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View Full Version : Built a simple service for stock portfolio management - would love feedback!



DaveLandry
06-14-2014,
Hey guys,

I'll keep this concise. We've spent a few months building and tweaking a service called PennyWhale (http://pennywhale.com) which is a passive service that assists with stock portfolio management. This isn't meant to be a self-promotion; I am looking for feedback and advice for future strategy. I have four questions:

1) Our central feature is an alert system which is constantly monitoring multiple financial news sites and can detect when a story starts "trending". If the story is about a stock in your portfolio, we'll alert you of the article through text message. The idea is to catch only stories that start trending across a threshold of sites so that we send you news that will actually affect the stock price and avoid hitting you with constant spam. Is this something you guys would find useful? To answer a few inevitable questions, this is different from SeekingAlpha for two reasons. One, SeekingAlpha has proprietary news written by their own content creators, so it's possible they report something later. Two, we are constantly polling multiple large scale sites, so we detect stories that start trending in a few seconds after it happens. This system is new and we're working everyday to improve it.

2) The other feature we put front and center right now is the alerts dashboard. Whenever we sent you a notification, we'll capture the price of the stock before and the biggest change in price up to 6 hours after (subject to change). That way, we can show exactly how much a piece of news affected your price. Once you (the user) and we gather enough data we can make informed decisions in the future on how much a type of news piece might affect the stock price. Do you think this is useful for investors to see?

3) A future feature we would like to build out is an automation tool for earnings reports. When a report is set to be released, we'd analyze the estimated earnings and reference historical data to tell you if the stock price will increase or decrease and by an estimation of how much (a little or a lot based on surprise %). Is this automation worth building? Would it make life easier for investors?

Our target market is fundamental investors who don't do it for a living and don't have the time to manually do all of this basic research. Last question: Is this something you would pay $9 a month for? If not, $5?

Thanks for any feedback you guys leave, appreciate the help.