My co-founder and I came up with the idea for Utradea about a year ago when we realized that we loved discussing our investment/stock ideas and process. This expanded within our friend group, at least to people who were interested in the stock market.
We thought it would be great to have a platform where we could have social interactions and combine it with core investment information/data. We didn’t like having to use multiple websites to connect all the pieces of information needed to make investment decisions. There are some sites out there that focus on providing investment information (Seeking Alpha), and other that focus more on the social interaction of investing (StockTwits).
Utradea is a social platform for investment ideas and insights. It is built around the concept that people enjoy sharing and discussing investment ideas. We built the usual social media functions (comments, chat, like a post, etc.) and included important investment data, charts, and a portfolio to help you track your investments.
Following up on the lightmode request. It's difficult to switch from income statement to cashflow or balance sheet because the menu is dark text on dark background. Additionally, you may want to add some spacing between % return and current price in the top leaders section to improve visuals for stocks with prices > $1,000.
Thanks for checking it out - we are using React. We made the design decision to go with Dark Mode off the bat. I see where you are coming from, we have had a few people mention that.
Cool idea. I will continue to check in to see your progress.
One note: the back arrow in the upper left is strange. Usually that’s where I find the menu. My browser already has plenty of ways to go back, so that element on your site seems confusing and unnecessary.
Yeah that's a good point, we did want to make it easy for people to go back - might be a bit redundant. We are launching an app soon which will be better than mobile site browsing.
SumZero is focused on Finance professionals. People who are working in the industry as their main job. WE are providing a platform for retail investors so we are targeting a different demographic.
I think you can develop this into something cool. However I think the current idea is a bit too similar to eToro and especially close to what Seeking Alpha is.
Thanks checking it out and the feedback. I would say eToro is more focused on copy trading as opposed to investment ideas/content and letting the user decide on what they are going to invest in. It is a bit similar to SeekingAlpha but we are focused on providing a better user experience and more focused on the community/social aspect. Regarding UX, would love to know if there is anything specific that you find overwhelming? This is important for me to understand and address.
Love the idea, and great effort put in! My initial impression is the same, overwhelming UX. There's a lot of information and there with very little visual hierarchy, it's hard to decide where to look first.
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.
This new wave of social investment platforms is really exciting. Stocktwits is just noise. I'm still shocked Twitter hasn't capitalized on cashtags by at least showing market data. I've recently been a big fan of Commonstock: https://commonstock.com/ it actually allows you to link your broker through Plaid and shows a leaderboard based on actual % gain on positions.
That said, I like you bringing more competition to the scene!
Twitter is crawling with scammers and pump-n-dumpers. It's impossible to use it for investment talk. You spend all your time blocking people, and ticker hashtags are abused by people selling their discord channel or other crap. Also, if you express negative emotion toward a stock, its investors go out of their way to dox you or harass you. I had to set my account to "protected" because of this.
Twitter missed out on a huge opportunity. They should have listened to investors who user their platform.
Interesting insight! Do you use Stocktwits? I see a lot of the same issues you describe with people abusing the cashtag & spamming their discord channels. Working on a new discussion site and I'd like to attract a community of people interested in stock/RE/investment etc.
Thanks for the shoutout! (I'm David the Commonstock founder). We're sprinting to finish some things to improve content algos and sorting before we grow so it's very cool to see you and @joadha call out the value of that and to stay disciplined focusing on quality over quantity. It's actually the exact reason I started building it as a side project in 2016: I wanted a community for signal instead of noise. The original pitch deck said, verbatim: "stocktwits/reddit/twitter but without all the noise/garbage".
Anyways, Thanks for the kind words!
(I'm all for more competition too, btw)
Yeah, I agree - Commonstock is a nice/minimalist platform and the ability to see and investor's portfolio is useful. The issue I see right now with commonstock is that they are heavily reliant on twitter for content - which can be mixed in term in terms of quality of investment information.
We do have broker integration on our dev roadmap because we see that as a key aspect of the overall investment process: decision, execution, tracking.
Please stop with the icon menu bars. It is 2021, and people are still doing this. Why. Just stop. Arrrgh.
Anyway, I absolutely love this idea! I signed up and am poking around now. I think I already like this more than Benzinga, Stocktwits, SeekingAlpha, you-name-it.
Text. You can scan it in an instant. It takes orders of magnitude longer to hover over each icon, wait for the tooltip, repeat for the more obscure ones.
Hello joadha, your first paragraph comes across as ranty and even arrogant (i.e. implying you are the authority on UX choices). You offer no valid support for your argument.
I perceived it that way as well, but I have to partly agree.
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.
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.
What is the plan to police/moderate the content to prevent scams? I think something like this works great when you know the people or at least believe that they have positive intent, but is hard to do right at scale (as WSB has experienced over the last few months).
yeah, that's a good point and something we've had on our minds since day 1. Our overall principle would be to let the community self-moderate to an extent. I believe most of the content that is spam or pump/dump would be flagged and filtered out. Some of our users have posted with their actual names and other have random usernames. I would be interested in seeing if the community reacts differently to an identifiable user vs an anonymous user.
Ignoring all the criticism regarding retail traders from outlets, there's a whole history of it being abused by mods for personal gain as well as the literal bots.
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).
Annecdotally, I've seen a few posts complaining about the quality of the posts in the sub as new users have flooded in. But I haven't been paying attention long enough to know how true it is.
Yes, right now we are leaning towards broker integration so users could stay with their existing brokerages. We want to make it easy for users to find an investment idea, validate it, then place a trade without leaving Utradea
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah we are trying to balance relevant information vs information overload I've found that on a lot of finance related sites there is too much info on one page.
Readit News
We thought it would be great to have a platform where we could have social interactions and combine it with core investment information/data. We didn’t like having to use multiple websites to connect all the pieces of information needed to make investment decisions. There are some sites out there that focus on providing investment information (Seeking Alpha), and other that focus more on the social interaction of investing (StockTwits).
Utradea is a social platform for investment ideas and insights. It is built around the concept that people enjoy sharing and discussing investment ideas. We built the usual social media functions (comments, chat, like a post, etc.) and included important investment data, charts, and a portfolio to help you track your investments.
Thanks for checking it out!
One feature request right away: Please offer a light mode. Dark mode is very tiresome for me to look at for longer periods of time.
One note: the back arrow in the upper left is strange. Usually that’s where I find the menu. My browser already has plenty of ways to go back, so that element on your site seems confusing and unnecessary.
For example, the Hardcore Berkshire Hathaway subreddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/brkb/
That's discussion and news, with dozens of value investor moderators and thousands of members. The guy who runs it is a legend (u/100_PERCENT_BRKB).
Reddit has great investment communities.
Could you recommend me other good subreddits for a graham / fisher / warren / charlie style of valuing securities and investment?
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Thanks!
The UX is also very, very, overwhelming.
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.
That said, I like you bringing more competition to the scene!
Twitter missed out on a huge opportunity. They should have listened to investors who user their platform.
Anyways, Thanks for the kind words! (I'm all for more competition too, btw)
We do have broker integration on our dev roadmap because we see that as a key aspect of the overall investment process: decision, execution, tracking.
Anyway, I absolutely love this idea! I signed up and am poking around now. I think I already like this more than Benzinga, Stocktwits, SeekingAlpha, you-name-it.
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).
Probably a good idea add `cursor: pointer` to your .feed-card class for the desktop folks.
A lot of wasted/unused screen real estate on my 1080 desktop as well.