Today marks TradeKing's first year in business -- and it's been a huge one. We assembled our team and launched the brokerage; shook up the industry with low, fair pricing, great trading tools, and a growing community of traders; scored top rankings in both SmartMoney(1) and Barron's(2) -- and, best of all, got to know all you folks.
I got curious about all the innovations we rolled out this year and asked Robert Donovan, our VP of Internet Strategy, to give me a quick rundown. First we rolled out an entirely new, built-from-scratch, brokerage website, then layered on the goodies thick. Check out this list!
BETTER TOOLS AND QUOTES.
Offered real-time, streaming quotes and charts. Beefed up our Options Chains with more customization power Launched our ground-breaking Profit + Loss Calculator Launched an excellent new Technical Analysis Center; this one's brand-new. This tool identifies emerging technical analysis patterns in charts, plus a full educational center that really gets you started right. (I'm saving the details on this for my next post, so stay tuned.)
BETTER ORDER ENTRY AND EXECUTION.
BETTER ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT.
We've got you covered at year-end and tax-time. Now we offer pre-filled Schedule D's for your account activity, and your account data can be exported to Microsoft Money. For those of you who prefer paper records, we've made all our account pages printable. Added dual passwords as an extra security protection when you're using a public or shared computer.BETTER COMMUNITY / EDUCATION.
We rolled out the industry's first trader community integrated within a brokerage account. You can start your own trading blog free, search for like-minded traders, and read other traders' blogs and commentary. Our free RSS Newsreader lets you consolidate all your favorite news sources into a single screen that constantly searches for updates -- so you don't have to. Our Community also includes a Certified Trades feature, so you can publish your verified trade history in your TK account and prove your trading chops. Our Community Trades brings you a "river of trade data" from all TK accounts, so you can get a bird's-eye view of what we're all trading, right now. (I have some pretty tasty posts planned on all of this, so look for those soon.) We launched and then beefed up our Learning Center video tours of our key trading tools, an options expiration calendar, list of educational events, and plenty more. We rolled out our Refer-a-Friend program, so you can share the good TK news with your friends and colleagues -- and get rewarded as you do so. I finally started blogging myself! (Hey, I'm heading into New Year's Resolution Season; I need all the encouragement and positive feedback I can muster. ;-)...the list actually goes on, but I'll let you pick up your jaw and relax for a bit.
It's no time to rest on our laurels, so expect more great things in 2007. And thanks for joining us for the ride -- we couldn't have done ANY of this without you!
1 'Best Discount Broker' by SmartMoney 8/1/06, based: on Commissions/Fees; Customer Service; Mutual Funds; Trading Tools;
Research; Banking Amenities. Reprinted by permission of SmartMoney © 2006. SmartMoney is a joint publishing venture of
Dow Jones & Company, Inc. and Hearst Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
2 Barron's is a registered trademark of Dow Jones & Company © 2006.
