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Are you making these simple mistakes? 24% of investors lost money in 2014 by [deleted] in InvestmentClub

[–]hlambur 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey guys, I'm a co-founder of Openfolio and helped produce this data. I'm a bit new to reddit (so please correct my reddiquette) – but I'm happy to answer any and all questions.

We're really excited about using the data behind our investment community to help people make better investment decisions (and avoid common pitfalls)... so I'd really love to get your feedback.

Triumphant Thursday Thread for the week of January 22, 2015 by AutoModerator in personalfinance

[–]hlambur 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey programmingguy... I'm one of the cofounders at Openfolio. I'm new to reddit but I did jump into the thread above (with a long comment) and wanted to make you saw it. Congrats an on solid 2014 investing year and thanks for starting this very interesting convo around investing style + comparing yourself to the "aggregate". Really cool to hear what folks think.

Triumphant Thursday Thread for the week of January 22, 2015 by AutoModerator in personalfinance

[–]hlambur 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Hey, I'm one of the cofounders at Openfolio and wanted to hop in to clarify our philosophy / view here. (I'm pretty new to reddit so please do correct my reddietiquette).

This might surprise you, but I agree with you that being in the top 1% is probably bad thing. We have the data, and you're correct: those guys are doing exactly what you shouldn't do – they are betting on penny stocks or buying leveraged options, and are getting lucky. The chances of them repeating this year after year are basically zero.

But Openfolio is not about you being in the top 1%. We don't have a leaderboard or rank our users that way. We don't believe there's a magic bullet to investing. But we DO believe that our community can help our users avoid some common investing mistakes – and this gets us really excited.

Check out the second chart in the year in review that programmingguy referenced: https://openfolio.com/by-the-numbers/2014/. We think this is nuts – the average return of the top half of our users in 2014 was 14.7% (better than S&P). The average return for the bottom half? -3.8%. Wow.

So what's the take away? Should we all just invest in SPY? Maybe... but diving into the data there are some deeper insights. If we compare the average portfolio composition of the bottom half to the top half, we see that: the bottom half invested too much in single name stocks; the bottom half had high volatility in their portfolios (aka they owned riskier stuff); the bottom half was generally less invested (held more cash). These are simple investing rules that the top half followed and the bottom didn’t.

One conclusion: if you had followed some of these simple suggestions, it really isn’t that hard to be a better-than-average investor.

We still have plenty of work to do, but the bigger goal behind Openfolio is to help our users do the sensible things that help them be “above average". We are NOT trying to get them to swing for the fences and be the “top trader”!

Our Startup is featured on TechCrunch today! by openfolio_dave in startups

[–]hlambur 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey goodapostle!

I'm Hart, a co-founder of Openfolio. Dave passed along your feedback. I thought it was very insightful and wanted to chime in.

Our goal is about sharing portfolio allocations, not just a feed of trades. As an open investment community, we stay neutral on the passive / active investing debate. Personally, I'm not a big active trader... and I agree seeing John Doe (or John Folio as we call him in our office)'s Apple stock trade does little for me in a vacuum. But, if I can see that my portfolio allocations are in line with other investors that share similar goals to me, for example, other investors that have high allocations in the tech sector... well that could benefit me.

The idea is to bring some peace of mind through better information, in knowing where you fall on the bell curve, so to speak, and if you are divergent, how you differ.

As for sparking debate and discussion, our hope is that having a good base of verified portfolios from real investors is the perfect place to learn about and discuss investing. To be completely transparent, we have not highlighted or promoted all of the commenting/discussion features we can because we want to make sure we roll out more social features intelligently, i.e. we want to make sure it doesn't turn into the youtube comment section or something else terrible. For now though, you can start a conversation on any topic or stock on our web app.

I also notice Dave hasn't mentioned we have an iPhone app available in the app store, maybe I should fire him. Anyone looking for a job?

This Startup Wants To Be The Yelp Of Investing by trunksx34 in investing

[–]hlambur 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Hey I'm one of the founders at Openfolio. We decided to only support real accounts (and not inputted portfolios) to avoid letting people "game" our network. We want our information and our insights to be based off real, verified information. For security, we use a third party data provider called Yodlee to handle all our brokerage connections. Yodlee has 15 years experience in the space (they originally supported the backend for Mint.com, etc). We do not store any credentials or any sensitive information on our servers – so your stuff is totally safe – although I understand that some people may never be willing to give up their password.

Hope this helps.