Show HN: My cofounder and I created a social platform for investment ideas

Could you recommend me other good subreddits for a graham / fisher / warren / charlie style of valuing securities and investment?

I find https://refactoringui.com/ has some digest-able design stuff for us developers. I'm not affiliated with them, but I've been the same boat with product design.

For me the key was understanding what roles spacing, color, and font-weight play in building a hierarchy.

Edit: spelling.

Here's my reasoning: if someone just invented a new icon (created it from scratch and gave it a meaning), they should be aware that majority of their users will not understand the meaning of the icon, at least not at first.

Historical icons, such as a floppy disk or a cogwheel, are fair game. Creating new icons is dangerous territory, especially if you are hoping for your users to focus on the content, rather than getting familiar with your UI.

What do you think the following two icons (taken from utradea example) represent:

* A lightbulb with a dollar sign

* A deck of cards

Having to hover (which may or may not work on mobile), and actually clicking the icons and observing what happens, is not a good recipe for good UX. To read more about actual authority on UX, I recommend reading about Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles[1] for interaction design.

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/

I'm continually triggered by this horrible pattern that frustrates me and wastes my time.

In turn, I think it is arrogant of UI designers to assume that everybody will automatically understand what their icons mean, and that it's worth my time to repeatedly hover over them to get to things they should want me to find.

Not too long ago one of the mods created a fake account and posted fake Tesla gains in attempt to manipulate the market as well as monetize the sub for a scam company.

More recently some mods tried to monetize the whole sub with movie deals and other media venues. The reddit administrators ended up nuking a lot of mods include one who was doing actual moderation and was good for the community of the sub. (The one mod was later reinstated by Reddit)

Separate from all the mod issues is the large amount of astroturfing that went on. All too often tons of newly created accounts were posting trying to create hype around some stocks (suspiciously Chinese owned companies).

Equating posts (news) with a change in price is not an investment idea. Most of the time, the news is counter to the way the stock moves in the short term. I think you need to find a way to differentiate yourself. The UI is nice and all the info available is great however I think you need a something to provide to your end user with respect to engagement/community, but news stories die so fast it's hard to create a conversation around that.

Not to mention: hedge funds have beat the market very consistently for decades (before fees), starting a new job is often a higher roi, real estate has a higher sharpe ratio over the last 100 years, private equity has a higher return before fees for decades, venture capital has beat the market consistently, starting a business frequently has a higher or even much higher roi, all these especially in absolute terms (nobody rich before 50 got that way from index fund returns).

To say “the index beats the active traders”, or that active traders lose everytime, or that it’s impossible to beat the market is just 1. Not relevant because it’s a vanity metric on its face, 2. Not strictly correct. It’s just said by people who want to convince themselves that the dominant strategy in investing also happens to be the easiest one for them. Index funds are about average returns - and thats ok! That’s probably best for any investor not looking to put in serious time or effort, but it’s certainly not the best strategy for maximizing returns (in fact, there are literally infinite strategies that have consistently beat the market on average for the entire duration of the exchange that don’t have foresight or overfit). The index itself is arbitrary: rank order the public equities by revenue, then select the top 500 and weight them by market cap. For the total market: you still chop off the companies that aren’t public arbitrarily, you still weight by market cap (why not volume? Why not weighted trade volume which correlated better with prices?).

As a parting note on this rant: the efficient market hypothesis is about determining fair value is an open system with minimal barriers and motivated rational players playing by the same rules with instantaneous info propagation. Do we all play by the same rules? Do we all have the same barriers? Are we all rational players? Is info propagated instantly? Are these values true enough? The market is efficient - except when it isn’t. Plenty of people succeed in business when the efficient market should have meant there was no opportunity for them, plenty get rich on trades when the efficient market says that trade shouldn’t exist. It’s paradoxical that the market can be perfectly efficient and those could be true, because even tiny risk-free profits should be consistently and equally arbitraged out of existence immediately. That just doesn’t describe our world.

Recommended reading: More Money Than God.

It allows you to automatically copy trades done by the others. So instead of trading $10k yourself, you automatically mirror the trades done by an experienced trader.

The platform allows you to find and follow many top-performing traders (eg. that usually obtain 20%-50% trading profit during a year). So you just "follow" them and you can forget about it. Personally I'm at 50% profit by following only one guy for about 2 years.