ValueWiki:Boardroom/Policy

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The Boardroom This is the place to discuss ValueWiki's policies and operations. Share your ideas and opinions. Policy Technical Proposals Miscellaneous

This forum is for discussing ValueWiki Policy. If you have an idea, comment, or suggestion, add it here...

First Post

ValueWiki Policy is still evolving. Our aim is to keep things as simple as possible. Use this forum to add your input on the site. Jonathan Stokes 13:56, 19 February 2007 (PST)

Where Does Point-of-View Stock Analysis Belong on ValueWiki?

This discussion was moved here from User_talk:Jonathan_Stokes at 10:21, 22 February 2007 (PST)

Jonathan I think your point about investment analysts is right on and you have no need to apologize imo. As you know from being on the hot seat, financial analysts are paid to 'make a call.' The stock you've recommended is tanking, your trading desk is screaming at you, calling you an 'effing a-hole' and you have to explain: 1) why you should hold; 2) why you should buy more or 3) why you should sell. What matters is you have a firm opinion, a cogent argument and that you're right 51% of the time. What I'm not getting on your site is where does someone like me add value beyond what your robot can do? Where do I put my informed, cogent, well-researched and hopefully hard-hitting opinions? Twostardav

Jonathan, Twostardav, This is a really important discussion that can help shape a direction for Valuewiki and I want to see it continue. One of the reason I got involved in Valuewiki is like Jonathan mentioned, Valuewiki can be empowering especially for the average individual investors. I think Valuewiki can transform the way investors collaborate, share and gather information. I agree with twostardav, that bots and sites like Google, Yahoo, Reuters and Bloomberg do a pretty good job with factual information. I think Valuewiki can add value by helping organize and pool independent analysis and opinions. It is certainly more collaborative and more efficient in pooling information/opinion than blogs. And I believe the peer-moderated nature of wiki can overcome some of the problems with inaccuracy and incivility of message board. Certainly wikipedia is a good example of that. However unlike Wikipedia subjects, market/investing information is much more dynamic. It is interesting how Wikipedia editors can spend months arguing about the neutrality and accuracy of an article. A lot of investing information's life cycle certainly has shorter life cycle. So it will be interesting to see how peer-moderator system works for valuewiki, especially once it gets bigger. I myself, hope to see valuewiki become a more organized but yet more democratic version of aggregator sites like seeking alpha. But in the short term, Valuewiki needs to attract (and motivate) well informed, high caliber contributors. Hey, maybe we should bring this discussion into a more public forum within Valuewiki. --K Hartandi 00:42, 22 February 2007 (PST)

I agree with K Hartandi, this is a very important discussion. One possible answer to Twostardav is that the Talk pages in a wiki offer a healthy, peer-reviewed, discussion and a gate-keeper to the more-consensual main article. Points-of-view can (and should) make their way from the discussion pages into the main articles as on-one-hand/on-the-other-hand summaries, as clearer explanations of the 'state-of-the-debate' about the relative-value of a stock. That forces the debate to be more rigorous and reference-based. The whole range, from gut-feeling hunches about a stock to very highly-informed views by a seasoned observer can always be referred to hard-facts or third-party info or other basic info and that all complements the argument and make their transtioning into the main pages more valuable to readers that come-in for the 'gist' about a stock. It is no easy to be encyclopedic about a fast moving target, but any advances in that road should result in a lot of 'linklove' and high-value traffic to both the main pages and their message boards.--Wikister 09:48, 22 February 2007 (PST)

The great thing about Wiki is we get to make up the policy as we go along! Twostardav raises an important issue - where do users write their analysis?

