What Capitalmind Premium members like about Premium, and improvements we are working on that will go live in the near future.
“Don’t want education. Want to make quick money. For the long term, I can invest in MFs. Tax efficient too.”
This is such an interesting time! In a survey we recently conducted, we did have a response similar to the one above. It’s reflective of a “Give me fish, don’t tell me all this nonsense about how to fish” – and thankfully this is far from the consensus among Premium subscribers.
A big thank you to all those who responded. 🙏🏽
There is always a lot happening at Capitalmind. New ideas get introduced, old ideas get retired, others get torn down to be rebuilt. So periodic surveys with our subscribers is a way for us to take a step back, and see if we are still pointed in the right direction and making progress on our internal mission of being the most trustworthy site in India for actionable investing.
In this post we’ll summarise what we’ve recently heard from our members, and the improvements (some of them radical) that we are working on to be rolled out over the next few weeks and months.
And most importantly: What we are, and what we definitely are not.
Our members like us, mostly
Overall, Capitalmind Premium subscribers rated their willingness to recommend us to friends and colleagues at 8.5 / 10
Breaking it out by how long the respondents have been Premium subscribers shows an interesting trend. While our overall scores are healthy albeit with opportunity for improvement, brand new members rated us poorly compared to those who have been spent a little more time with us.
Lessons for us:
- For new subscribers: Do a better job helping them get started with the things that matter most
- For all: Close that improvement opportunity gap
Most members get a ton of value in the Capitalmind Forum
All Premium members have access to the Capitalmind Slack forum. Think of this space as an informal meeting place for asking questions and exchanging ideas. From short-term trade ideas, to bottom-up fundamental valuation discussions, currency movements, macros, and even world markets – everything under the sun gets discussed here. Members join the channels they find most relevant. There’s even a #geekstuff channel where stuff like “which is the best mechanical keyboard” gets discussed. Active participants range from newbie investors to veteran traders and investors means there’s something for everyone. And there’s no such thing as a silly question. Everyone, including the CM team learns.
Capitalmind Member Forum
The forum also serves one of the ways the CM team announces portfolio actions. The CM team occasionally schedules slack AMAs (Ask Me Anything) where folks can log in and ask anything on their mind.
Not surprisingly, members who are engaged on slack show a higher willingness to recommend Capitalmind to friends and colleagues than those who are not.
Lessons for us:
- Help more subscribers discover the power of the forum
- Conversely ensure valuable insights are easily available to non-regular users of the forum
What Premium Members value most
We asked which ONE feature (of the several) did subscribers value the most. They could only pick one no matter how many others they liked.
The member forum, Capitalmind Portfolios, and Investment Strategies are some of our most-loved features.
…and what they value least
We also asked which ONE feature they valued the least.
Sector Deep Dives, Short-Term Actionable Strategies, and posts on Personal Finance seem to be the least valued features on Capitalmind.
Note how most of the features here also feature on the most-loved chart. That’s not a mistake. It means a group as diverse as our Premium members, features that some love, others don’t care about, and vice versa. So while 32% of our subscribers value the slack forum as the most valuable feature, 12% find it least valuable given they probably do not have the time to log on.
Lesson for us:
- Do less of the stuff most people are indifferent to (but we thought was valuable)
- Rethink how we do a few things to make them more relevant to more folks
These in addition to the survey comments gave us ton of priceless insight (even the one quoted at the start of this post).
Improvements we are working on
This entire post is unusual, as in it’s not meant to be one. Most teams use insights from surveys like this to internally discuss and work on them in the background. But because of the diversity of Capitalmind members, we think it’s important to provide context on what the community as a whole thinks, and how we identified improvements to work on.
Simplifying Portfolios: We currently have 7 live model portfolios (5 equity portfolios, 1 fixed income, and 1 trading strategy). While each portfolio and strategy has a clear use-case, we’ve realised it gets complicated for an investor trying to figure out how to allocate to them. We will pare this list down to include only essential and meaningfully distinct portfolios. Two portfolios: Dividend Yield and High-Price Portfolios will cease to be in our list of recommended portfolios. We will post about specifics on the way forward for anyone currently invested in them.
