Why did you build Stocketa?
When the pandemic began, I found myself quarantining inside with more time on my hands and a desire to learn a new skill. I had decided that skill would be picking up iOS app development. I learn best by having my own project and with the stock market crash of 2020, I was doing a lot of stock trading.
I became frustrated logging into my financial institutions' clunky apps and websites just to check how my investments were doing. I wanted an elegant way to keep track of my investments.
And Stocketa was born. I have worked on Stocketa an average of 10-25 hours per week in my spare time for over 2 years now. I've designed and built things in SwiftUI, then rebuilt them many times over as I found better ways to design and build them. I also wrote an entire node backend to help with things like proxying APIs for security, cleaning up data, authentication, syncing, notifications, widgets and more.
It has been a labor of love and I can't wait for you to try it out.
Who is Stocketa for?
Stocketa is for anyone that wants an easier, faster and more elegant way to keep an eye on their investments compared to the clunky apps and websites their financial institutions provide.
It doesn't matter if you only own a few TSLA shares from years ago, if you YOLO into meme stocks or you just follow a simple Bogleheads three-fund portfolio. Whatever your investing style, Stocketa helps you keep an eye on your investments. See them at a glance with portfolio and stock widgets. Receive a daily alert when the market closes. Or use neither and just open the app when you want.
Since Stocketa does not connect to your stock brokers directly and requires manual logging or importing, Stocketa may be less convenient for day traders logging dozens of new trades per day.
How much does Stocketa cost?
Stocketa will require a paid monthly subscription. Pricing is still TBD until launch. Due to the nature of financial data, it costs me a non-trivial amount of money to access the data needed from multiple data sources as well as run my own server and cloud services.
On top of that, a ton of time and passion went into Stocketa, which has been a labor of love for over 2 years. I’ve designed and redesigned and built and rebuilt the entire app several times to continually refine to achieve a high-quality bar. Stocketa is not for everyone and there are cheaper, less elegant products on the market.
What assets are supported?
Most crypto assets and U.S. stocks and securities are supported. Stocks on OTC markets may not be present. I plan to add support for complete U.S. stock market coverage once Stocketa begins making money and I am able move to a high-quality data provider that is currently prohibitively expensive for me.
Can I connect directly to my bank or broker?
No. While this is something I'd like to do there are significant blockers. For one, using an API provider that can facilitate these secure connections costs a minimum of $500 USD per month depending on usage. That's not something I can afford at this time.
Separately, I do enjoy that Stocketa is entirely disconnected from your financial accounts. I've heard from many people in my testing that appreciated the privacy and security of not requiring connection to their financial institutions.
It is unfortunately a bit of work to manually add your holdings. Stocketa was built for a casual stock investor like myself: I may do trades multiple times a month at most, so it's not a huge burden to manually enter a stock price and quantity when I do another purchase. If you are more of a day trader, Stocketa may not be for you.
You can, however, import your stock transactions via a spreadsheet. In the future, I may explore a small Mac app to help simplify the process of updating your holdings.
Can Stocketa be used outside the U.S.?
Stocketa is only available for people in the United States. A lot of challenges and costs are associated with expanding support to other countries including finding and paying for high-quality financial data, which is either not reliable or extremely expensive.
As a solo developer, it’s best for me to focus on the U.S. and get the experience right.
Is Stocketa a crypto wallet?
No. Stocketa is more akin to a portfolio tracker. Stocketa does not connect to any crypto exchange or wallet.
Currently, crypto support is manual logging where you would manually add how many tokens or crypto assets you have. I plan to explore better integration where it can automatically update if provided a public Ethereum address, for example.
However, I think a primary benefit of Stocketa is that you can see details around cost basis and individual transactions. It is impossible to determine your crypto cost basis strictly by monitoring a public Ethereum address. I would also need to integrate with your crypto exchange to determine the cost basis. This becomes extremely tricky and requires multiple integrations which would not be worth the work right now. There are entire businesses built around this for helping with your crypto taxes and helping understand your cost basis and gains.
What's next?
Stocketa is in active development and I'm continually exploring design and usability refinements, functionality improvements and reliability enhancements.
Your financial support will help ensure this continues.
Who made Stocketa?
Stocketa (the website, app and backend) was designed and built entirely by me, Paul Stamatiou (@Stammy). I'm a designer who can code. I am a huge advocate for holding a high quality bar while maintaining a strong customer focus.
I have founded 3 startups in the past (some with Y Combinator), spent 9 years at Twitter on the Design team (here's some past work) and most recently was a Principal Designer at a crypto exchange called Kraken.
Read more about me on my website.
Why do some stocks not have extended hours prices at times?
Stocks on the NASDAQ exchange may not recieve after-hours data immediately after market close and may take some time before it appears for that date. The same case applies for OEFs (including funds like VTSAX) where the price for the day may not be available until the end of extended hours trading, and potentially a bit later.
The unfortunately reality is that stock market data can be expensive and have various limitations like this. Getting quality data is a goal for Stocketa, but the best data providers can cost upwards of thousands of dollars per month so I'm unable to afford it until Stocketa grows more.
I'm constantly finding ways to improve Stocketa's data quality so this will evolve.
