"My Portfolio" - New Look

Avatar
  • updated
  • Under review
I wrote this follow-up comment already yesterday in response to an app-developer's explanation, but it seems to have been ignored and labeled "completed" without ever getting locked at...so here it goes again.

Like others have also commented, I believe you misinterpret how many use "My Portfolio". I'm just going to boldly claim here that many SA users are reasonably professional investors and analysts, who have a range of other "investment tools" available, least of which their own Excel sheet, where they have the key portfolio data personalized to their needs. They will most probably also have an active trading/investing account at some bank, which will provide most of those metrics anyway, including # of shares, value of portfolio, avg. cost, highs/lows etc. Forcing them to essentially recreate another mirror portfolio of all that, complicates things unnecessarily and misses the point.
Even the collapsed mode, which leaves you with a summary of your trading-account portfolio (assuming you actually bothered to enter # of shares and keep updating that), its a distraction.  And how many people actually want to publish their real portfolio data (# of shares) and value on a public site, to actually make any use of that collapsed summary.


"My Portfolio" is/was mostly a very useful SMART-FILTER that groups qualitative and quantitative information on stocks of interest so you can enhance your understanding of those companies. The first entry view therefore needs to contain the key/new headlines and basic stock prices.  Nothing more. Then you click and scroll from there into all the other great features and data content, depending on if your daytrading, DGI investor, sector focused, short or long, etc.etc.  Any web designer on Seeking Alpha should keep that objective in mind.


Frankly if you care about average daily trading volume and high/lo ranges of stocks flashing at you, just watch the tickers on Bloomberg or CNBC... Not saying that's useless, but please not on the FRONT page. When you pick up the Wall-Street-Journal, the daily trading metrics are also in the back pages.


If the idea here is to strategically capture the more novice/unprofessinal retail investor, you might well estrange a lot of your loyal customers. You have some truly great and very professional contributors on here that feed off a knowledgable readerbase and the debates. You risk DISRUPTING that dynamic by shifting the user functionalities to more basic trader focussed necessities....which dilutes the quality of this site.


Not trying to bash new ideas...Seeking Alpha is a great source of information and ideas that I use daily. Thanks for giving it some thought

Avatar
Tridente

Final comment:   After playing around with it for several hours, the main issue regarding layout is really only the Summary tab when clicking on individual portfolios. Thats too number-focussed for a "summary page" and it hurts to look at.  If you took out the avg. daily volumes, high/lows, open/close then you could make space for the headlines/articles section on the right half of the screen, sort of like before.  That would largely solve it for me.

Avatar
Joe de Mencia

amen. a very nice summary. 

Avatar
SA Admin Kushal Mehrotra
  • Under review

Hi Tridente,

Thanks for sharing your feedback. I'll be sure to relay this to our Products teams.

Regards,
Kushal Mehrotra

Data QA Analyst, Seeking Alpha