Discussion Improvements - New Topic Areas And Folio Tabs

4th Jun '16 by Edward Croft

49 comments 28560 reads

The conversations on the Stockopedia website have taken a huge arc over the years. When we first launched as a free website way back in 2009 there was a great influx of E&P experts and oil specialist investors onto our fledgling discussion boards. This early wave came from other sites such as the Motley Fool and ADVFN who mused confidently on topics that frankly none of us running the site knew much about at all!

When we launched the subscriber services in 2012 the conversation gradually changed away from the energy sector towards the kinds of topics that we were more passionate about. One of the challenges in running a discussion forum is to keep the best content discoverable as the conversation changes. We realised the topics that we've all been discussing the most weren't the topics that were currently available from the menus.

So we've made a move to fix this.

Topic Areas

There's a new set of topics available at the top of the discussion area in the Topic dropdown menus. Please do have a browse. We're still in the process of reallocating content to each of these primary topics but hopefully the content is much more navigable.

StockRanks, Screening, Ratio Analysis, TA and Stock Picks are all under 'Methods', while some of the more popular "Styles" of investing are covered in the next tab - value investing, short selling etc.

There are always heated discussions on the site relating to stop losses, rebalancing, diversification and general portfolio management so we've grouped these under the 'Folios' section in Portfolio Management. Given our focus on behavioural finance and managing the monkey, we've initiated an area for this here too.

We've noticed more and more discussions cropping up about getting started, learning to invest, choosing brokers, mechanics of trading so we're trying to support that in the 'Education' section.

There's also an area for "Community" level discussions - e.g. meet-ups, shareholder rights and interviews.

The Sectors dropdown has been rejigged so that it now matches our TRBC Sector Hierarchy. For a long time this has been running off an old FTSE inspired hierarchy so it was about time that we changed it to reflect what's being used elsewhere on the site. If you choose e.g. "Energy" from that menu it displays all the threads and articles tagged with Energy stocks…

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cig

5th Jun '16

Great initiative. Here's a few suggestions if I may:

If you click on the top level topic ("Style", "Methods", etc), you get the home page instead of the union of sub-topics as you'd expect. The granularity is good for classification but a bit too fine for casual browsing.

Also what about a hide some topic (negative favourite)? E.g. I'd like to see everything but TA and resources, and it's simpler to manage a short list of chatty topics to avoid than a long list of low traffic things you might be interested in.

Will moderators actively manage topic assignments? End-users tend to be abysmal at producing meta-data and dealing with topic drift.

Edward Croft

Cig - good point we'll fix the top links this week. The negative topics idea might not be implementable but I can see it's use so I've added a 'story' for this on our development backlog. We'll discuss it further.

On Moderation - What end users are often particularly bad at is writing titles that reflect the underlying content. People generally only click to read a thread if the title is interesting - so we do spend some time re-titling and editing content to encourage more engagement. The plan generally is to try and get all the content categorised correctly at the moment it's posted. We're also in the process of going through all our historic content to ensure it's discoverable through these topics.

On Mobile - We've not been very good at keeping a public roadmap but many will know we are currently rebuilding the whole site from the ground up - with one of the key goals to improve the mobile experience. The new site is completely responsive - so it does work brilliantly on mobiles, tablets and laptops out of the box. It's still some time away from launch though. I'll post more on this in due course.

On "Rants and Gossip" - we've designed an area for this into the new version of the site - it's a good idea. This re-categorisation on the current site is really a bridge to our new design.

On Posting Questions - I've been thinking about this - there are really 2 kinds of posts on the site. Blogs and Questions. It would be quite good to be able to filter to see just one or the other - maybe even put "bounties" on questions or give credit to whoever offers the best answer.

On Lurking - Even on this post there are probably anything up to 800 readers but only 6 contributors - which just shows the lurking percentage is very high. Only a fraction of the community do post and we should encourage more. I'm really open to suggestions as to how we help people over this hurdle. Do let us know your ideas?

On 'intimidation' - the community ethic here is to help each other improve. It's very supportive of novices or those seeking to learn. The quality of replies though can be very high which ironically may intimidate others from contributing ! I'm not sure what to do about this.

