Here at Estimize, we’ve been quietly at work for the last several months on something we believe will upend the legacy buy/sell/hold ratings regime that has provided little value to investors. Today we are thrilled to finally reveal our latest endeavor to the public, it’s called Forcerank.
Forcerank is a skill-based contest for stock market fans who want to compete for cash and glory. Competitors use their knowledge of the market to rank the performance of 10 stocks, with the goal of winning the money and respect of their peers each week.
You can download the iOS app from the Apple app store and enter next week’s contests HERE.
Forcerank is organized as a competition, in which competitors enter themed contests and rank a list of 10 stocks in order of which they think will perform best to worst that week. Different types of weekly contests include equity industry groups such as Social Media, E-commerce, and Apparel, to global indices, commodities and currencies. There are also catalyst contests that will center around themes such as stocks with earnings releases this week, or FDA approvals, and most shorted stocks.
Most contests will run from market open on Monday to the close on Friday. Monthly and even quarterly contests will also be available. Points are awarded within each game at the end of the week based on how accurate a player’s rankings were compared to the percent change in price of the stocks. The goal is to correctly match up your Forcerank with the actual results at the end of the week. The players with the most points win the prize pool.
The average investor is naturally skilled at equity selection (which of two stocks will perform better). If you asked someone how Groupon was going to perform next week, they’d probably shrug their shoulders. But if you asked them whether you should buy Groupon or Amazon, they’re likely to have a strong opinion on the matter. They get into trouble in the market when they have to then add position sizing, risk management, and marketing timing on top of that intuitive ability. Forcerank eliminates those other variables and isolates the most natural way we think about the market.
Using the same crowdsourcing theory as Estimize, which has made the Estimize Consensus more accurate than Wall Street 74% of the time, we believe this system will produce an incredible data set that will reveal which stocks investors believe will outperform the market each week. The research design is what’s most important here, and we’ve developed the best way for collecting a dataset on stock sentiment, as opposed to assigning stocks a buy, sell, hold rating which essentially has no meaning (buy when? how much? etc). Even overweight/underweight ratings have flaws, made clear by the fact that over 80% of companies are rated overweight by Wall Street analysts, which is statistically impossible. These data sets also suffer from the lack of a specific timeframe or cadence of updates. When everyone Forceranks their stocks at the same time, it makes all ratings relative to each other with no absolute nature. It’s simply great research design.
We are a ways off from that second half, and we will need a good sample of data before we can sufficiently study accuracy trends, but that is at the core, our overall goal here. In the meantime, Forcerank is a super fun contest for stock enthusiasts to participate in.
The app officially goes live in the iTune app store today, and we hope you’ll enter in one of the many
contests running next week. As a special thanks for being an early Forcerank competitor, please use code LAUNCH10 today only for $10 in credit towards any of those contests!
Watch our CEO, Leigh Drogen, discuss Forcerank on an episode of CNBC’s Fast Money Halftime Report, and be sure to check out these recent Forcerank profiles in Fortune and Benzinga.
