Strateer Blog

Last year in February we attended the first version of O’Reilly’s Money:Tech conference. It was the first time we gathered feedback for Strateer, which we just started a couple of weeks earlier.

This year we will be an exhibitor. Visit us in the Exhibit hall at booth #7 to talk about the need for better tools for the individual investor, Alerts4all, licensing some of our products or whether the stock market will be actually shut down by the end of the year.

Update: Appears that Money:Tech ‘09 has been canceled. There does not seem to be a market for a $2,500 ticket fintech conference right now. Too bad - last years conference was a big success for us.

We just launched two new features for Alerts4all that makes it easier and more exciting to use:

Integrate Alerts4all with your online broker account

We realized that it might be a bit cumbersome to login each time after you bought a position in order to setup your alerts for that position. Now you do not have to login anymore. Just forward your trade confirmation mail to ‘newalert@alerts4all.com’ from that same account that you signed up. We will analyze the email and create your default alerts (you can set these up in your account) for every stock symbol we can find.

Alternatively we have created a unique ‘@alerts4all.com email address’ for you. Look up your address in your account and have your online broker send all trade confirmations to that address. Done - we will automatically monitor your portfolio and you do not have be worried anymore to miss the right time to sell your position.

Streaming Stock Quotes

Wondering what the price is doing right now while editing your alerts? Now we stream all price activity right to your Alerts4all dashboard. We track and display the performance of each stock since you created your first alert for it.

2008 has been a wild ride on the markets. We hope that Alerts4all will make it easier for you to navigate the markets in 2009.

Thank you for using Alerts4all. If you have any questions, need additional alerts or have suggestions on how to improve Alerts4all, please email me at fabian@alerts4all.com

Happy Investing,
Fabian Siegel

We always used to say we do not have any competition. There is no service that does what we do and our vision is unique. Andy Swan wrote a post with the same title as this one.

However we used to miss one thing: Other companies that service the same customer segment (with a different service) compete with us for the attention of these customers. So there is always competition, though not necessarily on a product basis.

Today Amazon released its Elastic Block Store into to public Beta (see here). We have been part of the private Beta phase (Thanks Jeff Barr!) for a couple of months.

So far our experience was excellent. The problem with Amazon’s Web Services was, that their virtual servers did not have persistent storage. That means if one of these servers went down, all local storage was lost. S3 - Amazon’s other storage service - is not very fast and therefore not suitable for storing the DB or other data that needs to be reliably persisted and accessible.

EBS fills that gap. It is an external storage volume that can be mounted to any EC2 server. When the server goes down, the storage volume is still availabe and can be reattached to another EC2. Using EBS we were able to build our entiry infrastructure on Amazon’s Web Service, which provides scalable infrastructure at our fingertips at the fraction of the cost that we would have to pay for dedicated datacenter resouces.

Today is a big day for the team at Strateer: We are slowly starting the roll-out of Alerts4all.com by inviting a small group of friends and potential partners of the company to test Alerts4all.com. If all goes according to plan, we will start a larger private Beta in the next two weeks.

Thanks everybody for the hard work during the last weeks. Now with the first users arriving I bet things will stay busy around here.