[danielaxelsen]

Hi - I'm the creator of https://bravos.co, a replacement for Google Finance. (I didn't have anything to do with this article being posted.)

I actually left my job two months ago to work on this full-time... Google Finance used to be a "home page tab" for me and it was just killing me that I couldn't find a good alternative. Bravos.co features a clean interface for tracking public companies, cryptocurrencies, and even private companies. The platform pulls in news, social conversations, and key financial data, and has modern features like a "Dark Mode" and mobile site. APIs, native apps, notifications, and more are coming soon.

We have a 2 minute video walkthrough here: https://youtu.be/gpQpCK9Ydl0

We would love to get your thoughts - we want to build this based on community feedback.

[woodpanel]

Hi Daniel, neat site and I'm really happy someone is taking this on! As the OP noted, the killer feature for me to choose GoogleFinance (GF) above all other "free equities tracking websites" [1] was its portfolio.

I've just tried to see if your site addresses those pain points and it doesn't - but I think you're halfway there.

What OP's "hypothetical portfolio" means is basically the tracking of a whole set of selected equities (so in your site's case: the performance of everything within a watchlist, including a graph visualizing it plus all the common features like comparing that portfolio-graph to that of the Nasdaq, Dollar Index, BTC ...). [2]

GF's UI was horrible, but they allowed to create endless amounts of those portfolios, which was really helpful for finding one's investment strategy because you could compare "ideas". Or you could gather groups of similar equities to track their performance and decide whether they are ripe for becoming "a new idea" (like "I believe that downturn of x is at some point going to halt, maybe then it's worth investing")

When GF still had its portfolio feature, I hoped their "re-design" would allow for more mobile-friendliness (which you address) but more importantly comparing portfolio graphs with each other.

Also, as non-American I repeatedly ran into trouble finding an equivalent ticker sign for non-US equities [3]. Supporting WKN or ISIN would be an improvement over GF!

Anyways, quitting your job for this is a bold step and I wish you the best!

[1] Putting that label in quotes maybe highlights the fringeness of that niche and why Google shut it down :-(

[2] To be clear: not a graph where i have all the graphs of the items of a watchlist - but one line for all items combined

[3] My trouble was usually resolved, finding some European stock's ADR and converting the EUR amount invested to the amount of ADRs i'd have gotten in USD

[cloakedarbiter]

> What OP's "hypothetical portfolio" means is basically the tracking of a whole set of selected equities (so in your site's case: the performance of everything within a watchlist, including a graph visualizing it plus all the common features like comparing that portfolio-graph to that of the Nasdaq, Dollar Index, BTC ...). [2]

> GF's UI was horrible, but they allowed to create endless amounts of those portfolios, which was really helpful for finding one's investment strategy because you could compare "ideas". Or you could gather groups of similar equities to track their performance and decide whether they are ripe for becoming "a new idea" (like "I believe that downturn of x is at some point going to halt, maybe then it's worth investing")

I just want to second this point made in the parent comment. What I've always wanted to do that I can't really do in an app out there, is compare my "what-if" scenarios (e.g. what if I had held onto 20% of my AAPL in 2015, instead of selling and buying NFLX and UA/UAA?). I always imagined that there'd be an easy visualization comparison between two scenarios, to allow me to "evaluate" certain buy/sell decisions I've made, retrospectively.

[danielaxelsen]

This is a super helpful set of points. I've always had similar questions to your AAPL/NFLX/UA examples. I think the insight here, is that brokerage accounts and most sites treat your "list" as binary - you either "own"/"track" something or you don't.

In reality, you're tracking a lot of opportunities, and every decision you've made represents several different scenarios. It should be as easy to look back on a scenario (AAPL versus NFLX+UA performance over the last 3 years) as it is to see the performance of any of those specific securities.

You should also be able to easily see that your "biotech" list outperformed your actual portfolio, or that your "tech" list is outperforming your "European companies" list (or whatever else).

We probably won't go too deep into backtesting various strategies, as there is powerful software for that today, but we definitely can support the analyses in this thread.

[appleiigs]

I think Excel would be the best tool for that type of analysis, not an app.

[robryan]

An app would be a lot nicer to get a graph of performance offer time for that hypothetical decision. Excel would be okay if you just wanted to know today’s position of various decisions.

[imcoconut]

You should check this out

https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio

[woodpanel]

Thanks and: Yes, absolutely this.

