Two app ideas for retail investors
I'm interested in building tools to help retail investors (like myself) more easily manage their portfolios.
If you're a non-pro investor, which of these tools would you pay to use? Neither?
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Portfolio tracker calculates your profits, across stock and crypto accounts, with minimal time spent copy-pasting in spreadsheets. Has the ability to assess potential profits on trades you're considering ("if I sold X TSLA shares @ $Y, what would my capital gains be?"). Alpha version: https://www.tradepl.app
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Asset allocation tool to analyze your current portfolio, then helps you determine more optimal placement based on your target allocations, and the tax-effiency of assets/accounts. Similar to this: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Using_a_spreadsheet_to_maintain_a_portfolio
Do either of these problems resonate with you?
Hm you mention problems that more advanced retail investors seem to face. So not sure if IH is the right platform to ask for this. Maybe try FB groups/subreddits of actua stock and l crypto retail investors?
Thanks, yeah, that's a fair point. The target user I have in mind is something like "salaried, white-collar worker who has retirement accounts and also dabbles in individual stocks/crypto for speculation". I thought there might be some overlap with IH crowd, but definitely agree I need to go find people acutely feeling these pains.
Definitely NOT #1 - unless it uses Plaid to sync with all accounts etc. Manually entering trades is a non-starter. Asset allocation tool - to be honest is largely already offered by major brokers like IB, Fidelity etc...so unless you have substantial assets split up BETWEEN brokers then there is no point in this tool either in my view.
But if your tool generates interesting tax insights (non-obvious ones) into the assets, that would be useful and worth paying for.
I do support Plaid, but as far as I can tell, Plaid only gives up to 24 months of transaction history, which is why I am supporting Plaid, manual entry, AND csv file upload.
I built the alpha version of TradePL precisely because my wife and I have assets across at least four different accounts, not to mention crypto trading I've done. #1 is meant to provide an aggregated view across all accounts.
100% agree on non-obvious tax insights being the real juice. In my alpha release, I do show, for example, the impact on Long/Short term cap gains of doing a hypothetical trade. Ex: if you sold X Bitcoin at Y price, how would that impact your crypto cap gains for the current year?
What sort of tax insights did you have in mind? How do you currently try to optimize tax management? Thanks a lot for the feedback!
There's also tipranks and seekingalpha to keep track of your portfolio...
Tipranks looks pretty solid! Thanks. I just synced my Vanguard portfolio using Plaid.
What I've found is that 1) Plaid only supports up to 24 months of transaction history, which doesn't help me since I do first-in-first-out accounting (and therefore need my comprehensive history), and 2) Tipranks only supports syncing via Plaid, OR manual entry.
What I've built supports Plaid, manual entry, and CSV upload.
What was your experience like using Tipranks or Seekingalpha?
I only manually entry due to security. I also don't day trade so... They get the job done
Thanks, totally fair and useful feedback. I'm trying to make a decision on which of these ideas (if either) to pursue further. If you're comfortable sharing, do you pay for access to a wealth or financial advisor? Do you pay for any financial tools? Cheers.
I don't pay for financial advisors because I don't believe in them. I do read a lot and I do wonder if I should pay for motley fool or SA subscription though. I don't pay for tools. I am thinking of building tools but yahoo has everything there already.
I sort of build few tools and had a published list of my portfolio and some of my reasonings behind the investment
I went with Option 3: place valuation formulas and probability models into one app and attempt to calculate if stock is undervalued or not. I developed apps for mutual funds research teams for years so getting data sources and formulas wasn’t a difficult part. This is what I built:
Company 360:(https://apps.apple.com/us/app/company-360/id1464857130) (Find undervalued stocks using Value Investing strategy).
Why release on iPhone/iPad rather than desktop / web app? If I am doing any sort of serious research - I would do it on a desktop, not with my fingers on the phone? (also I don't have an i-device)
Thanks for sharing, and that's a good idea for value investors. Have you had much success marketing it?
I posted on relevant subreddits, ProductHunt and of FB.
Overall got me almost 3k downloads and 67 paying customers - mostly from Reddit.
My launch on ProductHunt got me a meeting with VC firm but it went nowhere.
I started advertising on AppStore: set a limit of $10 per month and so far it got me 40 downloads per month. I only started 2 months ago so I still have to see how many conversions to paying customers I get.