Strateer Blog

I guess given the current implosions on Wall Street there is no way we cannot comment and try to make sense of what is happening and what it means to us.

Strateer is committed to democratize institution grade trading technology and bring automatic trading tools to the individual investor.  Now as the financial institutions are struggling to survive in this market, what does this mean for us? What does it mean for the service that we are planning to offer?

1. Better tools help especially in difficult markets
We believe that many individual investors were not following good risk management strategies over the last months and lost a lot of their portfolio value. Honoring a simple stop at the right time would have allowed them to watch the storm unfold from the side line. But more so, looking forward the markets might stay in bear territory for some time and then markets might go sideways for a while. Buy and hold might not be the best strategy for the years to come. Some people will be able to follow trading systems that find the right stock in this market at the right time. Strateer will be the tool to automate these systems and leverage them so other investors can profit from them, too. All in all we believe a difficult market environment is good for our product.

2. Talent exodus on Wall Street
We are right now expanding our team and it seems that now is the perfect time to find financial market engineering talent. Joining a startup does not seem to be so risky anymore, given the safe job at the large investment banks is not that safe after all. With no bonuses expected at the end of the year there is no lock-in that we faced until now when talking to people in the industry. Paired with all the upside of a startup (less specialized work areas - more end-to-end technology responsibility and an equity interest), the current market situation is good for us on the hiring side.

3. The change of the Broker/Dealer industry
Now that is a big one: Technology has been disrupting the broker/dealer space for many years, minimizing the margins of their core business and leaving them in need to push the envelope in those instruments that have been melting down (see as well this post) We believe that our technology paradigm is very disruptive leveling the playing field for large and small institutions as well as individual investors. Providing an algorithmic trading platform as a service, hosted in the cloud, diminishes economies of scale that larger hedge funds and investment banks used to have on the IT side. So the current market situation might be influenced by an ongoing technology trend that lies at the core of what we are doing.

4. Distraction of Angel investors
Well, not everything is good for us. Having a financial crisis and an economy in recession does not have an impact on our current business as it is non-existent. But as we finance our business by raising money from business angels that have an interest in financial markets makes these times challenging. It seems that people are quite busy with what is going on the markets. No dire need to close that deal with that financial services startup. Do I want to increase my exposure to anything that is related to financial markets? So that is not so good for us right now.

With all the coverage of TechCrunch50 and Demo’08 we wonder where that leaves us (we do not participate in either of them). We believe that a big launch event does not matter so much - in fact we plan to launch soft and quiet.

We just opened our private beta for our first product, Alerts4all, to a couple hundred users and will make it generally available later this month. The product is already evolving and improving based on users feedback and we believe the better it gets the more attention it will receive.

Seth Goldin wrote a great post that supports our approach. So we keep our powder dry and use all the money that we raised so far to build a great product and make it as valuable as possible for our customers.

This morning we launched Alerts4all.com into private Beta. Everybody is excited to get feedback and comments from the people we invited and see in general how the platform will hold up. If we get as much constructive feedback as we got from the small group of Alpha testers, Alerts4all should be in great shape for its public launch later this month.

Thanks to everybody in the team that worked hard the last days to get all open issues fixed in time and thanks again to the Alpha Tester.

If one of the reader is interested in getting an invitation to the private Beta, email me at fabian at strateer.com

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.