Site that showcases our neural network signals, critique please

I think the website is coded very well, clean and simple. All about the content. But I miss something. Something to remember. Maybe just a fresh colored spade?

>> I'm looking for an honest critique, how does the site strike at first glance, does it succeed in letting the user know right away whats going on? Is it hard to get to the signals, do they make sense?

I've been interested in neural networks for many years, so I may may not be representative of the average person looking at your site. I know the neural part, I'm not as knowable on the financial part.

The design and content really depend on your intended audience and purpose, which is, as you say, "to give retail investors access to quant[itative] technology and data in a user-friendly, transparent, and democratic way".

I'm not sure if you mean *professional* retail investors or amateurs like me, who have some amount of money in the market and are trying to find a way to increase my return and reduce overall risk, maybe spending an hour or so a day in the process. If it's for amateurs, the financial information needs to be dumbed down a bit. I noticed you refer to Investopedia but you might want to have links to Wikipedia for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund, and maybe include extensive quotes from the wiki article such as:

Most ETFs are index funds that hold securities and attempt to replicate the performance of a stock market index. An index fund seeks to track the performance of an index by holding in its portfolio either the contents of the index or a representative sample of the securities in the index.

This seems like a better, less technical definition that Investopedia. You could also add comments about the meaning of it all, address the "so what" questions that people might be asking themselves. Try to simplify whenever possible. A few diagrams of the parts and interactions of the ETF industry could help explain how it works. You might even add some of the explanatory material to Wikipedia; the article needs it.

It might be good to have a section in the FAQS for what the neural network will *not* do, to help set the boundaries for the use of the models. Some of the pragmatic information is in your blog, maybe generalize it and put it in the FAQS page. I noticed that FAQS was your top page on Google, so that would be an entry point for many people.

This may relate to your question, "do they make sense?". The answer is more complex than it seems. As I'm sure you know but other people may not know, neural networks don't give reasons for their recommendations, they are purely associative, they just are. There are some analytic back-ends that help to differentiate between strong and weak associations in different factors, but it doesn't provide a "why" in the way that most people can understand. You may want to address that. You aren't trying to sell a product like the other NN ETF services, so you can afford to cut out the marketing blather and give them a more truthful assessment about the utility of tracking signals.

I'm pretty sure that more money has been made in selling gee-whiz financial tools than has been made by using them. The big fad with option trading seminars and systems is a prime example. For every person who made money, probably five people lost money, the poor slobs. You may want to be more explicit in selling the idea of your service to the many thousand of people who have been burned in the past - or at least their expectations were set too high. You don't have to oversell your service ( I don't think you are ). On the other hand, let everybody know that New Capital Club is different !

On the UI front, I had to mouse around for a couple of minutes to find links embedded in the text. A little bump to the stylesheet should fix that.

When I clicked on your major graphic "Neural Net Status", I wanted to go somewhere. Maybe change it to a high level site navigation image with an image map, that might be more effective.

A very interesting site. I glad I had a chance to look at it. I'll be tracking you ...

- Bill B.
http://billbreitmayer.com

.

Excellent information, your content can't be questioned (from a layman, at least).

I'd experiment with some typeface styling though to break things up. Headings as different colours (orange, purple, light blue - one of these). At least that way your content would be easier to browse.

Good work.