I'm pretty confused about this. Aren't asset prices (that retail investors are likely to explore) already the real-time forecast of the value of assets?
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Social Forecasting Platform for Retail Investors
$0raised of $100000 goal
07/29/2023date created
Project summary
We are creating a social forecasting platform that enables retail investors to make more informed decisions by leveraging the wisdom of crowds and AI. Today, the majority of the population doesn't have formal financial knowledge. Hence, they would go to sites like Wallstreetbets to seek advice and opinions. However, the existing site doesn't vet the credibility of its users, retail investors are easily faced with poor advice, impulsive hype, and financial scams, causing more damage to their financial stability.
WOC Street aggregates user predictions to provide real-time community forecasts. A key aspect of our platform is validating users' prediction win rates, fostering a community of trust, and helping retail investors avoid scams, fake news, and fake financial gurus.
What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?
Our goal is to bridge the knowledge gap, promote online credibility and encourage good investment practices.
We are redesigning the prediction market to be more intuitive and provide meaningful incentives, solving the mass-adoption problem the existing platforms faced.
Build a small community to test and experiment with the product
Users can use earned coins to redeem premium services like AI News Analysis.
Scale the platform and community so that forecasting accuracy is trusted and respected by the investment world.
Offer different languages and allow global investors to further contribute to the wisdom of the crowd.
We want to make WOC Street the most trusted social investing platform, empowering everyday investors to make more informed decisions. The success of the platform will reduce online financial scams and income inequality.
How will this funding be used?
We are requesting $100,000 in funding, denominated in USD, for our project. The breakdown of the budget is as follows: 50% on salary for technical founders, 20% on software development, 15% on marketing and outreach, 10% on administrative costs, and 5% on contingency and unexpected expenses. The priority is to fund the engineering founders to work on the project full-time.
Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-chen-a9a98175/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/noni2she/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincent-lin-649201126/
We have successfully built the MVP(https://wocstreet.com/) without funding.
Our team consists of experienced professionals with a proven track record in established consumer-facing companies like Amazon, Verizon, and OpenTable. Daniel has a finance degree and zero-to-one product management expertise. Our technical team, Vincent and Bryce, have strong backgrounds in backend and frontend development, respectively.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)
Adoption. As a close follower of Manifold Market, I am aware of the challenges to kick-start a play-money prediction market and its limitation in the US. That's why we are creating premium features that provide an incentive for long-term participation.
What other funding are you or your project getting?
No funding at the moment.
Chen
4 months ago
Current asset price is based on current information available. This is future price forecast based on multiple factors like economic factors, market sentiment, fundamentals, technical analysis, market news...etc.
Joel Becker
4 months ago
@Daniel but
The "current information available" includes the factors you point to.
I can get future price forecasts from the prices of futures contracts, right? (Cost of carry aside -- prediction markets would have their own issues, in particular liquidity.)
Chen
4 months ago
@joel_bkr There are many attempts to get a price forecast. Analyst reports for 12 months price target. Future contract that is used for hedging. Discounted cash flow analysis to find a fair value. However, most retail investors doesn't have these knowledge and go to places like wallstreetbet, which has 14M subscribers and kind of indicate the problem still exist. There were posts being hyped up by stranger who has no proven record and caused a lot of damage.
WOC Street is a play money prediction market so liquidity is not an issue. The goal is to create a trusted prediction community with more credibility and less noise for investors.
Joel Becker
4 months ago
@Daniel I agree that retail investors are unlikely to be sophisticated enough to looks at e.g. the prices of future contracts. But why should I expect them to be sophisticated enough to seek out + understand + trust a play-money prediction market?
And, my apologies, liquidity was a bit of a misnomer. I meant to invoke related issues like "number of market participants" and volume.
I guess it feels to me like:
I'm not sure there's a serious problem here.
Even if there is, I'm not sure prediction markets solve it in practice. (I've concentrated on this above, but the other concerns feel important too.)
Even if they do, I'm not sure this would be highly socially valuable.
Chen
4 months ago
@joel_bkr That's ok. Thank you for reviewing.
I believe there is a serious problem. Investment fraud is one of the largest fraud type in the world. Many get rich campaigns, trading scam advertisements are still common online, exploiting unsophisticated retail investors.
I see there is a potential to use play money predictions market to solve it because this topic has a direct financial influence to users, unlike some other topics that has low motivation to participate.
If this becomes successful, I see the potential to reduce investment frauds and increase online credibility.
Joel Becker
4 months ago
@Daniel No no, thank you for engaging so kindly with negative feedback. I'm very grateful that we are able to have this back-and-forth at all.
I think we've hit the bedrock of our disagreement, so will leave things here for now.
By the way, I like the design of the website! It's pretty and intuitive!