Since GF's portfolio feature is gone I've never found a way to visualize to me, that my thinking in the past was stupid/correct.

[danielaxelsen]

Yeah, this is awesome. We absolutely need to have that.

I appreciate the points about ISIN and tickers. We'll need to be thoughtful about how we handle that, and definitely should support more than just the U.S. exchange tickers.

[steakknife]

As of right now, Yahoo Finance has the same watchlist functionality, but with more data than Google Finance including options and crypto and much more powerful charting and native mobile apps. You can even link your real brokerage account for real-time portfolio tracking and trading directly from their apps and site.

(If I sound like a shill, I work for https://trade.it which provides broker API functionality to Yahoo Finance, but I have also been trading and using Yahoo Finance for over a decade, way before I ever became technologically involved with them)

[pmikesell]

I'd also like to echo that having a portfolio tracker would be for me a the killer feature. I have a mix of equities and mutual funds purchased at different times and different prices and I really just want to input the purchase dates / amounts and then have a single place to track performance. GF had this and now it's all gone.

I'd pay some amount of $ per month (or year or whatever) to just have a reasonable portfolio tracker. Yes, the brokerages all have this - and they're all pretty terrible.

[spo13]

If you don't mind using a windows application you can give https://www.stockportfolioorganizer.com a go it does what you need and much more like allowing you to paper trade, divide into different groups, write formulas etc.

Disclaimer: I am the author.

[pmikesell]

Thanks for the reply. I really only use windows for video games at this point. Looks like a cool app though. Have you thought about converting it? Some of these web frameworks have higher level wimp apis now.

[rcar1046]

This is more portfolio tracking centered... https://stockdaddy.io/

[pmikesell]

Thanks - this is exactly what I was looking for. They never show up in search results - some SEO would be great for them.

[mmanfrin]

Apologies in advance if this sounds overly negative: this is not a replacement for Google Finance. This is a portfolio tracker. The first two things I checked for that made GF different and important (to me, at least) were company financials and an advanced stock search.

Company financials are self explanatory (quarterly breakdowns of cash, income, etc), the stock search allowed you to pare down stocks based on market cap, div &, P/E, etc, and was a wonderful tool for discovery.

Your site is nice, but it offers almost nothing over what every brokerage I've used offers: watchlists, news. Crypto is a nice addition, but Robinhood has that, and Robinhood has my actual transaction history.

[danielaxelsen]

Super helpful thanks. We're definitely early, and we don't have the resources yet that Google had to throw at GF!

Fundamental data is coming soon, for sure. We'll show you 10 years of historical data (annual and quarterly) for income statement, cash flows, and balance sheet.

Screening will come too, although it's not requested as often so we haven't prioritized it. The API, mobile apps, and improved charting are next for us.

[toss1]

Looks super-cool - nice vid demo. My only suggestion would be to prioritize the screening over certainly the mobile an probably the API.

My reasoning is that I do almost all real searching and analysis on the desktop, whereas mobile is just nice and handy for tracking an updates on the go. Also, screening is more immediately usable by a broader user set than the API functions (tho your spreadsheet integration is way cool!).

Just one small vote while cheering you on!

[danielaxelsen]

Super helpful feedback, thank you.

[jonknee]

> the stock search allowed you to pare down stocks based on market cap, div &, P/E, etc, and was a wonderful tool for discovery.

You may enjoy the Finviz screener:

https://finviz.com/screener.ashx

(Make sure you check the tabs of the search menu, you can filter by a crazy number of attributes, including stuff like sales growth, technical breakouts, etc)

[drenvuk]

I would second this. Finviz felt educational when trying to find growth stocks for me. The terminology used and capabilities provided are pretty deep.

[woodpanel]

I dunno, there are tons of sites that have financial data. But yes, GF's stock picker was maybe the best search interface, because you basically were given a range-slider to each parameter. But that feature, although it sometimes yielded some pearls for me, in general felt very "beta" to me.

[dnadler]

Check out Koyfin.com

It's like bloomberg-light.

It doesn't have great stock filtering, but is pretty good for financial data.

[cloakedarbiter]

I spent 10 minutes surfing around, and overall, I really like the layout, sparklines, and navigation.

It looks like you're using Highcharts for the main graphs, and if they support transitions out-of-the-box, that'd be nice to have that turned on. For example, when zooming out from 1M to 1Y, it's a little tough to see the recent 1 month changes in the context of 1 year. The axis transitions just makes it a bit more distracting, without the line chart transitions between date ranges.

