STOCKALERTS.COM
FIGURE 1: WWW.STOCKALERTS.COM
It's no surprise that this website is all about stock alerts. But given that just about every site that has something to do with the financial markets usually provides some sort of alert, what makes this site any different? Not much, except that it focuses just on alerts. Those who are interested in following the markets but are unable to keep their eyes glued to their screens during market hours may find the features of this site useful.
You need to be a registered member to use StockAlerts.com's features, which involves a relatively painless registration process as well as a payment (fee structures available on the site). After that, you are free to create a portfolio of the stocks you desire and the site will keep track of your portfolio. All stocks traded on the US exchanges, plus those traded on the London Stock Exchange, are supported. You also have the flexibility to edit your portfolio by adding or deleting stocks. Updates to your portfolio can be sent to you via email, cell phone, or pager. I had the alerts sent to my email, and received three per day: one in the morning, another in the early afternoon, and the third after the market close.
A sample alert is displayed in Figure 2. These are displayed in a tabular format, although you have the option of creating different templates to fit your needs. The reports are archived on the website, so you can go back and refer to them at your leisure.
FIGURE 2: EXAMPLE OF A PORTFOLIO REPORT
The reports display details such as last trade, today's price change, today's percentage change, and volume. This is what you get in the Basic View. There are other options, however, for viewing your alerts. The Day Watch view displays all details in the Basic view, but adds more columns. These include average daily volume, open, low, and high. The Fundamental view displays market cap, earnings per share, price/earnings ratio, and the 52-week high. The previous close, dividend pay rate, bid, ask, ex-dividend date, 52-week low, annual dividend, and dividend yield are all displayed in the Detailed view.
Another feature worth mentioning is the Watch feature, which gives you the option to have messages sent based on events that occur in the market that affect your stocks or portfolio. These include change in price, price/earnings, market cap, and earnings per share. You can also watch for price to exceed or fall within a given percentage of a new year high/low; volume to exceed average daily volume by a percentage; or for volume to reach a specific value. Other options include watching for analyst recommendations on given stocks; portfolio change in value by a given percentage or dollar amount; or a move in value, equity, or margin equity to a given upper or lower limit.
Besides receiving alerts, you can receive quotes on any stocks that are supported by this site. There is also a forum where registered members can discuss issues pertaining to specific equities. Another feature is "Steve's Picks," which is based on trader Steve Sullivan's analysis of the markets. This service is available for an additional $59.95 per month.
There may be traders out there who need a service such as StockAlerts.com to make their trading life easier. It's certainly not for the diehard daytrader who makes several trades a day, considering that most brokerages provide an alert service for their customers. I can see the service provided by StockAlerts.com as something that would be beneficial to a trader who makes a few trades a month.
-Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan, Editor
MONEYTEC.COM
FIGURE 1: Homepage of moneytec.com
The Internet revolution has brought many opportunities to the desktops and personal digital assistants of traders and investors of all types - from novices looking for better ways to limit their exposure to equity downturns, to daytraders who survived both raging bull and agonizing bear markets, to market veterans who are finally forcing themselves to use any one of the many online, web-based charting services instead of plotting out all their price points by hand.
But one of the more overlooked aspects of the Internet revolution is the way that it allows traders to share ideas, insights, observations, and war stories. The pump 'n dump chatrooms of the late 1990s, in some ways, gave this aspect of the Internet a bit of a bad reputation, as more than one chat-room trader was caught propagating real-life pump 'n dump schemes in little-known stocks with small floats. Nevertheless, the Internet remains among the best ways for traders - whose professional lot is often a solitary one - to keep in touch with one another, to realize that they are not alone in their attempts to move with the market, and that there are few mistakes newer traders can make that haven't been made by older hands in the trading game.
MoneyTec.com is one of the responses to this development, and it comes from the world of foreign exchange trading, a market whose participants never tire of telling the rest of us how large their market is. Arguably, it is the size of the forex market that makes it more amenable to an online forum for traders. Unlike the world of stocks, in which an unscrupulous trader or booster can provoke a buying or selling panic over a little-known equity with even less liquidity, the world of foreign exchange is far too sizable to be moved about by the machinations of individual traders or groups of traders (central bankers, however, are another thingÉ but I digress).
MoneyTec forums
At its most fundamental, MoneyTec is an online community of forums and message boards that was founded back in the summer of 2001. According to the website, the founder of MoneyTec.com, Kyle T. Cottrell, was frustrated by the many unethical, semicredible online forums for traders. The website he designed is geared as much for market professionals as it is for market neophytes - indeed, MoneyTec.com even has separate forums for advanced and beginning traders. This allows both newcomers to the forum as well as those whose knowledge of and experience in foreign exchange trading is at a higher level to grow and learn at their own pace as they ask questions of some members of the MoneyTec community and provide answers to others.
It is particularly interesting to realize how bold MoneyTec is when it comes to creating a truly free forex "information zone." For example, fee-based recommendation services - often frowned upon in many message boards and chatrooms - are more than welcome to participate in MoneyTec's "Trading Recommendations" forum alongside regular trading Joes and Janes. A message-board notice directed toward these fee-based services reads: "Simply post a portion of your intraday, medium, or long-term predictions and watch your client base increase (if that's your goal)."
MoneyTec links
In addition to MoneyTec's main forums, the website also features a set of "Community Links" that give Money-Tec forum participants access to such message boards as the Community Forum where topics only tangential to forex trading can be discussed, an Open Directory, and a growing set of Trading Tools that features demos of various types of forex charting and market analysis products. The Community Links section also provides a separate message board geared toward educating (or re-educating) beginning and intermediate foreign exchange traders, an Open Reviews section where forum participants can provide their own reviews of favorite (and not-so-favorite) market analysis products, and a Central Banks link that provides email and snail-mail addresses for many of the larger central banks around the world, as well as the various Federal Reserve banks around the United States.
Other specific MoneyTec forums include Trading Methods & Strategies and Trading Analysis & Charting. MoneyTec also features a live chat room for more immediate contact and conversation with fellow traders, as well as a glossary to help learn some of the phraseology that is unique to foreign exchange, technical trading, or economics and finance. And, as you might imagine, MoneyTec features a "live charting" service so that forum participants can quickly check up on a given currency pair that might be under discussion in a forum. The live charts are Java-based, making them easy for most computers to create and straightforward for most traders and technical analysts to read and manipulate.
MoneyTec in progress
MoneyTec.com has a quickly growing community base, currently at just under 3,000 active traders/members and adding about 50 new members a week. Still, at this point, much of MoneyTec.com is about potential. Because the site is driven largely by those who participate in the forums rather than by content-creating staff, MoneyTec is pretty much what its users and forum participants make of it. Right now, they appear to be mainly devoted to the use of the various message boards in all of the different categories. Other areas are not as developed, such as the product reviews, but are likely to grow as more and more foreign exchange traders - including those who are new to the field - begin to visit and contribute to the website. For now, MoneyTec is a worthwhile cyber-stop for those forex traders who, while more numerous in overall numbers, probably feel more than a little marginalized in a world where stock trading still dominates the news and the attention of investors. If you are a forex trader - or thinking about becoming one - in search of stock-free trading conversation, then consider spending some time messaging with the traders at MoneyTec.com.
-David Penn, Technical Writer
Originally published in the October 2003 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine. All rights reserved. © Copyright 2003, Technical Analysis, Inc.