Today's tip on getting the most out of TradeKing's Community: turn on Certified Trades in your profile today. 

Prove your trading cred '“ and know who's qualified to advise you.

Whether you're talking finance on financial message boards or the golf course, the old problem is figuring out who's for real and who's bluffing a big portfolio (and who's paying someone else for all that genius). We're trying something new in cutting out the b-s: Certified Trades.

Here's how it works: login, then go to Services > Settings > Certified Trades. On that screen check the box marked 'œPost information about executed trades to my blog' and then save. The next trade you place will post automatically to your Community profile for others in the community to see.

You can turn this trade publisher on and off as you like '“ maybe you just want to show off your option trades, or trades relevant to a certain strategy you are blogging about. 

Of course, Certified Trades represents what a trader or investor is doing within his or her TradeKing account only, so the bigger financial picture may be different. But the fact is, for the first time online EVER, you actually know that a person did the trade he or she claimed to do, certified by TradeKing, an NASD member brokerage firm.  That's a level of certainty about who you're connected to that you can never get from a Yahoo message board. If you see a guy who's executed ten successful calendar spreads in a row, you know for a fact he's truly had that success, because TradeKing certifies it happened. That should make you feel a lot better asking him for tips about that strategy.

As always, if you've noticed a cool feature I'm missing and should highlight, send it my way!

Sounds great! I like to see how people are doing as well as the volume of trading. I post most of my trades...key word: ''most''. There seems to be a bug in my profile since the last trade I executed (1/26/07) never posted. The first trade I executed did not post either, but TR customer service said they corrected th glitch. Looks like it may be back.

Is there really a demand for this type of insight? Personally, I could care less about what someone’s last 10 trades were. Just as investment disclosures state: “Past performances are not indicative of future results.” I think this is rubbish. Only desperate investors would be concerned with something like this!

Thanks for mentioning your issue with Certified Trades. Our Director of Internet Strategy tells me we're back in production.

Definitely let us know if you notice any more problems - and thanks for your eagle-eye!

Be Good,
Don

Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous:

Thanks for your comment. First, just to clear this up: no comment of yours was ever removed. Maybe you didn't notice that I posted twice on successive days (1/30 and 1/31) on the topic of Certified Trades. Your original comment is where you posted it, as it has always been, underneath my post of 1/30. Then you re-posted the same comment, twice, on the 1/31 post. If you hit the Previous button above, you'll see my post from the day before, and your comment right there where you put it originally.

As for Certified Trades, and whether they are ''rubbish'', as you suggest: You know the saying, 'One man's garbage is another man's treasure!' So, if you don't find value in the Certified Trade feature, simply avert your eyes. In time, we'll see if there's continued interest and demand for this new feature or not - but we think it's an idea worth pursuing, and we've been getting great feedback from the folks who are members of our community and from participating TradeKing account holders.

A big problem with so-called ''stock chat'', whether online or off, is a lack of transparency. Who knows if you should heed anyone's ideas or suggestions, unless you have some degree of visibility into their actual results? Certainly the infamous pump-and-dump schemes on message boards rely on anonymity. I say the lack of trustworthy transparency is the problem there. That's what's different in here. In the TradeKing community, you can see who is anonymous, who is a member of the community, and, most importantly, who is a member of the community who also has a TradeKing account.

Thus, while an investor may choose to protect her privacy by naming herself ''Abby Normal'' or any other fake name, when you see the ''TradeKing Accountholder'' badge on a community profile, you can be sure TradeKing, a regulated NASD-member brokerage firm, does know who that user is. If you see a trade certified by us, you know for a fact it happened. If someone is stupid enough to attempt a pump-and-dump in this arena, we'll cooperate fully with the regulators in running them into the paddy wagon.

Obviously, Certified Trades isn't a perfect window - it's possible to ''hide'' unsuccessful trades in another brokerage account, for example - but we think it's a step in the right direction. We believe transparency and accountability will go a long way towards helping honest investors connect with other honest and truly knowledgeable traders in our community.

I think everyone would agree that it's a fact that past performance is not indicative of future results. However, that doesn't mean they are irrelevant, or not interesting. I disagree with you there.

Be Good,
Don

p.s. apologies to all for the slight delay in responding here. We are required by the NASD to get all posts to this blog, including comments, approved by our compliance department before posting online.