Also, making the selected range saved to the URL to make the links shareable would be a good feature to add too.

I see that it's built in React, but I'm curious why clicking on an individual stock appears to "leave" the app, not giving it quite as smooth of a single page app experience? Not a huge deal, just curious.

Otherwise, this looks really great!

[danielaxelsen]

Thanks a ton for the thoughtful feedback, hugely appreciated.

We have much better charting coming soon. You'll be able to compare different securities, log scale, bar charts. URL params for things like the range are a good idea.

(And sorry, what do you mean by leave the app? Clicking on a company somewhere should take you to bravos.co/AAPL, no?

[cloakedarbiter]

> (And sorry, what do you mean by leave the app?

When I click between "Watchlists" and "Market News" on the left sidebar, the sidebar stays in place as I would expect from a single page app experience. However, when I click on a stock, it appears that the page reloads, as the left sidebar flickers a little bit.

It's still a fast experience switching between stocks, but I'm guessing it could be even faster if local state is updated with a new selected stock's information with the app shell already in place. Maybe that's exactly what's happening, but the left sidebar flickering just a little bit makes it "feel" like the site is refreshing.

[danielaxelsen]

Ah good call, thank you. We've optimized some things on the app, but have a lot more to do.

[AznHisoka]

One of the simple things Google Finance never bothered to add is projected earnings date for a company. so frustrating.

Project earnings date, and past earnings performance (price effect) are 2 things sorely lacking. I do like the historical financials but man, I wish they showed the past five quarters, not 4. Sometimes you want to see how last year’s quarter changed quarter-over-quarter.

Sometimes I think the people who create these products don’t invest/trade stocks at all.

[adventured]

Quick feedback. On desktop, Firefox 62 / Chrome 69, Windows 10.

I immediately went to put in eg MSFT in the search box in the upper left. When I hit enter it just blanks the input box. The search icon is non-reactive to clicking. The only way the search box fires properly is if I click on the auto-suggest that drops below the input box. You should definitely wire up the icon to trigger the search, and enter needs to work as well.

[danielaxelsen]

Agreed. It's shockingly not supported by ReactiveSearch, which we're using right now. We'll be replacing the entire search experience as soon as possible.

[tanderson92]

I signed up, very cool stuff! Is there any feasible way to build total return functionality in? This was always a major gripe of mine with Google Finance, and why M* is preferred for non-trading, investing purposes. I imagine you would need reliable dividend (ex-div date, price, amount, etc) information, and I'm not sure what your data sources are.

[danielaxelsen]

You're right - there's always a lot of corner cases and "handling" that you have to do for financial data. But it's very possible.

You're basically saying you should be able to enter that you bought 100 shares AAPL in 2004 at $15... what is your total return?

(We only have watchlists today, but we're designing more of the features that are "portfolio"-like and this is great feedback.)

[tanderson92]

Right. I always worry when I'm presented a price plot over more than a few months that there is something masking the real picture, which is total return, or price + cash flow. For any "portfolio"-like feature you're going to want total return and not price action return.

[WorkUntilRetire]

Exactly! If I’m looking at a 5 year chart for any given stock, I don’t really care what the nominal price was, I care about the total return. Even more so when comparing 2 stocks.

Killer feature would be historical charts that include re-invested dividends.

[tanderson92]

You can do this at morningstar.com

[peterwwillis]

I'm not sure how the "Top News" section is curated, but along with financial news I see:

- "'No hablo Ingles!' Video shows Taco Bell employee in Hialeah denying service - Local10.com"

- "Guac fans, rejoice! Chipotle is now selling large sides of guacamole"

[kcorbitt]

Hey, cool!

A while ago I was looking for an API that would give me the calendar date that quarterly earnings were reported historically, ideally for all public companies (but a large subset like the S&P500 would do). Do you know if anyone tracks this data, and if so where I might find it?

[danielaxelsen]

Yeah, that should be possible with a moderate amount of work. We probably won't support it very soon, but I would start with Intrinio, which is relatively easy to work with compared to some of the bigger providers:

https://intrinio.com/financial-data/zacks-eps-surprises?meth... https://intrinio.com/financial-data/wall-street-horizon?meth...

Feel free to PM me if I can help any further.

[existencebox]

Not the OP but I have side projects in similar veins. I didn't find any great sources for this, so I ended up scraping Zacks and similar sites; both for backfill and future.

