After nearly three years of providing daily updates and links via the TradeKing Blog, it’s time to step down from my role as blog editor and pass on the role to another set of capable, market-savvy hands. It’s a step that has been difficult to take, mostly because I realize how entwined TradeKing has been in my own personal life and in my development as a better investor.

Working at TradeKing was a unique experiment to see how social media and finance might come together to help individual investors not only beat the market – but have fun doing it as well. By any measure, this unique experiment has been a resounding success. Back in 2006, at a time when blogging tools and social networking were not yet mainstream, the TradeKing team was at the forefront of thinking how to adopt these tools for investors. Now, three years later, it almost seems obvious that every brokerage firm should be offering these types of tools to self-directed individual investors. In many ways, TradeKing has helped to alter the industry dynamic, upsetting the status quo and challenging the financial services industry to embrace the new and the unfamiliar.

In my time as the blog editor, I’m proud to have seen the TradeKing Community grow, adapt and transform into the TradeKing Trader Network and during that time, to have interacted with such a smart, focused and often witty group of investors. It’s been fun reading your comments, following along – during both the good market years and the, well, less-than-profitable market years. Most impressively, it’s been fun meeting and corresponding with other TradeKing investors who seem to know more about the markets than just about anyone else I’ve known.

I’m sure the next three years will be as momentous and successful as the past three have been. It will be an exciting time to watch how TradeKing will continue to innovate and change in response to new Web 2.0 trends. To all my colleagues, friends and mentors at TradeKing – thanks for letting me part of the ride!

Best,
Dominic Basulto

Always informative and will be sad to see you go. Big shoes to fill, whoever follows.

May God Bless all that you put your hand too.