How did we get here? Other than the obvious response of 'blood, sweat and tears', it was a helluva lot of ideation, white-boarding, talking to Community members, designing, redesigning, re-redesigning, building, and testing. And finally, the time is upon us.
Who is us? Well, there is you, obviously. I'm Mike. Hello there. Ziggy is the guy behind the design of not only the new Community, but of TradeKing.com as well. Ruby Jim is our developer. (An aside on Jim - he can put down an unbelievable amount of cherry coke zero in one sitting). Helping Jim out was a great company in North Carolina called Relevance (Thanks Justin, Geoff and Glenn!). We got an incredible amount of support from a ton of people at TradeKing - Don, Rich, Tom, KC, Robert, JD, Rick, Brad, Dominic, Stefan, Jude, John S, Stick and Move, George, and Fraz (I am now at the point where it feels like I am giving an acceptance speech at the Oscars). Finally, thanks to all the users who gave their feedback, and dove right in.
We have added a fair amount of functionality that a lot of you have been asking for. Let me tell you about it:
Trading Activity - Trading Activity shows the aggregate buys and sells of the Community. It's fully filterable and sortable, so you can drill down the information you want to see. Think of this as the collective brainwaves of our community at any given minute.
Trade and Position Notes- If Trading Activity is an EKG of the Community's thinking, a Trade Note is your individual brain. Trade notes are a super-easy and fast way to log why you traded something or why you're still holding a position. Writing Trade Notes is a great discipline for yourself in following your trading plan, plus reading other members' Trade Notes gives you a window on their viewpoints, too.
Pulling the trigger on a trade is a big decision - talk it out with the group and see what you can learn along the way.
Symbol pages - See who else is trading a specific security and why they traded it. Check out the symbol page for GOOG, for example.
Forums - This has been a pretty popular request. It's your basic message board with a little added transparency: you can see who's a TradeKing account holder and who's not by their badge. We'd definitely encourage you to check out account holders' trading activity as certified by us as you evaluate the discussion on the boards.
Groups - Groups will be a really powerful tool to collaborate with others regarding a trading play or security. For example, check out this group on option trading:
Subscriptions - You can subscribe or 'follow' other traders that you think are interesting. We will deliver that trader's trades, trade notes and blogs directly to your dashboard. It's a great way to be alerted when someone whose opinion you value makes their next move.
Privacy - You can now share your trades without sharing the quantity (size) of your trades. Same thing on sharing your portfolio. Go to your settings page to do so.
Coming Soon - Performance measurement - The obvious extension of trading activity are stats on how well a trader performs. We will be launching this feature the first part of Q1 08, so stay tuned.
We built all these tools for you - to make you better traders and show off your mad investing skills. Please, tell us what you think. We REALLY want to know. Do you like them? Hate them? What else would you like to see in the Community?
PS - If you are having any problems accessing your account, drop us an email at community [at] tradeking.com.
Be good,
Mike
