We decided to open up our strategy to the investor community so that the community could better see where Inderes is headed. In this thread, you can freely give feedback and ideas related to the strategy. After all, this work is ultimately done for you, the investors.
This thread can discuss:
Feedback on the attached strategy deck draft
The purpose of Inderes’ existence
How we could better serve the investor community and our marketplace
Criticism of our operations
How we could together with you as a community create the greatest possible positive impact on capital markets (and society)
The attached strategy material will live and evolve based on your feedback. Sharing intimate information about our company and direction hopefully also emphasizes the openness and community spirit that are part of our values
Let’s try to keep the thread at a general level and in the big picture, avoiding getting bogged down in individual analyses, recommendations, or features (there are separate threads for content ideas, development ideas, and failed recommendations :)).
I would like to see Inderes challenge traditional financial media on their own turf. Current financial media are all full of errors. That would support your mission to bring higher quality information about companies and markets to Finns in general.
Financial media is certainly a relevant theme, even from a partnership perspective, although Inderes itself is becoming a fairly comprehensive medium for following the economy through company events and phenomena.
I also believe that the community can develop into an even more significant part of the service. For example, investor sentiment is conveyed through comments, questions, and likes more in real-time than traditional methods can achieve. This can be an important element alongside analysis in assessing future developments and, of course, brings the IR function into a new era.
Inderes has been a broad-minded pioneer in utilizing technology. Whether there’s a strategy or not, I believe many wild openings will still come from Yu Gong’s den.
I’ve been wondering for a while how Inderes can offer such good services for free. Is the future of the business model to hook Free users with free content and, at some point in the future, convert current Free features into paid ones? However, between the lines of the strategy, I read that the goal is to grow the entire user base with current (and new) services, which would also organically increase Premium payments. The majority of revenue growth would continue to come from paying companies in the future. Am I on the right track?
Does “Inderes app” mean a mobile app? If so, shut up and take my money.
The point about Inderes as an analysis platform is also interesting. How do you verify the impartiality of freelance analysts? What about the quality of the analysis, or is that left for the reader to evaluate?
In investment communities, there seems to be a tendency that when the community size grows to a critical mass, the quality of discussion deteriorates. Frequently asked questions like “Are we in a recession now?” or “X dropped 4%, is it time to buy??” don’t create very constructive discussion and tend to push away participants who delve deeper into their writings. For example, the Stock Investing Facebook group sometimes seems to have reached this point. If Inderes’ platform wants to continue the current interesting discussion, I think some kind of curator system needs to be developed. For example, a full-time Inderes admin or a decentralized karma system like Reddit. Perhaps the current forum implementation won’t work in the future. Have you considered this?
Some of the questions might have been too specific. Thanks anyway for the transparency!
Hello, I’ll comment on a few of these that hit closest to “my own turf” (we don’t have a siloed distribution in our organization here, although digital team members shouldn’t worry about becoming analysts overnight, but in principle, nothing prevents an analyst from making their own videos, etc.).
The features for Free members will remain comprehensive and free, as I commented in another thread, unless the community specifically demands that they should cost money New features and content are being built for Premiums so that Premium membership provides as much added value as possible for the demanding investor.
The majority of revenue in the future will come from something that we can’t even imagine at the moment; I would phrase that revenue growth, quoting Timur Kärki.
That is a significant concern, and it’s good that you brought it up. In the Osakesijoittaminen group, the level has remained relatively good, but of course, as the number of people grows, the “dispersion” also starts to increase: I intend to dedicate more time and energy to cultivating it. On the other hand, not all discussion has to be so serious; we need to find the right balance between substance and “trololo.”
Here on the Investment Forum, there are mechanisms for this; for example, writers rise to a higher level of trust by writing comments and receiving positive reactions from other writers. There will certainly come a time when moderation rights are also given to others besides Inderes’ few paid employees; after all, we are making this forum better together day by day.
From a small investor’s perspective: I understand the purpose of Inderes’ existence, and I believe Inderes has identified the problems in the capital markets and good ways to solve them. I think Inderes operates in accordance with its values, and there is an increasing need (demand) for such a service.
I am amazed at how all European stocks could be analyzed by 2023. To a layman, it sounds like an incredibly ambitious goal, but you know best how to get there. I believe visionary goals should be set high, and one should not settle for little - good!
Good luck on your journey and success in your operations. I think the work done so far has been of high quality overall. Congratulations!
At my workplace, I have brought up Inderes at the coffee table. According to my observations, clearly not all working Finnish small investors know about Inderes’ existence… which is a shame, because the service is so high quality.
Problem: Inderes’ awareness among small investors. → The service is high quality (this is the most important thing), but how can awareness be increased?
