Comment by hippofluff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hippofluff | Hacker News Reader

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Hi, thanks for sharing your perspective. While Stock Unlock is a great tool, I don't think it's meant for everyone. If you are a passive investor that is DCA'ing into an index, I don't think a tool like Stock Unlock would be for you.

Further/mathematically you're correct, statistically you will beat people that try to beat the market.

That being said, there's a lot of angles to this. For example, you can put x% of money into safe investments, but a lot of people do really nerd out on companies/understanding them (and will take smaller chunks of their money into more risky investments). For people like myself I can even use my capital to fund/invest in companies that are supporting causes I like (like green energy). We have found a lot of our users just enjoy learning, and it doesn't even mean they will invest.

I'll end this by highlighting that a lot of apps today are incentivized/have revenue structures which are built upon user trade frequency. That's bad. At Stock Unlock, we are incentivized to teach our users & we make money from the subscription fee for the platform. We don't care/would never push people to buy, well anything. They can take our opinionless/open research and data visualization tools and do with that what they want.

I'll end this by highlighting again, that your point makes sense and I fully respect/anticipate that we won't cater to everyone's needs today. Please keep us in mind if you ever get curious about how to analyze a single stock!

I wish you would just be honest and say you are trying to assist people in _gambling_.

Investing is the world I have grown to absolutely hate. Like, you can't know how much I hate that word. Just like all the crypto "investing".

It's all about people trying to get rich in something they have zero control over. And the only people who can even benefit from this gambling are people who already have enough capital for it to make any difference, so it just continues to help the already well off be even more well off, while the people without capital are left behind.

The world would be infinitely better off without the services you are trying to provide.

> I wish you would just be honest and say you are trying to assist people in _gambling_

I have to apologize if we are putting off a message (that I'm not aware of*) that we assist with gambling. Long term investing is not meant to be gambling, and that's the entire point of our platform, to educate people/having them think that stocks aren't just lottery tickets you buy when someone at the bar says "it's going to the moon"

I understand this space in general has trust issues, I understand that a lot of people are burned/on their heels for this space, I get it, that's why we are here building this. On our side we never promise returns, or sell this as a tool that will make you rich, we advertise this as a way for people to gain fair access to market data with tools the pros use, embedded with education that makes it accessible for anyone to learn. We have no skin in the game for how people invest/trade but hope to influence less "gambly" decisions through our platform.

> The world would be infinitely better off without the services you are trying to provide.

I am getting a sense that you will be saying this blindly to any app you see that comes around, and I don't blame you, it's an unfair world out there with a lot of shady people trying to make a quick buck. If you look at companies core fundamentals, investing is not gambling. Investing is understanding a business and industry and forecasting when there's a margin of safety of that companies future growth, relative to it's current trading price and reported financials/leadership/company earnings communications/all that (it's not simple and takes time to learn! We make that process easier.). It's an entire world. If you ever change your mindset here to be more open minded that not everyone is out to get you, I'm sure Stock Unlock will show that we are different. If you have more constructive feedback I'd love to continue this conversation, if not I appreciate your time and comments here.

>Investing is understanding a business and industry and forecasting when there's a margin of safety of that companies future growth, relative to it's current trading price and reported financials/leadership/company earnings communications/all

That's giving me the biggest eyeroll ever. You can throw all the academic wording out there you want. I've been through all that, I know precisely what you mean. And it's nearly all bs.

>Long term investing is not meant to be gambling, and that's the entire point of our platform, to educate people/having them think that stocks aren't just lottery tickets you buy when someone at the bar says "it's going to the moon"

Fair enough. However, yes, it is gambling. You don't control anything about the company you are 'investing' in. You can do all the research you want, you can think you know whatever. But you have no control over idiosyncratic events.

Also, why are you even suggesting people 'invest'? Just so they can "make more money" by putting money into something they can never fully understand or have control over?

I probably wasn't clear the first time around- and that was kind of intentional. Yes I am completely against the world of "investing" because it's just people trying to make money. That's literally it. So let's call it what it is- gambling- and stop pretending like investing is a "good thing".

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