Genuine Impact on Crowdcube

Found where they mentioned it!

It’s on their product roadmap as part of the advanced filters. It’s a fair comparison then.

Brilliant thanks.

Would anyone mind giving me a few of things that might present a ‘false flag’ in SimplyWallSt/Genuine Impact - i.e. what factors may result in a stock looking very appealing on the presented metrics whilst being a very risky/dangerous investment?

I’d watch out for super super high value stocks (value trap) and super high momentum stocks (normally means they are a bit rubbish but the analyst guesstimate says next year will be better.)

Value trap is the common one to keep an eye out for.

Basically, too good to be true! If the stock is that extremely undervalued, it might be for a good reason!

Companies with a high momentum or future forecasts can also be a bit tricky, they are only forecasts after all. If the forecasts are that true then the value is likely to be lower e.g. Uber, they are expensive to buy but the analysts see promise, rather than it’s cheap to buy and has an amazing outlook!

I’ve made a lot of mistakes buying cheap stocks or ones with “great” future potential and ended up dumping them. I don’t mind a long time horizon but I don’t want to stick with a losing move when I could be using that money in a smarter way.

A lot of the mining stocks end up with great future momentum (normally built around finding resources based on the expeditions they are paying for now) and the value is normally cheaper (because of the high risk.)

I like to think the market is always right in the end, if someone is cheap then there is a risk that being account for. If something is unbelievably cheap then I’m taking a punt or don’t have the full picture yet. I don’t believe I can find a stock that everyone in the whole world has overlooked, just didn’t levels of risk.

This is why I use these tools for screening before I make my own assessment.

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Is anyone going to the meet and greet? I’m picking the kids up for their first day back so I’m going to miss out.

The webinar was good and I guess they answered my questions but it would have been good to see them.

@Marsares I saw you on the update! Shame you won’t be making it either, it’d be good to find out how it goes.

Would love to go, but alas, have to travel back “oop north”. :slight_smile:

But how big? They mention individual investor numbers but the vast majority of those are investing in diversified funds. A smaller % of them will also invest in random stocks like “I like using Facebook, I’ll buy some FB shares” kind of fun…none of them need a terminal/any market research

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Good question, one to ask them honestly. They said the other day that the investor survey showed most people invested because it’s a product they want to use. That is why I invested.

Agree with the point though, it’s not for everyone, the numbers they quote are for DIY investors with over £20k invested assets, which hopefully isn’t the I use it so I invest crowd (not that there is anything wrong with that!)

The comfort for me is they have two existing competitors, that gives me the comfort there is a market there.

That said this is very much my view, I’m more in this because it’s the product I want more than anything so I might be overlooking something! That’s part of why I made this thread, to make sure I wasn’t!

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https://community.genuineimpact.co.uk/t/welcoming-alex-sherwood-our-head-of-communications/217

Congratulations @anon2636484 :tada:

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Which deprives us of the Robinhood/Sherwood forest joke we were all hoping for

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He was good Alex but I do like @Freetrade_Team’s style ( Edinburgh Freetrade meetup please :wink: )

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Thanks, Jim, and yes – we’d love to do an Edinburgh meetup!

I’ll do my best to persuade the rest of the team :tumbler_glass:

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This gave me a laugh:

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:thinking: @Marsares :eyes:

+1 for Alex’s Mohawk style haircut :smiley:

Do you disagree with me? Don’t get me wrong, I check the FreeTrade forum daily but rarely find anything useful here.

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Then i’d question why you’d visit daily. I may understand the underlying point you made (not necessarily agree) but I find “uneducated” derogatory.

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I think “[yet] lacking knowledge” is the phrase @Marsares may have had in mind :wink:

Due to the larger size of this community compared to GI, the array of users’ knowledge about investing is far wider. GI is also more of a niche area that is more relevant to advanced investors, whilst Freetrade is effectively relevant to everyone, which is why the degree of awareness of some users may seem lower in comparison.

However, this is what #first-time-investing is for, and, hopefully, those who wish to learn more from old posts or by asking questions will greatly benefit and expand their knowledge base.

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Yes, I must admit that my words were perhaps poorly chosen. Apologies for that, as I have no intention of insulting anyone.

