Analyst Index Scores Stock Calls Against Actual Results in Show HN Launch
Analyst Index scores analysts' stock calls against actual moves and plans subscriptions with a 10 percent platform cut.
The founder wrote that the idea came after riding the Tesla wave in 2019 and 2020 and then making high-risk bets that did not work out, including one pick from an analyst he did not know was not much good. He said he needed a way to determine which analysts were worth listening to and which stocks to buy based on their ratings.
According to the post, TipRanks has scored analysts since 2009 and Benzinga sells accuracy scores through an API, so the concept is not entirely new. The founder argued that Analyst Index differs by aligning analyst incentives with investors through a subscription. TipRanks and others scrape published sell-side calls and sell access to investors without analysts seeing any of the investor revenue, the post says, and without aligned incentives the quality of the work will be lower. The founder said he also scraped sell-side calls to bootstrap Analyst Index with some data, which he considered better than launching with no data.
The scoring methodology is currently naive, the post says. It compares a call against the stock's movement over the stated horizon and scores the difference. The founder said he preferred to ship something simpler sooner rather than later and invited people with scoring design expertise to talk.
No analyst signup, payments or paywall enforcement are live yet, according to the post. Anyone can currently subscribe to anyone and see everything. The planned business model would let analysts set their own subscription price, with readers subscribing directly and the platform taking 10 percent.
The founder listed two unresolved problems. The first is cold start on supply: the analysts he wants are good and undiscovered, which means they have no audience by definition, so the score has to do the work an audience normally does. If the site cannot drive demand-side traffic, he wrote, no amount of scoring sophistication will save it. The second is whether price targets carry information at all. Many people think they are noise, and while the founder guesses that aligning incentives will produce a signal, he said he cannot prove that yet.
On regulation, the founder said he operates as a publisher, not an adviser. Content is impersonal and general circulation, with no personalized recommendations and no performance promises, and nothing on the site is investment advice. The project is at analystidx.com.
The post asks for feedback on which analysts users would like to see on Analyst Index and what it would take for them to become a customer as an investor. The founder wrote that he expects most people to have objections to using the site for their own investing and wants to learn what those objections are to evaluate whether they can be overcome. At the time of the post, the Hacker News submission had 3 points and 2 comments.
Editor's Summary
Analyst Index is a Show HN project that scores analysts' price targets against actual stock performance and plans to let analysts charge subscriptions, with the platform taking 10 percent. It currently lists 44 price targets from 25 analysts across three tickers but has no analyst signup, payments or paywall enforcement. The founder says the main open questions are cold-start supply and whether price targets carry information at all.