- Dividend Yield: Because Dividends are now taxed, this may not be useful as a longer term strategy anymore; it may be just better to use the Large-Cap Index strategy to build to longer term goals. This portfolio will be retired at the end of August 2020. We suggest rolling out and moving to the Large Cap Index strategy instead.
- High-Price: While this is an excellent strategy and we actually have it in our Capitalmind Wealth PMS, it’s altogether confusing to offer it in Premium. Because of that, we will retain it as one post every year, but not as a strategy to allocate or actively manage. The portfolio will be retired in December 2020, and after that we’ll share a Google sheet with the current portfolio that anyone can use (but not displayed on the CM Website)
Sharpening the LT Multicap Portfolio: To do a better job of tracking and covering the LT Multicap Portfolio, we will reduce the number of holdings in the portfolio, and have only one of two statuses for any holding. Buy or Sell. We will make a few other changes around the way it is set up. More about this soon.
Focused AMAs with CM: We did a few slack AMAs over the last couple of months where all premium members were invited to join and ask about anything investment-related on their mind. Based on feedback, we’ll continue these but will focus individual AMAs on specific topics.
New Investor / User Content: We’ll add more “how to” and “basics” content and also collate what we hope will be an effective getting-started guide for new investors.
Usability Improvements: A bunch of under and above the hood improvements to enable better use of the site including working with CM Portfolios. To mention a minor example, to be able to easily bookmark and access posts you’d like to refer back to. This and a few other improvements are in the works and should start rolling out over the next few weeks. On this list is also a mobile-friendly Progressive Web App.🤞🏽
As you can imagine, some of these involve a fair bit of work so expect them to take a few weeks to be rolled out. There are a few others but let’s leave some pleasant surprises for later.
Making quick money vs. Learning How
Back to what subscribers should and should not expect if they sign up for Capitalmind Premium.
Here’s a live example: The last member survey (in May) told us there was significant interest in active trading strategies.
That led to the still ongoing series on trend-following: What is this trend-following thing anyway [link], If you can’t measure it, don’t trade it [link], Understanding the why of trends [link], The making of a trend-following strategy [link] and Rough framing a trend-following strategy [link]
Only then, in July, did we launch Capitalmind Chase – Our active trend-following strategy that combines the NIFTY and NIFTY Futures.
The easier and more lucrative thing would have been to forget about publishing the underlying thought-process and launch our proprietary “returns max” trading strategy.
But then none of us here at Capitalmind get excited about the thought of marketing mysterious “quick money” strategies. We won’t do this get-rich-overnight kind of marketing, or tell you fifty stocks to buy every day of which we’ll say we-told-you-so on the five that did make money. We’re glad you even read this far into the post, but if you have, we hope you agree with the sentiment.
We’re ok not being the place for “quick money” ideas, and the real deal is the understanding of how the system often gives you opportunities. The point is to highlight what we don’t want to be, in order for us to be better at who we really want to be.
Our approach seems to be working reasonably so far.
Here’s to constantly improving what we offer. Thanks for reading.
It’s been a good year for our Momentum strategy.
Check it out on @smallcaseHQ : https://t.co/GhooUIy53T pic.twitter.com/76GdF3gJaP
— Capitalmind (@capitalmind_in) August 1, 2020
We revamped the LongTerm Multicap portfolio in April with a four-box framework.
Subscribe to CM Premium to get access to our model portfolios and so much more.
Sign up here: https://t.co/MU4rN0foPD pic.twitter.com/Ev1KR5We0R
— Capitalmind (@capitalmind_in) July 25, 2020
Capitalmind Chase Performance Update for 31 July #CMChase
YTD: +29.5%
Last 4 weeks: +8.4%
This week: +2% pic.twitter.com/aZfJpI7aY7— Capitalmind (@capitalmind_in) July 31, 2020
For full access to our model portfolios, research, and member forum, upgrade to Capitalmind Premium today. Use Code CMPOFF10 to get 10% off regular price.
