In this prescient article by the ubiquitous Mark Hulbert, “Can you believe Wall Street”, the author notes that three-quarters of Wall Street ratings are positive, while less than 1% are sells. That is not the case in the real world. Today is a great example, with the market off nearly 4% and nearly every stock being hit hard. Today if you’d been following Wall Street, and indeed, over the last few weeks and months, you would not have been served well. As exemplified in the above reference article, Enron stands out. Enron fooled Wall Street – continuously, even as it slid to zero, taking life-savings and pensions with it.
We were, seemingly, at the mercy of Wall Street on that one. Today, we have a robust blogging community on sites such as SeekingAlpha.com or MotleyFool.com. One wasn’t around, the other was fooled as well. Why couldn’t a community of sleuths find the fraud first?
The problem though, is that those of us without years invested studying the market are at the mercy of Wall Street analysts or louder voices in media and on the Internet to do this homework for us – with our never knowing their primary assumptions or the ability to tweak their assumptions a bit. Unless we want to spend hours researching each stock, we have to take these analysts at their word for the most part. For a lot of people this isn’t an answer. They want to be empowered to make those calls on “sell” or “buy” themselves, based on knowledgeable research.
Tweaker empowers everyday users and even the pros to make those calls. We want consumers to be able to make their own informed decisions, without hours and years of research. Tweaker lets users call the kettle black with objective tools to see what is safe to buy, or not!
The Tweaker app does what Wall Street does, only better, because it puts you the user in the seat of a Wall Street pro with all the knowledge-and lets you make the informed judgment call. We are crowd-sourcing Wall Street’s job – by providing estimates and therefore meaningful insight into what is worth buying, or not.
