Strateer Blog

After 3 month in private beta (thanks to all the testers), we are finally releasing Alerts4all today for public use!

Alerts4all is the first product that we are launching which brings Wall Street technology to Main Street. With Alerts4all investors benefit from real time stock market alerts that can be easily setup in minutes to automatically monitor the stock market and protect investors’ portfolios.

Individual investors often miss the right time to buy or to sell because they are too busy to actively monitor the stock market. This leads to frustration and bad investment performance. Alerts4all was created to solve this problem and help individual investors to find the right time to buy and sell. In today’s economic climate individual investors keep being hit in the current markets, and ultimately will need better tools and methods to get on their feet again.

Have a look for yourself at http://www.alerts4all.com.

To us Alerts4all so far helped us to prove a couple of things:

Technology Stack
Alerts4all runs on the technology stack that will eventually power Strateer.com. We wired different open source frameworks together and successfully embedded our CEP library (complex event processing) into it. Alerts4all runs on Amazon Web Services end-to-end. All in all the platform has been running like a charm - no crashing, no inconsistent behavior. Quite boring. Our operation guy spends no more than 1-2 h a week on it. Congrats to our development team for build such a stable platform.

Real-time market data and historic market data
We are right now processing real time data streams from AMEX, NYSE and NASDAQ. We had to overcome some hiccups but by now we feel this topic is well under control. Currently we throttle the market data to one price update per symbol per second. Our current infrastructure can process up to 1,000 messages per second - with tons of options left to scale. At the same time we had to solve the problem of building our own in-house historic stock price data base (10 years for all traded symbols) as well as an intraday 1-minute bar database. Both databases and the real time data streams are stable and will be part of the core infrastructure for Strateer.com

Cost of Development
The development costs for Alerts4all were quite reasonable, given that this is a full-grown real-time data processing enterprise application. We outsourced most of the development to China and Belarus. Only UI design and core technology was built here in New York. The core technology parts (CEP, J2EE architecture, component design) were developed by Matthieu, our CTO, and another very smart French guy. UI was developed with an external local agency. This cost efficient structure will help us as we move on to build our next product iteration. Given the difficult funding space, it is crucial to keep costs low.

Go-to Market
This has just started, so no real conclusion yet. All we can say so far is, that our private Beta worked out very well. We got some financial blogger to test our product, give us feedback and help us expand our private beta via their blogs.

We are quite proud about Alerts4all - but this is only the beginning. We will add some more very exciting functionality to Alerts4all in the next months. More important: We are working full steam on our next product scheduled for launch in Q2 next year. Stay tuned…

We are expanding our private beta of Alerts4all. Get your account at Silicon Alley Insider, Clusterstocks or the Amazon Web Services Blog.

Roger Ehrenberg wrote a great post about ’short-termism’ (see here).

Similar to the ‘weight-loss’ self help books that Roger refers to, there is no easy and fast way to get rich by investing in the stock market. All books, all newsletter or websites that suggest they have the right method to get rich fast exploit an inherent impatience and greed that is probably the biggest factor for investment failure for individual  investors. It is striking, that today the launch of triple-leverage ETFs has been announced. Apparently current volatility is not enough. Given that the double-leveraged ETFs are more popular than their non-leveraged cousins I am sure there will be plenty of demand for the new ‘Basement Bomb-Building Kits‘.

Instead of chasing the dream of getting rich fast and getting ripped of in the processes of trying, investors will have to learn to be realistic.

Individual investors need a good system (Diversification, Risk Management, Profit taking), the right investment horizon and discipline to follow it through. Unfortunately as most individual investors are busy, they do not have the time to follow such a system manually. So they ‘outsource’ this job to mutual funds or index certificates. Unfortunately those strategies have not served the individual investor well in the last couple of years.