I decided I want to deprecate suggestions feature on digrin.com. I looked into data and it was rarely used. Digrin was sending emails to users (I even forgot about that part). I don’t use the feature myself, and I think it can be even dangerous, to have a feature that sounds like “suggestion for stock buys”, which you often need financial licence to do. And this was automated feature. I am removing it now, but wanted to write down for myself how it worked, because I will definitely forget and one day I might find it interesting.
Digrin has a stock screener, where you can filter stocks. You can find better stock screeners around, and digrin has no intention to compete with them. But it was an intention to provide a simple stock screener focused on dividends – for example by allowing to filter based on dividend champions or dividend contenders. This is how stock screener looks like:
Right there under the title, you can check dividend lists you are interested in. If you are interested only in US stocks that paid and raised dividends for more than 10 years in a row, you will check “Contenders” list.
Later you can choose what metric are you interested in, e.g. dividend yield filter can be enabled/disabled in Active column. Filter column sets range what stocks should be included. Influence will adjust results based on how important this metric is for you. There is also field Sector, that takes your portfolio sector diversification in account, and penalizes all sectors where you are already heavy invested. All non-testing portfolios are taken into account. This being said, stock screener is staying as it is, but I thought it’s important to explain this before I get to suggestions feature.
Suggestions on Portfolio
Now that we have data from stock screener, where users can personalize their preferences, digrin knows what stocks you prefer. Or maybe not stocks, but attributes like dividend yield. If you selected you want 10% dividend yield stocks, suggestions feature showed you how would your sector allocation look like, if you replace the worst stock in current portfolio with best ranking stock in stock screener. Here it how it looks, I did a quick screen recording.
As mentioned on the page, you could view next stock from stock screener or from portfolio by clicking on “Show next”. Or you could tell digrin you like that stock in the portfolio, in that case, digrin would not show it in sell suggestions for next 6 months, so you are not annoyed you see your loved stock there all the time. Similarly, for suggested stocks, if digrin suggests you stock NC all the time, because it matched your parameters in stock screener, but you did your own research on NC and you don’t like it, you can tell digrin not to show it to you for next 6 months as well. All this is saved automatically, and you could change these preferences in your settings page, which looked like this:
That’s it, it is all it did. Well, it also sent users email every now and then with same info, but that is a minor thing. You could adjust, how often (and if at all) you want to receive these emails in notifications settings:
Now, all this is going away. As I mentioned at the start, I don’t think digrin should be doing suggestions to your portfolios and it will simplify digrin a bit. So I can focus on features, that are actually useful 🙂