Show HN: An investment forum where everyone manages a $1M imaginary portfolio (longtermboard.com)
Hi there! Made LongTermBoard.com as a Jr. FE engineer fresh from leaving the investment field but still in love with it.
Back then, I'd read articles on investment forums and wanted a quick way to determine if I should spend time reading the analysis. I wanted a quick way to determine if the author is a good investor.
LongTermBoard solves this by making it easy to view the competency of the author by seeing his investment performance of his profile. It's long-only for now, as the goal is to look for great long-term businesses to invest in.
It ain't perfect as its a controlled investment environment, but my hope is that over the longer term, the portfolio performance should be a good proxy.
It's super rough now, so hope it doesn't break.
26 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 74.0 ms ] threadPlus, authors can only start selling subs after 6 months, and no one would subscribe if their ideas are bad. I'm trying to build a skin-in-the-game kinda system as much as I can with the constraints that I have.
Might need to work on my copy since you didn't get it. :(
Could use some myself.
It sounds like the main purpose is to show how qualified people are to give advice but I'll note my first thought was how fun it would be to compete with friends.
Regarding the verification email, I’m using Firebase Auth now, will figure out the cause. Thanks for letting me know! Have you tried resending the verification email?
Some more question/feedback:
- Is it a design decision that the commissions are high? I got 13 cents per share (on a stock priced at 49.89). I would expect more like 0.35 cents per share. I suppose that is forcing more long-term holding...
- I already find my trading in this website is not representative of my positions held in my actual portfolio. It's a lot less well balanced.
- I could trade when the market's closed -- at 3:10 AM ET. But S&P, Dow, Nasdaq, and Russell 2000 futures are running overnight. So that opens up a possible arbitrage. There is a similar one on individual stocks for any after-extended-hours news -- such as selling TWTR before pre-market hours on Friday (Oct 21).
- When I search for "BA" in the ticker lookup, the option "The Boeing Company - BA" was way down the list. The search box should prioritize exact match ticker lookups over company name lookups.
(1) yes high commissions are designed to promote long term holdings (hence the name of the platform). I’m still trying to figure out simulated taxes.
(2) hmm, do you mind elaborating? For me, it’s not an exact replica of my personal portfolio, but moving forward it should be a relatively good proxy to it.
(3) I think the commissions itself will eliminate profits from minor arbitrage, but large deviations are possible to arbitrage successfully. Thanks for this, I’ve added a ticket to solve this issue. Will implement open market timings for trades.
(4) Search is far from optimal for now... super rough MVP. Will improve of course.
I think having no taxes would be a decent decision -- it could be an IRA.
(2) This is just a basic paper trading vs. real money difference in behavior -- TWTR at 49.94 will probably jump 8.4% in a week, so I went all in -- also, the presence of a leaderboard would reward more high variance decision-making. But what can you do.
The goal is to make it as perfect as it can as an imperfect proxy to investor skill.
But then again, it’s still possible to maintain two to three accounts running different strategies. And so moving forward, I’d either try phone auth or Stripe’s identity verification.
The site sounds cool but there are huge systemic problems with web based reputation systems. The reputation system can never be bullet proof, so maybe focus on other facets of the project IMO (unless your passion is the reputation system and fraud prevention).