We want to be an open ecosystem, which is why third-party content or even analyses are not excluded from our strategy. It is in the interest of the investor community and the marketplace that there are other voices and opinions in the market than Inderes – so we must promote this as needed, in accordance with our mission. However, if we open up our platform, we must also “protect” our users by ensuring that the content is good, high-quality, and impartial. So, one of our core tasks is to ensure that the quality level of the content is high and that it benefits investors – whether it’s our own content or third-party content. In addition to our own work, you investors also have an important role: if some content doesn’t serve you, give it a thumbs down and provide feedback (other feedback tools will surely come so that curation can be handled by algorithms). Note that I’m talking about content; hard-core analysis leading to a recommendation is an extreme case where the impartiality & quality questions are the most challenging to resolve (but we like to solve problems )
This is a really, really great way for you to openly share your plans and discuss the topic with us, your users. I wish publicly traded companies would do the same. (Of course, I understand that they have some restrictions in the stock market, but discussions can always be held…) I hope Inderes makes more discoveries like Siltronic from abroad. You could even take a small sum of money from companies for bringing them to the attention of Finland. After all, you are the most reliable source of investment information in Finland. There’s an idea for your marketing
The goal is to bring a wider range of companies to our service, even at a European level, so that investors can access useful information about these companies. This is, of course, not realistic to achieve with a “traditional” operating model by recruiting new analysts and opening offices. The goal is ambitious because it forces us to think of entirely new ways for a small player with limited resources to make a significant impact in a short time. Naturally, leveraging technology, network effects, and community (collective intelligence) are key here. We can implement our idea of acting as a platform between investors and companies (and creating value for investors) through many other means in addition to analysis – without underestimating the role of analysis. So, we don’t quite mean that every European company would have an in-depth, recommendation-leading analysis done by a professional analyst in our service. To be clear, we also don’t believe that the work of a professional analyst could be entirely replaced by technology.
I think it’s good that you are also looking beyond Finland; I see no reason why Inderes’ operating model in Finland couldn’t be replicated, for example, in other Nordic countries or the Baltics. In fact, I’d be curious to know how concrete your internationalization steps are?
We are indeed surveying nearby markets. One possible direction, for example, is the Baltics, where an underdeveloped and poorly functioning marketplace needs a player like us the most.
The challenge with our model is the chicken-and-egg problem. If there are no companies, it’s not attractive to investors. If there’s no investor community, it’s not attractive to companies. We need to be able to solve this basic problem that every platform company faces so that we can scale effectively enough. Companies in a new market should ideally also bring added value to our current existing community (in the Baltics, for example, the challenge is that it’s very difficult to invest there from Finland; some broker would first need to connect the wires).
“People’s capitalism” (Kansankapitalismi) is a great goal. On the other hand, could Inderes act as a messenger for the Helsinki Stock Exchange and increase awareness among foreign medium and small investors as well?
We could get rid of the periphery stock exchange status, liquidity would improve, and prices would rise due to increased demand.
At the level of individual companies and often individual foreign investors, yes, meaning that when there’s a clear demand for this regarding a company, we often commission translations of reports and our analysts are available to foreign investors. But in the bigger picture, it might require us to have a larger stock exchange (in terms of national economy and thereby) and several companies listed that are significant and interesting on an international scale, to break away from the periphery status… we are, of course, solving this problem partly by promoting popular capitalism
Yep. I’ve been wondering if one could leverage, say, the Seeking Alpha platform and readership… I personally believe that OMXH could be an ‘undiscovered gem’ for many international investors because we have well-managed and competitive global companies listed (OMXH25).
Regarding community and working together with investors, some of you may have already noticed that “sentiment surveys” have appeared in various parts of our service, asking investors for their opinions on companies. The stock price tells the real-time investor sentiment, but this delves deeper into investors’ thoughts about why the stock price is what it is. The dimensions include management trustworthiness, strategy credibility, competitive advantages, earnings growth prospects, and the company’s attractiveness as a long-term investment.
The purpose is to utilize this data in two ways: by giving feedback, investors can genuinely influence and give their voice to the company’s investor relations (and in the future, see what other investors think about the company). On the other hand, the company’s investor relations can see where the pain points in their own communication are (for example, “investors don’t understand our strategy”) and improve their communication and shareholder service through this. I can promise that companies’ investor relations will take this data seriously, so our community has a great opportunity to make an impact by being active.
Hopefully, you will actively give votes and comments in these surveys. We will scale up the service as soon as we get enough raw material, i.e., responses from you… I am super excited about this
Sentiment surveys (e.g. KL’s Stonder :D) are a good idea, but with a small sample size and, for example, the absence of investment portfolio weighting, they are pretty much pure guesswork… It should be possible to do it more scientifically; a large sample size and classification of respondents. If 1000 small investors vote BULLLL and a couple of big institutions say BEAARRRR… You get me?
New features and content are being built for Premiums so that Premium membership provides as much added value as possible for the demanding investor.
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