I do stand by my view though that too many people on this forum make really poor investment choices based on either very poor or incomplete date, or on a gut feeling or emotional basis, and that thus most of the posts on here are merely noise. I call that speculating, rather than investing.

That’s why I am so passionate about startups like Genuine Impact and the likes. People need the right information before they make investment decisions, or they may end up in dire straits.

We all like to think that people are rational beings and do their research before they invest, but fact of the matter is that most don’t. Having insightful information at your finger tips that allows people to move from hearsay into facts, and thus takes the emotions out of the debate, can only be a good thing.

Combining the right information with the right trade execution ability like FreeTrade will be key so people don’t get caught out.

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I think this is a fair point. I think it’s good that we have a lot of new investors on here, like myself. But there is lots to learn and we can always be more informed.

Opinion: Things such as a company’s “Financial strength” i.e. the “robustness of a balance sheet”, as per Genuine Impact’s definition, cannot be summarised by one number.

You can’t simplify something so complex, the way you can’t rate a person 8.7 or 5.2 (and a company is staffed with people making decisions which impact the said balance sheet).

It’s easy for us to rely on something relatively simple and easy to understand, but it doesn’t paint the entire picture, especially when capital is at risk.

Scores/ratings/charts steer people to making decisions in favour/against something. This is why you see “6X% of people prefer Pepsi Max to CocaCola” ads - marketing came from psychology and psychology is human, irrespective of whether you’re investing in stocks, buying a sofa or deciding to watch something on iPlayer.

“Drakes” and “Riris” of the world can attract more clicks/attention while being in featured Top Playlists, while someone with more “talent”/quality of performance outside of Top 10 in music charts flies economy to perform at own concerts and you may never listen to them despite assuming your music taste is not affected by ranking and algorithms.

These are some of the ideas based on research by a guy called Barabasi - you should read his book on the laws of success - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Formula-Five-Behind-People-Succeed-ebook/dp/B07F19VCHF.

Credit rating agencies - which assign a rating (to companies who pay them, their debt, and sovereigns) based on their “proprietary” credit metrics and qualitative assessment - provide detailed reasoning for a BB+ or AAA- ratings (and you can read them for free unless you want additional paid research). Some disclose methodology which is very detailed and many people skip it.

They also do not provide investment advice. Yet, many fund/investment managers use credit ratings as one of the main criteria when it comes to investing.

The more complex it is to assess something, the more likely humans will go for a simpler solution. It’s like doing accounting without software - you go to an accountant. If you can’t invest and have $1 million, yo go to a wealth manager. That is why Wall St has been thriving before the fintechs joined the party.

Financial analysis is not easy.

And companies are purposefully not making it easy to analyse them. But you can’t put a single number to the quality of the income statement, cash flow, or the balance sheet.

A lot of stuff in finance is doing qualitative and quantitive analysis - if you’re a bank and want to lend to companies, the process is very long and requires risk, compliance, legal, and financial analysis. The same applies to investing.

People and companies do pay $20,000+ /year to Bloomberg, because they are effectively saving money/time and reducing headcount thanks to a tech company founded in the 1980s by a sacked banker Michael Bloomberg who saw an opportunity and became a billionaire.

Genuine Impact is not replacing Bloomberg yet with its initial offering. Bloomberg is a behemoth that grows stronger with more data - it’s more like Facebook rather than MySpace - its software and data engineers are not asleep.

Hopefully thoughGI becomes a beautiful solution for DIY investors in future.

Below are some of the free/cheap-ish alternatives that are quite “good”. They are not a replacement for going to the Investor Relations pages of fund/companies and doing due diligence:

  • Yahoo! Finance - web-based. Powers data in Apple Stocks. Offers basic “Bloomberg” functionalities (e.g. FA ):


  • SeekingAlpha.com - free/paid - offers basic “Bloomberg” functionalities (e.g. FA ) on the web. They can be real time savers. But these are features that could be included in freetrade maybe in 2020 without a third-party integration. That data is basically rows/columns in a relational database:


  • Motley Fool (fool.com) - paid research, in-depth analysis, portfolio monitoring, worth it if you can afford it. There have US and UK separate services.

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