Stockalyze is back again

[Sacha]

Hello dear Stockalyzers,
You must have noticed that the Stockalyze website was not working for a long time. We deeply regret it. We had met with an unprecedented and unforeseen situation where our domain registrar (Net4 India) had abruptly closed its business. They made many websites defunct and virtually ran away.

Including us many were impacted, a simple google search shows many news about it, for example this one and ICANN wiki also says that Net4 India is now de-accredited.

We were badly impacted because, admittedly, we were not prepared to handle this situation.

But finally we are back again and we will continue our business with more efforts than ever before.

We will continue working on user requests and keep updating the Stockalyze.
We look forward for your suggestions and feedbacks. Once again we regret the situation that did not allow us to maintain Stockalyze. We hope similar thing will not happen again.  And anyway we are now prepared to handle such crisis in the future. So, going forward, we have little to worry.

We request you to help us spread the word about Stockalyze.

Wish you and us all the best,
Happy Stockalyzing (again :) ).

[Charlie]

Sacha,

Much thanks for getting things fixed and for reaching out to us who think your program is the best there is for testing trading systems. Give me a chance to get caught up, and I'll be happy to spread the word about SA in the financial forums I use.

Charlie

[Sacha]

Thanks for coming back to the forum Charlie and I will appreciate your help in spreading the word.

[Charlie]

Sacha,

You need to be aggressive about trying to show what your (very excellent) program can do by joining some of the public investing forums and discussing how it can help beginners stay out of trouble. The Motley Fool is one forum you  might consider. 

By and large, the subscribers to its endless, worthless newsletters are told to buy such and such stocks and to hold for 3-5 years. When those subscribers do buy, they quickly find out they've been scammed in what amounts to a pump-and-dump scam. The typical complaint goes like this. "On the advice of the Motley Fool, I bought such and such. Now I'm losing money. What should I do?" Sometimes, those losses are a reckless, irresponsible, inexcusable (-30%) or more. Invariably, they are told to "sit tight", that all will be well if they just "have conviction" in the underlying company. That is self-destructive nonsense, of course. When a stock is getting sold down way beyond the normal price fluctuations one has to tolerate in the manic-depressive casino that the stock market is, then it's time to cut losses, or better, to reverse and sell short.

That's what your program can do for would-be buyers of stocks. It can show whether buying-and-holding would have been A Good Thing To Do, or whether some judicious, disciplined selling would have been smarter. As is the case with most forums, you can't mentioned your program by name or make an explicit pitch for it. But what you can do is show  what might have happened with any stock mentioned in any post if a bit of trading had been done. For sure, in a raging bull market, nothing beats B&H. Just throw a dart and you'll become rich. But that's not the market we're now in, which is a late-stage, "topping" market in which prices are rolling over and beginning to make lower lows.

Charlie

[Sacha]

Thank you for all your kind words and suggestions.
Our current focus is to improve Stockalyze by implementing feature requests that Stockalyze users had already made, and in parallel, we are working to make people aware about the Stockalyze.
With many happy users already, we aim to build a thriving Stockalyze community.

[Charlie]

Sacha,

You're the programmer, and the project is yours to shape its destiny.  But my take is this. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it until it is."

Yeah, there are some minor changes that maybe should be done, like, letting the user determine capital deployed at a more realistic level than $1 million and letting the user decide whether to keep positions sizes equal (my preference with real money).

But the program already offers nearly as much as MetaStock ever did, at one-tenth the price. So that raises the question of whom your intended audience really is. Are you trying to target beginning investors/traders who aren't going to want to spend $50-$100 bucks PER MONTH for a backtesting service/program? Or are you trying to undercut the high-end services/programs? IF you want to "do well while doing good", I'd say to skip adding features and try to make the program easy to use for people who are math klutzes and/or who have zero programming experience, but who might have a budding interest in trying to make a few bucks in the equity casinos (--err, stock market) or how they might better manage their 401k.

Here's what I'm thinking. The typical 401k is based on mutual funds, which StockAnalze doesn't chart. Also, the typical 401k severely restricts the number of fund switches that can be done each quarter. That makes most of SA's pre-loaded trading systems useless to them. That problem is easy enough to fix if the user has had experience building trading systems. Few investors have. Furthermore, they don't really enjoy the investing/trading game and just to be told what to buy.

But what they don't realize is that it doesn't matter WHAT they buy. It matters WHEN they sell. It's managing their risks and cutting their losses that matters most. You're familiar when Buffet's Two rules, right? #1, Don't lose money. #2, Remember Rule #1.

Right now, Schwab is running a promotion that them not already in the market should consider. https://www.schwab.com/investing-starter-kit

The offer is this. Open an account, fund it with $100 bucks, and Schwab will give you ten slices of stocks from the SP500 valued at $100 total. In short, if  person opens an account, he/she can double their money. But what those stocks will be worth next week or next month is a whole 'nother matter. It might be more. But it probably will be less, because we're moving into to bear market. But here's the kicker. As soon as those ten stocks are in the person's account, they can be sold and the money deployed on better opportunities WHICH STOCKANALZE CAN BE DIRECTED TO FIND.

In fact, if you want to launch a thread based on just such an investing/trading project, I'd be happy to participate, as well as try to get some trading buddies involved. Right now, what's the situation is this country? There is zero financial education in the schools. Inflation is running close to 20%. Most people have a day job and family responsibilities. They're lucky if they have a 401k, much less a DB pension. If they want to retire some day, they need to learn how to deal with markets. But they've got no role models to look to, nor much time to learn on their own. But they can find a $100 bucks and maybe 20 minutes a day.  They aren't going to be able to turn a $200 dollar account into the money they'll need to retire with. But a couple of years of engaging that account will enable them to acquire the skills they need to manage bigger money. Meanwhile, if they're the least bit careful, the whole project can be done on Schwab's nickel due to the opening match. In fact, if they open that account and trade carefully, they could use their profits to pay for buying StockAnalyze. And that would be a hoot, and three-way win for everyone.

Charlie