Show HN: An investment forum where everyone manages a $1M imaginary portfolio

[raymondmoay]

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.

[f0e4c2f7]

Wow what a cool idea - thanks for sharing!

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.

[raymondmoay]

Thanks! You’re right on the use case. Hope you’ll find value in this. (:

[kleinsch]

How do you prevent people from opening a ton of accounts with different risky positions, abandoning the ones that don’t work out, and claiming to be a genius on the ones that top the leaderboard six months later?

[raymondmoay]

I thought about this a lot. Initially, I wanted phone authentication, but decided to do that next time when the problem arises. Then I realised that the goal of this is long term investing, I.e. 3-5-10 years. I doubt these “return miners” can do so over the long term while writing good insightful posts on their positions to build enough reputation to thrive on the platform.

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.

[tmpz22]

Realistically if enough value exists a secondary-market selling "successful" accounts will crop up and anyone wanting to harvest leads on the forum will purchase one of those.

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).

[aetherane]

IMO a big thing these sort of simulators always lack is a notion of tax consequences, which is always a big factor in real decision making.

[raymondmoay]

You’re right. Currently high frequency trades are penalised by commissions which has a fixed component. I’m still banging my head trying to figure out a simulated tax environment, but I’ll get it done.

The goal is to make it as perfect as it can as an imperfect proxy to investor skill.

[DontchaKnowit]

Long term =15% ish percent short = 30% easy and close enough to make it fairly representative

[mousetree]

Could you explain a bit more? Do you mean that the decision of what to buy and when to buy/sell is informed by the tax consequences? Interested to learn more.

[cmeacham98]

The most obvious one is holding for at least a year to avoid being qualified as short-term capital gains. There are other relevant rules too, for example look up "wash sale rule".

[smoldesu]

What's up with the "get paid" page? Are you selling real subscriptions to insider knowledge for people's fictional portfolios?

[raymondmoay]

Actually, I'm not selling anything. The authors themselves get to sell subscriptions to their readers when they gain reputation. Yea, it's fictional, but hopefully it will be a better proxy to their value as compared to outright selling a newsletter subscription.

Plus, 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. :(

[knubie]

FWIW I understood it pretty easily.

[hackrnusr]

More useful would be a website where everyone receives the same $1 million to propose research to cure cancer.

Could use some myself.

[SamReidHughes]

Never got a verification email. So I don't know what it offers, but I'd say it should allow shorting, if it doesn't already.

[raymondmoay]

It does not as of now, but I’ll be working on shorting soon. The goal was to initially find good long term companies to invest in.

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?

[SamReidHughes]

I did check my spam folder and it didn't get any messages. But now, the third email got instantly delivered, into the spam folder (hosted by Fastmail), and I marked them as Not Junk.

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.

[raymondmoay]

Firebase is annoying damn. Will figure it out.

(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.

[SamReidHughes]

(1) It would be hilarious if you included state taxes based on IP.

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.

[vrdvn]

Add shorts!! ,gotta have market neutral portfolio ,also add leverage.

[tbs1996]

oh hey this is cool, I'd like to start investing some time so this seems fun to play around with first

[raymondmoay]

I’ll be writing some articles as posts on the site in the coming days, hopefully it’ll help you get started!

[joshxyz]

just signed up and bought some positions, i hope it sends me weekly updates of my pnl

[raymondmoay]

Weekly updates sounds like a good idea. I’ll put it on the roadmap. Thanks!

[sakerbos]

Sounds like fun!