Show HN: I built a website to create financial models for any stock online

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Purpose and Positioning of the Tool

  • Web app to build discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation models for stocks.
  • Not marketed as a stock-price predictor; users are expected to input their own assumptions.
  • “AI models” in the pro tier take a user’s qualitative view of a company and translate it into DCF inputs, plus export-to-Excel.

Modeling Approach and Accuracy Issues

  • Defaults often just extrapolate last year’s metrics (e.g., revenue growth) five years forward.
  • This yields absurd projections for extreme recent growth (e.g., NVDA, CRSP) and negative or tiny valuations for others (e.g., Boeing, Chipotle).
  • Several commenters stress that DCF output is extremely sensitive to inputs; the math is trivial, assumptions are not.
  • Suggestions: add bounds to auto-filled values, hide projected prices until users adjust assumptions, or initialize with breakeven / more conservative defaults, possibly show multiple contrasting models.

Reception: Enthusiasm vs Skepticism

  • Positive: people like the simple UI for DCF, the ability to tweak parameters, and find it educational or entertaining.
  • Skeptical: some argue that if such a tool yielded real alpha, it wouldn’t be sold cheaply; others doubt DCF’s usefulness for predicting equity prices, especially for tech and “story” stocks.
  • Counterpoints note DCF is standard in fundamental analysis, especially for steady businesses, but mainly useful for understanding sensitivities, not for guaranteed outperformance.

UX, Performance, and Data

  • Reports of mobile layout problems, clunky signup (inputs obscured), ticker-selection bugs, and lack of clear explanation of how projected price is calculated.
  • Strong requests to view at least some models without registration.
  • Site initially hit free API limits, causing errors; suggestions to cache results and move to paid tiers.
  • Data comes from a specific financial API; commenters notice missing required attribution.

Feature Requests and Extensions

  • Email/alert system when market price deviates materially from a user-defined fair value.
  • Metric tooltips and basic “good vs bad” guidance.
  • Support for regional/segment breakouts, correlation/backtesting against historical prices, and alternate valuation heuristics.

Legal and Compliance Concerns

  • Some warn about potential regulatory risk (SEC/FINRA) if naive users treat outputs as advice, especially without clear disclaimers or identifiable ownership.
  • Others downplay this, arguing obviously nonsensical outputs are self-disqualifying, but this is contested.