Generally speaking, I think the current system is easiest - anything opinion based gets posted on the Message Board page. But if a user wants to write a more thorough blog-style analysis, and wants to protect it from random edits, it would make sense if they wrote it on their own subpage and linked it to the Message Board page. This turns each user into their own mini-blog, churning out their own analysis. Great to hear everyone's input on this discussion. Jonathan Stokes 10:21, 22 February 2007 (PST)

Simplicity is important, especially in the early days as you are building a community. As a fundamentals analyst (which I am) you research the supply chain, customers, sales reps, competitors, ecosystem partners, technology maturity, rumor mill etc. and then collaborate with technical analysts (which I'm not), or analysts in related domains (e.g. Semiconductors and PC's), to make a call. I hope over time VW can find a way to support the creation of collaborative opinion-oriented research on stocks beyond a blog-like stream of consciousness. I think that would really be different and useful. Thanks for considering this issue everyone.--Twostardav

More Structure and Guidance Needed

I think ValueWiki could use a bit more structure and user guidance. I feel like I never really know what to provide for a given entry. I do try to refer to the AAPL example, but I would rather have a template for what to enter where while I'm looking at a particular stock. I don't like constantly tabbing back and forth to the AAPL example.

I hope you find this feedback useful. FatPitchFinancials21:07, 23 February 2007 (PST)

Good point, FatPitchFinancials. So far we've wanted to leave things as open-ended as possible. A few sample headings that contain a few examples of links and references for new editors. But this is an interesting note. Would be curious how other users feel. Any specific suggestions? Thanks for the input! Jonathan Stokes 21:07, 23 February 2007 (PST)

I am currently testing, with RIMM, a slight departure from the original suggested sequence of topics and break-out of headings. It seems to me that the stock analysis/valuation should follow some encyclopedic/historical early parts in the articles. I'll be continuing this lab experiment at RIMM over the weekend. Feedback and editing will then be welcomed.--Wikister 21:20, 23 February 2007 (PST)

I guess what I mean is that, as our subject are stocks and they have a highly documented historical record, i.e. the price action vis-a-vis developments, we should explore and contextualize those developments (weighting heavier the ones closer to the present time) and then allow for a more informed company analysis/stock valuation second part of the articles, drawing for the discussion board. By then, one would assume that the participants in the discussion board are also informed by the historical/encyclopedic basis in the first part of the article. I know it is confusing and that's why I decided to test with one article first RIMM, the result should then hopefully be worth a thousand words.--Wikister 21:39, 23 February 2007 (PST)

Wikister, I am very impressed with your work on RIMM. Continuing on our earlier discussion about personal analysis, trying to explain price movement to events can be a very subjective exercise. Yes, an event like guidance release, analyst upgrades/downgrades, product launch, etc can explain some price movement, in the short horizon. Over long term we know that price movement is stochastic (Random walk) with a lot of unexplained factor in there (market, industry, weather in New York, etc). This is even more complicated for larger companies with broad business lines. For example, handsets is only a fraction of Motorola and Apple's product portfolio, I would say it is unfair to compare RIMM, that has focused product portfolio with Motorola or Apple as a whole. This analysis is certainly useful, but I think it is more appropriate for the message board. It is even a more slippery slope once you get into projections and valuation (OK maybe it's too early for me to say this since I don't know what you're planning to put in that section yet). It is a gray area, what constitutes as fair and objective coverage. For example I would consider quoting analyst consensus as fair, but would you consider quoting one sell side analyst balanced? Just my 2 cents, certainly interested to hear more on this. --76.21.111.185 23:50, 23 February 2007 (PST)

I am voting to keep it kinda open and let the community decide on optimum format for each article. I agree there should be some uniform elements, like company history, leadership, risk. However, each industry or even individual stocks is different with different profitability levers and KPI's. I think the community will settle to a consensus after a while. Isn't it the point of Wiki collaboration?  :) When I write for VW, I actually just dumped my due homework/due diligence about the stock I am thinking of investing in. So I usually include questions that I want to be answered before I put my money in and share my findings. --khartand 22:20, 23 February 2007 (PST)

I agree that there are Darwinian benefits in allowing a degree of freedom.--Wikister 22:26, 23 February 2007 (PST)

Good to hear everyone's thoughts. For now, we'll leave the article structure open ended and let things freely evolve. In the meantime, Zach and I will work on improving a system for drawing attention to featured articles. The more examples new users have to work with, the more they will get a sense of how to write on ValueWiki. Jonathan Stokes 09:20, 24 February 2007 (PST)

