INTERVIEW
All Together, Now
Trading Communities On The Web: Doug Fairclough
by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan
Doug Fairclough was in the midst of a two-year stint as database
guru at HotWired, the pioneering website of Wired magazine, when he became
aware of the possibilities of the Internet technologies, and decided to
apply them to the financial arena. He launched financial website ClearStation
in 1998, building it up before selling to E*Trade in 2000. What's he up
to these days? As it turns out, more of the same. Stocks & Commodities
Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan spoke with Doug Fairclough via telephone
on March 29, 2002, to find out.
"User contribution at a site is very valuable. What keeps
it vibrant and strong is really the community input."
Are you still involved with ClearStation?
Yes, I am. I'm a member of the core section of Recommend, an area on
the website -- my username is "kensey." I still send recommendations
to that, and those go to about 400,000 people.
Let's talk about that a little later. First, though, what inspired
you to start something like ClearStation Community - is that what you call
it?
That's fine. I started it in the summer of 1996. I worked on it for
about two years on my own, and then, once I had most of the sections of
the website functional, I got an investor, Kris Skrinak, who provided the
initial funding to build the company, involved. While I continued to work
on the software, Kris pretty much did all the other necessary things to
create a company, which is a pretty involved task. He also became the chief
executive officer (CEO). I was the chief technology officer (CTO).
What got you interested in creating something like this? And in technical
analysis, of all topics?
Before I got started, there weren't really any sites that allowed traders
to apply technical screening characteristics to stocks. I wanted a powerful
tool that would let you take all the stocks you were interested in and
view their charts quickly. At ClearStation, you can build portfolios and
watchlists, and see all the charts for those stocks on one screen. There's
a feature called "Graphs and Bulk," and that allows you to see
as many as 100 sets of charts for the stocks that you're tracking, as well
as track their relative performance to each other. This was a powerful
new way to track the stocks that traders are interested in.
...Continued in the June 2002 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS
& COMMODITIES
Excerpted from an article originally published in the June 2002 issue
of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine. All rights
reserved. © Copyright 2002, Technical Analysis, Inc.
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