Today I’m shining the spotlight on yet another of our new community features: groups. (If you’re catching up on this series, I’ve already posted about the benefits of forums, voting, subscriptions, tagging and trade and position notes.) Groups gives you the chance to set up your own trading-treehouse to gather likeminded community members around topics they all care about.

Let’s take our biggest new group, Union of Fundamentalist Stock Pickers, or my personal fave for clever titles, I Keep Investing in Stocks I Know I Shouldn’t, as examples. The first group gathers investors  seeking advice and perspectives with a fundamentalist twist on equities. The second group is a fun place for investors to share war stories and lessons learned from their trading mistakes. These groups are open to anyone, so if you want in, just click on the big orange “Join the Group” button in the upper left-hand corner of each group’s home page.

You’ll then be able to see all your fellow group members’ contributions across our community – trade notes, trades, blog and forum posts – from a single screen. Updates on group activity will also be delivered to your My Dashboard screen.

You can also start your own group by logging in, clicking the Groups tab, then clicking the “Start a New Group” button. You'll be taken to a page where you can enter group details (name, description, logo if you’ve got one, et cetera.) You can even control which users can see your group (everyone, just your group members or no-one) and whether your group is open to anyone, closed to your group members, or open to users who apply to join. Privacy controls like these let you use our groups feature as an online home for your offline investment club, with the level of privacy you’re comfortable with. Even better, if you’re managing your i-club’s account with TradeKing as your brokerage, your group’s interactions can lead seamlessly to trades when you deem it’s time to make a move. Nice, eh?

We’re really excited about the possibilities of groups and have plenty of goodies in store to enhance this section moving forward. I’d love to see groups across all kinds of specialized interests. Already we have groups for non-U.S. stocks, options traders, and the fundamentalist and “whoops” groups mentioned above – but I can just as easily imagine groups for women investors, retired daytraders, those organized around a shared passion for following a certain stock or perfecting a certain technical analysis or options strategy…really the possibilities are considerable. I’m eager to hear what you guys think of groups, both as it exists now and into the future. After all, social networking is about nothing so much as harnessing group smarts to raise us all up, right? 

[image: tree house by shortfatkid on flickr]
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Follow the markets at the TradeKing Blog, or learn more about options strategies from the Options Guy.