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Simply Wall St's unique approach to stock analysis
03 Aug 2021
Simply Wall Street doesn’t provide financial advice, but it does provide a unique visualisation tool to help users make more informed financial decisions. We speak with CEO Al Bentley to learn more.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then fintech startup Simply Wall St is producing 10 million words per day, via the more than 10,000 infographics that turn daily – and complex – financial data into simple visuals.
Utilising data from S&P Capital IQ, Simply Wall St enables users to get an instant visualisation of many and varied financial aspects of individual companies listed in 41 exchanges across 27 markets. Users can also utilise the visualisation tools for insight into their overall portfolio.
It’s a fascinating concept, and Canstar caught up with the Co-founder and CEO of Simply Wall St, Al Bentley, to find out a bit more about the service.
Q: What is the benefit for self-directed investors in using Simply Wall St?
A: Our aim at Simply Wall St is to turn you into a better investor. We do this by helping you make non-emotional, long term investment decisions based on fundamentals. Specifically:
- Access to institutional quality company data on ASX and international stocks
- Holistic company analysis model which makes due diligence a breeze
- Portfolio analysis
- Ability to find new ideas and create your own ‘views’ based on our analysis.
Q: You are competing in an increasingly crowded marketplace. What are your competitive advantages?
A: It is very crowded but this actually makes the experience of being a DIY investor worse, as people are overloaded with information and conflicting opinions!
We are the only platform that analyses over 75,000 stocks every six hours and presents the results in a really easy to understand infographic. Users can then search for any of those stocks via our advanced filtering system, which is sort of like designing your own dream Snowflake! Because we analyse all those companies, this also allows us to do things like portfolio analysis in a way that no one else can.
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# Ongoing fee for the account. There may be waivers or discounts subject to account use
Q: Why do you think infographics are more likely to be read than an article? What is it that makes them so effective?
A: It all comes back to how the brain processes information. We actually process visuals 60,000 times faster than text and because of this when information is presented as an infographic it’s 30 times more likely to be read than a pure text article.
I think this is especially true with finance, which is a bit behind other industries with recognising this, a lot of content is still 100% text and even the visuals they include are often not easy to read! Some of the big publishers like Bloomberg have dedicated infographic teams now, so it is changing.
Visit the Simply Wall St website to test the tools for yourself!
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Cover image: Supplied by Simply Wall St
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