Close on the heels of our
recent site redesign, I’m super-excited to announce the re-launch of the TradeKing Community! To check it out, go to Community > Community Home in the menu above.
We’ve re-tooled aspects of our community and added new features ever since we launched it back in December 2005 – but this time we think we’ve really taken a giant step forward. Now our community platform puts the spotlight on the trading action within our community (and the reasoning behind that action). It’s a great way to discover new trading opportunities, research them further, and bounce your ideas off knowledgeable folks before pulling the trigger.
I’m especially excited about the
Trade Notes feature, which allows you to jot down your reasoning post-trade, either as a note-to-self or a means of giving (and getting) insight into the why’s behind every trade. It’s a fast and simple alternative to writing your own “traditional” blog – plus you can add chart images and other content if you’d like to complete the picture of your trade.
Another cool feature is
groups. Now you can gather a group with shared interests together online for more effective interaction. I can imagine lots of uses for groups: letting you “wire” the offline interactions of your investment club; or creating groups around a specific stock, market sentiment, trading strategy, or option play. We think letting you organize your interactions into various online “rooms” will make conversations that much more focused and valuable to their members.
I’m also excited about
voting and
tagging, both ways to drill down to the really meaty content that interests you, faster. Now you can “vote” on especially useful content you find in many sections of the community – which helps you and other users find the most valuable content more effectively.
Similarly,
tagging helps the community work together to label content for easier retrieval later. Think of tagging like a big filing folder project: you can add “tags”, or file labels to content you find so that other users can search or browse to find that content later. So if you read a great post about a new advertising technology at Google and its effect on November options, you can tag that post “Google”, “advertising”, “technology” and “options”. (Tagging is super-fast and easy; in fact, our platform suggests tags based on words it finds in the content.) Bam! Now other Google-heads can use tags to pull up Google-related content – as can traders following the advertising or tech sectors, and the options fans. It’s an ever-expanding encyclopedia of knowledge that the community labels for future retrieval later. Neat, eh?
Voting and tagging also help you interact more easily with fellow members – something we’ve kept in mind throughout this redesign. In that spirit, we’ve also added
traditional message boards at your request.
I’m also a big fan of the
subscription feature. Say you find a really clever trader whose trade notes or message board posts you’d like to follow. Simply click on the username, then click on the “Subscribe to me” button underneath their profile picture. Now you’ll get fresh content generated by this user delivered straight to your dashboard, as soon as it happens. Also, on many pages, you’ll note a familiar-looking orange “subscription” logo in the upper right corner – click there to subscribe to whatever page you’re on, be it a page with all the TK community trades on a particular symbol you like, or the trades of a trader you’re learning from. Even more ways to interact with other members, plus the features you’ve come to rely upon like Certified Trades, should make the platform more useable than ever.
There’s lots more to discover, so I’d encourage you to check it all out. We think this new platform makes the excitement and collective “buzz” of ideas more immediately palpable, exciting, and actionable – and we’d love to hear what YOU think. Talk to me, people!
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Follow the markets at the
TradeKing Blog, or learn more about options strategies from the
Options Guy.
