I'll implement it when I have time as it is a great idea. And I just implemented point 1 now, hope this helps!

Is it possible to access prior issues from the newsletter?

Here https://buttondown.email/ipobrief/archive

Interesting. I like the look and feel of the site.

Two bits of critical feedback.

One, if you can get it you should use the day 1 VWAP -- what you would have most likely paid had you actually bought on the open market.

Two, if you invest 1000 in something and it's now worth 1200, you haven't made $1200, you've made $200. You use the $1200 value in your examples (although the percentage gain is correct).

Re: two

Especially when it loses money. See https://onethousand.in/GRPN

Assuming that this tool is not adjusting for inflation, the value of the initial investments vary considerably in spite of being anchored to $1,000.

For example, comparing investing $1,000 in Apple's IPO in 1980 to investing $1000 in Facebook's IPO in 2012, the investment in Apple is almost triple the investment in Facebook: $1,000 in 1980 is $2,786 in 2012.

How would you do it differently? Would you adjust for inflation or look for a different indicator like a rate of return over time or compare to an index fund over the same time?

IRR is a common way of evaluating returns.

Each company you select shows you how many today's-dollars you'd have today given the "same" initial investment. Given that, it seems to me it would make the most sense for the initial investments to be the same value, instead of the same number.

In this application, it would make more sense for each initial investment to have the same value instead of the same number, i.e. having an initial investment of however many dollars would be equivalent to $1000 2021-dollars.

It would be more interesting to know the percent of IPOs that survive for at least 10 years and give you a high return-on-investment. In other words is it a viable strategy to invest something like $1000 in IPOs, wait 5-10 years, and make a profit.

Taking a look at the giants of today.

https://onethousand.in/AMZN

https://onethousand.in/GOOG

https://onethousand.in/NFLX

https://onethousand.in/MSFT

https://onethousand.in/AAPL

A pretty clear pattern emerges, the good investments in tech are the ones which are dominant in their respective industries - and able to grow the market rather than fighting for market share. Unfortunately newer patterns in private financing may not allow retail investors to participate in this growth. Compare the above results to FB

https://onethousand.in/FB

Although if FB repeats its last 8 years performance over the next 8 years it will net 36x gains since IPO over 16 years... and be a 4.5 trillion dollar corporation.

Even the old guard of Intel, Cisco and others do well. Owning cisco since 1990 nets 832x growth, owning juniper since 1999 nets 1.4x.

You could argue there was substantially more risk with some of those first five IPOs.

Amazon looks nothing like it did in 1997. This was pre-AWS, pre-Prime, pre-just about everything.

Apple survived a point in the late-90's/early 2000's where they could have easily gone belly-up.

Netflix was only delivering DVD's by mail.

I'm not familiar enough with the environment when Microsoft went public.

Google was a solid company that dominated search at the time. They've obviously grown a ton since but their returns aren't remotely close to what Amazon, Netflix, Apple, or Microsoft would bring.

Fantastic idea, visually exceptionally well done. Thanks for posting this. It would be really cool to have a Top 10 of the best and the worst investments (and perhaps a way to hide stocks that have been delisted/ceased in those top ten). I've tried a few stocks, but the ones you've listed may give a bit of a skewed idea of just how well IPO investments can pan out. Other than that, nothing to add, love it.

Huh... I was thinking about investing exactly 1000$ in Tesla in 2010. Two things stopped me: my skepticism when it comes to stocks and I somehow didn't want to invest 1/3 of what I had at the time, though the path ahead of me was pretty solid. Looking at this, my only thought at the moment is 1 word, four letters, starts with "f". Take a guess :D

No intelligent person would have held until now so there's nothing to regret

It sounds counterintuitive since obviously you must be a genius if you foresaw the current valuation and held right?

But there is no way anyone would have reasonably predicted Tesla being worth 4,000 a share by 2021 no matter how sure you were Tesla was going to obsolete every other carmaker.

The only way you could have held this long was a naive strategy of holding indefinitely refusing to take profits no matter how volatile things got because you see Musk as the messiah or something...

Which is a pretty foolish trading strategy to apply to 1/3rd of your holdings in a single ticker...

Interesting site! I have a question for the native speakers here. The twitter handle is @IPObrief. I also wanted to call my site something with "brief" but then my American friends told me briefs are underwear... I guess it's different in the UK?

That's one meaning of 'briefs', yes. And I suppose if someone has never had to deal with information professionally, that might be their only exposure to the word.

But that is not all it means.

Briefs with an S are a type of underwear. A brief is a statement, where as something being brief means it lasts only a short time.

Brief is one of those words that is very overloaded, and which depends on context.

Hmm, you're also giving a raw % gain when some were IPOs a long time ago and some were more recent. A CAGR/annualized gain compound gain would give a more accurate comparison.

Also, what about dividends - they are reinvested?

you should add to the home page a chart showing the top 50

You could include other major events, such as stock splits or even product launches, that were followed by explosive growth.

Can anyone beat MSFT with their $2.7M? I tried WMT (2.27M) and ADBE ($2.48M) but couldn't find one to beat Microsoft.

Don't think so, since it's been around for so long. I suppose you could if you compared annualized returns

The data seems to be limited to IPOs after 1962, as stocks like IBM and XOM aren't showing their actual total returns.

I noticed that as I had tried both of those tickers

Home Depot (HD) has a result of $9.2M...which seems off to me.

Altria (MO) returned nearly 12Mil since 62 (and even more since its IPO date) https://onethousand.in/MO

Home Depot (HD) nearly 10Mil https://onethousand.in/HD

So we can't see the old ones?

You can use the search bar to find other stocks

I want to see the previous issues of the newsletter.

my bad, here is the archive: https://buttondown.email/ipobrief/archive

Thanks!

"How much would I have today if I invested $1 000 in a IPO?"

Should be:

"How much would I have today if I had invested $1 000 in an IPO?"

Actually, it should be:

“"How much would I have today if I had invested $1 000 in an IPO?" since it is addressing a past counterfactual, not a current option.

"Invested" is the correct past tense of invest. Its also the correct future tense! English is fun.

Sure, my correction was "a" to "an", I updated the "had" based on another response! It was supposed to be a helpful comment, but I don't think it's helped.

Nice job. Cool idea.

Thanks!

Do this for SPACs.

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