Joy Woodstock

6th Jun '16

Hi Ed. One suggestion on your discussion boards is that I would appreciate a way to read the first replies first in rhe order they were written. A button that says something like 'follow thread, start from beginning' as I often end up reading replies in reverse order until I remind myself to scroll all the way down and read upwards. Would love an option to change that, as it doesnt seem natural or isnt my preference anyway. Like reading the end of a novel first!

while I am far less knowledgeable than many of your discussion contributors, I find them a generous lot, who spend alot of time helping to clear the fog a bit... and I'm getting more educated the longer I stay tuned into the boards, so thank you contributors. Also got a lot from the webinar.. More please!

Joy - you can change the order of comments by clicking the "View Options" cog at the top of the comments list... then click 'most recent comments > At bottom'. See here

575530fbdf37bDiscussion_Improvements_-_N

We've made this a lot simpler in the new application (coming next year) - see the below screenshot:

57553088cdb6eSmall_Cap_Value_Report__26_

Hi Ed. Another suggestion on the site improvement. ...Or a question if I am missing something obvious.. Is how do I access your past webinars, or any other videos you may have in your system to help us learn more good stuff? Where is this buried? Thanks, Joy

You can find them under the help menu in webinars... or go straight to the Youtube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/user/Stockopedia

snickers

"great influx of E&P experts and oil specialist investors.."

and I rue the day I - as a novice investor - payed any attention to them. One tends to take the world as one finds it, and those were the voices that seemed to make up the investment world. Siren voices as it turned out. Now the conversation here has turned to things that can be known with some degree of certainty, about businesses which are going concerns - I'm off the rocks.

There's a leading voice on another bulletin board who set up an oiler-focussed tip list, after a successful 2010. I recently checked back on the subsequent performance, and it was something like 93% loss of capital. But this voice is still making the same confident, plausible noises.

nickwild

It would be very helpful to be able to click a button to reveal recent and upcoming dividend details for my porfolios.

Nick

slartybartfast

7th Jun '16

Although the originator of a thread will have to classify it by Topic or Company, the same does not apply to comments on the thread.
This is a particular problem on the SCVR with it's multiple Epics as comments are often made without a stock code which makes subsequent searching difficult if not impossible.
Why not force all postings to include Stock Code or Comment

fifthcolumn

Hi Kelvin, thanks for your kind response to my post. I agree with you totally and I am definitely missing out by not using the discussion boards productively. Obviously my feeling of intimidation is my emotional response to all the knowledgeable (and my lack of knowledge) contributors to stocko. Not stockopedia's fault, but mine. It really is an excellent educational site. I gave up on ADVFN a long time ago. It has all the appearance of an over excited pinball machine with very little in the way constructive conversation. I always read Paul Scott's report and I would like to contribute myself at some point.

Many thanks

MichaelFBS

10th Jun '16

I was lucky not to come to the investing world until around 2012 and attribute my portfolio being in profit (in no particular order) to Stockopedia, endless reading (books, magazines, annual reports, admission documents etc), Paul Scott and the bull market!

13th Jun '16

Given the increase in Brexit threads I've realised that we need a topic for this kind of discussion.

We've changed the old and slightly redundant 'Economics' topic to a more appropriate 'Market Outlook' topic.

Hopefully that will help general discussion of market direction- http://www.stockopedia.com/investment-topics/market-outlook/discussion/

Braam53

14th Jun '16

Hi Ed
Thank you for improving the discussion boards - I wander around them often
Also thanks for the url hack for the stockranks on the stockranks discussion I will definitely use it
One thing I am unable to do is to bring up a list of articles published by an individual.
Especially would like to be able to see a list of who I am following and and then see a list of their articles
Is this posible?
Thanks Braam

Braam, You can click through to people's profile pages and find their content there.

The Following page is quite a hidden feature (and needs more development) but you can see how to find the people you follow here - http://recordit.co/OEU8jy95Ec

In the new site we'll make this a lot easier with a link on your profile page.

mgallear

20th Jun '16

Well my main want list of little needs is -

My main annoyance is having Russian and other ‘over the counter’ shares as been listed on the main LSE Exchange. I would much prefer it if they were in an OTC category that could be screened out.

I sometimes worry that not all the screenable shares are spitted out by a screen.

You are missing a trick not doing the O'Shaughnessy’s Value Factor Two composite ranking – there is great demand for this item.

