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Comment by rustyconover | Hacker News Reader

Are there really enough other places besides Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool's CAPS and StockTwits that publish people's recommendations in such volume that the number of recommendations would be large enough to be valuable outside of these already large established communities?

Or is this whole site's effort merely a feature that StockTwits and the other sites may add later on?

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The platforms you mentioned don't track how well their users' stock recommendations perform. We want to change that and give you more insights about people's stock recommendations.

I'm not familiar with the others, but Motley Fool's CAPS certainly does... I.e. http://caps.fool.com/player/gibybo.aspx shows accuracy, score (this is % return after subtracting the index), average score (same thing, but per recommendation), plot of the score over time, and the performance of every recommendation.

I actually constructed some simple trading algorithms based on the CAPS data and back-tested them. I didn't find anything to exploit... didn't put that much work into it, but did enough to convince myself that following "nobodies" was probably not worth the effort. I moved on to trying to analyze professionals. Finding this to be mostly noise as well, however some of the outliers appear good enough that maybe their performance is not chance alone. It's difficult to analyze, see my other comment.

Just browse through the Motley Fool website, there are similarities for sure. Then I came across this, http://caps.fool.com/player/bbmaven.aspx. This person has a rating of 100, and for a period there, each of his recommendations have consistently made over 500%. I don't know how it is ranked, and I don't think it is correct either.

But it definitely felt weird on how they score each recommendations.

just pointing out the starting day of those 500% returns were in financial crisis period.

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