If anyone found something easier, I'd certainly be curious as well.

[charlesdm]

Nice website! But I'm curious: where do you source the stock data from? Unless mistaken, if you want to redistribute the data (i.e. not just for personal trading), those data feeds generally run at >$100k a year.

[jonknee]

Appears it's using IEX's API which is awesome and free.

https://iextrading.com/developer/

[danielaxelsen]

Yeah, IEX is helpful for many of the stocks, and we use a few other APIs to supplement.

[ILikeConemowk]

what stack did you use to build bravos?

[newyearnewyou]

That's pretty awesome, one of my favorite features of Google Finance was how it would show the top daily gainers and losers (but ONLY of companies with market cap >= $1B) It looks like you have it at $100M on the homepage.

Any way you could make a easy to access URL that does the same thing but for market caps >= $1B?

Maybe:

https://bravos.co/gainerslosers/1B

[ISL]

Just want to say Thank You!

Has Bravos implemented imports for GF transactions, so I can spin up my exported-from-GF portfolios? GF had a nice export feature, but I never found anywhere that would import them for tracking.

Thank you!

[danielaxelsen]

We don't have that now, since we're prioritizing other things.

Hopefully we can include that down the road.

(And thank you! Appreciate you taking a look.)

[rcar1046]

https://stockdaddy.io/ - Can import google finance portfolios directly or any other csv transaction files.

[atombender]

I'd love to use your site (which looks great!), but I'm not able to log in with Safari; the form fields don't show up: https://i.imgur.com/myxCZLU.jpg. I've tried disabling my adblocker. Also, when signing up, I got an alert box about "FS" being undefined. But I did receive the verification email. Feel free to reach out by email (address in profile).

[danielaxelsen]

We're looking into that. Thanks for being really helpful about it.

[WorkUntilRetire]

Looks like a great start, thanks for posting.

For me, a killer feature would be charts with the option to include total return including reinvested dividends etc. I would happily pay for that if the data was accurate.

I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that the dividends listed in Google/Yahoo finance are often incomplete for common index funds. And it drives me nuts when I can't add them into the charts.

Good luck!

[danielaxelsen]

That's great to know, thank you. We'll prioritize being able to show the charts with and without dividends reinvested.

[oneplusone]

It needs a few things that I liked about GF:

1) If I click a different period in a chart, it should show me the different in price over that period as a %. I want to be able to see the chart for the last 6 months and be told what % the price changed.

2) It needs options chains.

Some small tweaks would also be nice:

1) The news line length is basically unreadable. 2) Font size is too small. Really hard to read the site.

But overall I like it.

[danielaxelsen]

Completely agree on the charting percentage, and the options chains.

Thanks for the feedback on the font and news line. For the news line, do you mean that you'd prefer more text to show up in the news section?

[z0r]

Could you sell it as desktop software with replacable plug-in data feeds for each source of information?

[danielaxelsen]

Possibly - I'm curious what you had in mind? Could you tell me any more about the use case?

[z0r]

I don't want to sign up for any more web apps or web only services. They keep shutting down

[zero_intp]

This is an under appreciated/represented sentiment. I wholly agree.

[malkia]

Hi Daniel - noted that sorting might be a bit flaky, possibly you guys are aware of. - e.g. tried here https://bravos.co/unicorns on the Raised, VAL columns - not always easy to repro.

[danielaxelsen]

Thank you! I think I just fixed it, but we have work to do on components like that.

[mcny]

Thank you for this beautiful website. I'm not a trader so sorry if this is obvious but is there any plan to include index funds like vtsax? I try searching for vtsax but it keeps kicking me out with no error message. Is it out of scope?

[nsriv]

This looks wonderful, just signed up! Looking forward to APIs

[danielaxelsen]

Yeah - they're going to be really cool, fast, and useful.

[ALittleLight]

How do you make money from this? (Or plan to)

Looks really nice, by the way.

[osrec]

Hi Daniel, I'm interested to know where you source your data from. Is it from freely available sources or do you but it from somewhere?

[HelloFellowDevs]

Hey, is there some sort of list I can put my email on to get updated for when an API is released?

[cryptozeus]

I like this a lot, please consider adding mobile friendly layout to your site

[akudha]

Looks clean and loads fast! Where did you get past crypto data?

[danielaxelsen]

It's coming from Crypto Compare right now. We've been told to look into Coinige. Definitely open to feedback here!

[jaimex2]

Any chance you can include ASX?