I would like to see the modified Magic Formula screen in Quantitative Value by Gray and Carlise. (They say it’s a modified Magic formula Screen, not me and yes I know it’s impossible to do all the extra stuff to make the investments safer.)

Ok I wrongly read what this topic was about - but thought it was worth mentioning anyway.

ThomasFak

21st Dec '17

This comment has been moderated

21st Jan '18

andrewdb

I personally do not think asking people to classify their own posts is a great idea
- it is a barrier to posting
- once the comment thread grows the thread's purpose may change

A good quality keyword search is v.v. useful - you provide that.

If you want to assign a topic, it would be better if a moderator did this.
Look at some variant of the slashdot moderation/meta-moderation model - it would probably work better here than there.

All the data here is time-bound and so (usually) newer is better, but not always and so those lists need to be ranked by a combination of views (all time and recent) and age.

Andrew L

22nd Jan '18

Ed, A good step forward and it makes sense. One area that could be added that would add tremendous value is an "ideas" section. These are generally posted under the general thread at the moment and vary in conviction while sometimes they aren't ideas but rather general discussions.

I think there should be a way for people to post stock ideas - long/short; sector ideas; fund ideas etc. Also maybe with Editors picks, most popular, by poster, by poster who has posted the best performing ideas etc. Seeking Alpha have a rough version of this already covering a number of different areas: seekingalpha.com/stock-ideas/long-ideas The website also covers many other sections such as short ideas etc.

What I mean by ideas are potential investments that the poster thinks are attractive now and where the poster gives an investment case. This is as opposed to general commentary, updates, comments for discussion etc. It can be hard to distinguish between general commentary and what maybe actionable ideas sometimes.

In my view, an ideas section might need to be controlled so that it is reasonably high quality i.e. people submit ideas but these are only approved if they are of sufficient quality. And/or each idea would have to go through a set criteria outlining the idea. Short investment case, company description, sector backdrop, growth outlook, competition, risks, valuation. This is to make ideas standardized and so that they cover all the bases.

An ideas section would essentially make Stockopedia a very useful service in the sense that users can post their best current ideas. At the moment there are a deluge of posts on various issues so it can be hard to find user ideas. It is also often not clear whether the poster has a strong view or whether they think the investment case for a stock is robust. If users are forced to set out an investment case if they want to post in the ideas section I think this would generate lots of good quality, user generated content. There would also be an incentive for users to get a good track record on the investment ideas they post i.e. no one would want to post a half finished idea in the ideas section as otherwise it may hit their track record.

At the moment I find it fairly difficult to source attractive investment ideas from the discussion area but an ideas section should solve this problem. For example, I missed out on Gameswork Shop and Boohoo simply due to the volume of commentary in the discussion area and the SCVR. An ideas section would of better highlighted these two stocks when they were attractive.

Any other thoughts from Stockopedia subscribers on this? Worth looking at Seekingalpha's ideas section as a template but I think that can be improved i.e. by providing the performance of ideas submitted by individual users.

The role of an ideas section is essentially to turn content that may already being submitted to the discussion section into something more valuable i.e. by highlighting where a user has a strong conviction view on an investment.

If we take SCVR's excellent commentary it is often hard to see when something is a robust idea or just feeling the way on an idea. In other words, it would be great if Paul, Graham posted in an ideas section every-time there was a stock in the SCVR they had a high conviction on. Otherwise you have to read all of the SCVR so you don't miss anything. Once every so often Graham and Paul have a really strong idea. An example, would be Paul's idea on Boo Hoo after its post-IPO profit warning. Even if you read all the commentary from the SCVR it can be hard to determine the level of conviction on a particular company. i.e. sometimes they think it is good but it is not clear if this is a conviction view from experience/research or a "on face value" type view. The two types of views are very different.

When analysts rate stock they often give a conviction view if they believe there is a high probability they are right. This helps highlight these views versus other "on face value" type views. I have often thought that qualitative analysis should use an out of 10 ranking system to help distinguish between different stocks. It would also give detail on the thought process as lots of different attributes could feed into the out of ten ranking.

24th Jan '18

Discussion Improvements - new Topic areas and Folio tabs

Topic Areas

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Edward Croft

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