Cross listed stocks

How should we handle cross listed stocks? Should I just copy and paste contents that I have written for the US listing to the other exchanges, or should we redirect ADS type securities to the underlying? For example, now that you have Singapore, I am thinking of cut and paste the content Singapore airlines content to SSX and put a note and link on SPAAF to the underlying in SSX. How about stocks whose main exchange is not in VW yet, but cross listed in multiple supported exchange in VW (like telkom Indonesia and Indosat), the mother stock is listed in Jakarta which is not in VW yet, but bot stocks are also cross listed in Singapore and NYSE through sponsored ADR type securities. --khartand 21:27, 26 February 2007 (PST)

With RIMM/RIM.CA, I tried to have both the quotes and news feed from RIM.CA in RIMM as well to make RIMM the one and only destination, but without redirecting. I decided not to add the quote/chart and the news feed of RIM.CA in RIMM, as it took space didn't look right. I did put one sentence headers in both explaining what to find in each other.--Wikister 22:39, 26 February 2007 (PST)

Khartand, good point. We're going to start running into this alot! For now I'd vote for a single italicized "disambiguation" sentence in the header, like on Wikipedia. I think Wikister has the right idea on RIMM. I think he wrote For the Canadian listing of RIMM, visit RIM:CA (or some equivalent).

Khartand, your second point is important too. As you noted, in all of these situations, there will be a primary article and one or more secondary articles. We definitely don't want to waste our time maintaining redundant articles! It seems most efficient to do the bulk of the writing on the primary article. The secondary articles can have italicized Wikipedia-like headers saying 'This is the Acme ADR. It tracks the Acme company in Japan. For the main ADR article, visit ADR ARTICLE. (or something along those lines).

That way, the secondary articles only contain information specific to them. For instance, VIACOM INC CL A (VIA) is slightly different from VIACOM INC CL B (VIA). Most of the info can be written on the Class B page. But the Class A page has a little information that is specific to Class A. And the rest should be redirects (Like under Company Analysis perhaps, "for more company analysis, visit the Class B page").

Not to get into Byzantine Wikipedia policies, but this may be a case where ValueWiki needs clear rules. If it sounds like we can hash out a reasonable policy here, we can add it to ValueWiki:Policy. There's not much at that page yet, as we are only just discovering policies like this! Thanks guys for your input here. Jonathan Stokes 00:37, 27 February 2007 (PST)

System of MicroPayments for Good Contributors

Wikister has brought up the idea of payments for good contributors. I thought I would post it here.

"What do you think of the idea of weekly, staggered prizes, compensating different types of contributors..."

...and...

"The idea of micro paypal awards is good. I don't know the legal viability of having that as a permanent feature. It should, however, be highly subjective and not winner-takes-all. One could, for example, imagine teasing a good contributor that has gone quiet with some intermittent, probably declining mini prizes. Maximizing the limited pool of resources would be an art in itself but highly worthwhile. This 'culture' could also be extended, and even honeyed, with the core team of part-time, freelancers. (Then VW just steals a team of quant PhDs to develop the incentive algorithms based on traffic, AdSense, and the phase of the moon...) But seriously, why not try a balance of volunteerism, resume-filling, credits and monetization?" -- Wikister (posted here by Jonathan Stokes 00:03, 3 March 2007 (PST))

I think this is an interesting idea to toy with in the long run. Presently, ValueWiki is not profitable, so regular payments are unlikely! The $2500 contest was paid for out of pocket, and for obvious reasons, we don't anticipate doing that every month. Additionally, we need to make some large investments in hardware and software in order to address our server needs and hire developers to build our wishlist of features. So we are a long way from having the $$$ for salaried writers!

However, should ValueWiki become profitable, we would essentially be making money off the backs of unpaid volunteers. Possibly at that point, top contributors should share in ValueWiki's income.

On the other hand, Wikia earns ad revenue off the work of 100,000 unpaid writers. But Wikia is performing a free service, creating and maintaining the technology for members to use.

I'm definitely curious to hear opinions. It's very rewarding to host contests and find ways to acknowledge great users. But given the financial picture, we're a long ways from creating a fixed system of payments. First things first, we need a small server farm so we can get rid of those pesky server error messages! Jonathan Stokes 00:03, 3 March 2007 (PST)